Hellboy 2 Does More With Less
SCI FI Wire had the opportunity to visit the set of the upcoming sequel film Hellboy II: The Golden Army in Budapest last October, where director Guillermo del Toro explained that although the new film is more ambitious in scale, he had a smaller budget and a shorter schedule this time around.
"This is a bigger movie, and essentially I think we are a week shorter in the schedule," del Toro said in an interview on the set during a break in filming. "It's the same as in the first one--the fat man's syndrome. If you have four doughnuts, you want them all, and the crumbs and the glass of milk. So it's a problem. You have a budget and you say, 'How can I make it much bigger?' Even if you don't have the money. So that's a little problem. And then in this one we didn't have the money and we didn't have much time, so it was twice as stressful."
Del Toro was in the midst of filming a scene in which the Angel of Death (one of three characters played by Doug Jones) offers Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) a fateful choice. Later on, the production moved to an outdoor set dressed as a New York street just below the Brooklyn Bridge. He said that the second film has allowed him to explore new territory with the characters, an opportunity which proved to be as stressful as it was liberating.
"It's a pressure cooker," he said. "But creatively, it's been very free. The movie has been very free, and much more free than the first one, in the sense that you don't have to set up the rules of the world, so you're allowed to frankly have more fun with it, which I haven't had. But in theory, you should have more fun."
The film revolves around a rebel elf prince, who seeks to recapture the Earth for the forgotten magical creatures who were forced underground by the human race. The idea was based on an original story written by del Toro with the help of Mike Mignola, creator of the Hellboy comic-book series.
"When we finished the first one, Mike Mignola and I, we talked about it for a long time, and I came up with an idea that was very different from this one, and that's the one we pitched to Revolution," del Toro explained. "The idea for the character story was the same, but the anecdote of the Golden Army was not there. It was four titans in the four corners of the Earth: wind, water, fire, earth. And the idea was that a prince wanted to awaken the four titans. And it just felt to me like this was a more magical idea, a more magical story. ... All of a sudden I was thinking, Golden Army, it sounded great. And then we said, 'What can the Golden Army be?' And then when I thought about the prince's father having constructed them eons before and him wanting them to conquer the world, it sounded immediately great. And that's what we pitched."
Returning to the world of Hellboy for a second time has also given del Toro a chance to correct some of the mistakes he felt he made in the first film.
"One of the things that I'm changing is both the action and the fights," he said. "I went for certain things in the first one, but I was not as happy as I could have been. And I think this is a completely different type of fighting. ... I was slavish to a certain type of thing that was more comic-book [like], reproducing certain things in the comic books. But I tried it on [Blade II] and then immediately after I tried it on Hellboy, and for whatever reason, the second movie, it already, to me, felt old. So what we're doing is we're doing things that are more free, more, in a strange way, beautiful or spectacular, whichever we're going for. Almost balletic stuff. And it's part of that. It's a spectacle in the action and the fighting. There's a beauty."
