BY DAVID SERVER | Hey there, Hellfans! David 'Typhon24' Server here, recently back from a few days at the Hellboy scoring sessions in San Francisco, where composer Marco Beltrami's all-kindsa-excellent orchestral score for the film is being recorded with a 90-piece orchestra (120 including the choir!). Did I have a kickass time? Damn skippy I did - met some great folks, heard some downright beautiful music (you won't be let down) performed by some exceedingly talented musicians, and managed to see more footage of the Big Red Guy (who's lookin' great, by the way). That's all well and good, but what do you guys get out of it? No worries! I made sure to bring you back some goodies. What follows is the extremely extended post-production interview I was allowed to conduct with the film's director Guillermo del Toro during one of the looonger breaks - it's a doozy! Enough of my yammering, though - let's get to the good stuff already! Here's Guillermo!

CD: Could you outline some of the major points of the post-production process for our readers?

GDT: We're done with the editing, we locked the editing. We are halfway through cutting negative. Now we are recording the music. We have done what is called 'pre-mixes' on the reels, that means we are laying down dialogue with special sound effects and then we're gonna do the first pass at the music mix, which divides it into several stems that then you manipulate on the main mix. Then we're gonna go through the process of presenting the movie to the MPAA, and once that is done and the movie is locked for the final time, we then go into the mix room, and we mix down all the stems from music, the premixes for effects and dialogue, premixes for atmosphere, foley, etc, and then we do the final big mix, which is very detailed and very elaborate and basically we do about a reel every 2 days.

CD: Which is your favorite part of the post-production process?

GDT: I love post in general. My favorite is editing, because ultimately it is like screenplay writing with pieces of film. I'm not a guy that believes that the way you shoot it is the way it's gonna end up, I really think film is very malleable, and you discover new ways of telling the story in the editing room, you move pieces around, and you better experiment when you have the chance, and it's the last time you're gonna have a chance like that. And one of my favorite parts of post is the mix, the final mix. I'm very detail oriented about sound, I love paying attention to detail and then seeing it pay off when it interacts with an audience in a good way.

CD: How many years have you been trying to make Hellboy now?

GDT: It started between '97 and '98, if I remember correctly, and so that would make it...5 and a half years or so.

CD: This period must be very satisfying for you, stress aside.

GDT: Very much. I'm very tired, it's been incredibly taxing physically, but I'm very, very happy, I'm incredibly happy.

CD: Two years ago, in your first full interview here on CountingDown just after the Variety 'Hellboy' announcement, you already had a lot of ideas about how to do the movie - how close do you think the movie you're finishing up is to the movie that you had in your head back then?

GDT: Very close. Extremely close. I mean I think that the two movies that are the closest to what I wanted to set out to do were Devil's Backbone and Hellboy. I think it's actually in many, many ways better than what I set out to do, I mean in some ways some of the stuff is better than it was on the written page. So I think that is actually a first. Y'know, I like it more than the screenplay in a way. And that has never happened to me.

CD: Did anything about the film specifically work out better or worse than you had originally expected?

GDT: I think the only surprise probably...some of the creature effects, I was expecting to be great, but I really found them to be better. Sammael, or Behemoth at the end, they turned out to be better than I expected them. Simply because I think both Tippet and Spectral Motion did incredibly careful work. And there are a few pieces of animation by Tippet that are still to me mind-boggling, how utterly careful they were with making them real.

CD: Were there any performances that turned out either better or different than you had expected?

GDT: Yeah, I think that Rasputin, Karel Roden, did a better job than I expected. I knew he was a great actor and all that, but Rasputin is in the piece much like in the comic books, in 'Seed of Destruction' he's barely there. He shows up at the beginning, and then basically he doesn't show up for a little while, and then he doesn't show up until the end. So Rasputin has to be played with a lot of weight, but in very brief moments...

CD: And then you can fill those gaps with Kroenen...

GDT: And I think that then you have Kroenen and Ilsa, and mainly Sammael for the bad guys. And basically they carry the weight of the piece. But Rasputin is, in terms of being the mastermind of the plan, is very important to display with weight. And Karel gave it a lot of weight...and the same is true for Selma [Blair as Liz Sherman]. All the characters in the movie are sketched with very few strokes, but are very deep strokes - I mean they really illuminate who their characters are. I like writing that way, I wrote that way for Devil's Backbone, where you define characters by what they do as opposed to stopping the movie to have a confessional moment.

CD: Was Ron Perlman everything you had hoped he would be as your Hellboy for all these years?

GDT: I think more than that. I really must tell you, we are still an underdog movie, we are still the "Seabiscuit"; we're $60 million, we are coming totally out of left field, I think that we are one of these 'comic book movies', quote unquote, that is coming after a couple that didn't work, so all of that, the fact that there are no stars in the movie, all of that makes the 5 and a half years weight very heavy, because the bet is still hedged. But all of that, the thing that still makes the five and a half years the most satisfying, is to see a fucking movie starring Ron Perlman. I tell you that, I think that somebody in a forum on the internet said that I have a crush on Ron, and I think that, fortunately or not [laughing], I do have like a crush on the figure of Ron Perlman. To me he represents the common guy, in the most uncommon way...Y'know, he represents what it is, for me, to be 'a guy', Ron is. And I think that that's the most pleasant thing.

CD: Speaking of performance, you originally were considering doing Hellboy as an all CG character - does any part of you think that may have worked?

GDT: No. Never. No no no, not even with the best technology. For example, baby Hellboy, which is [computer generated] and a puppet, is very limited. You can only show him so much. It's a great intro to Hellboy, but you could definitely never have done it like that. I think that it'd different when you have a character that is very flamboyant, like Gollum or Jar Jar even, you have character that are larger than life in that way, and the thing with Ron and Hellboy is that it's a character that has to be played like almost a regular guy, like a regular Joe, working class. And his mannerisms and his gestures have to be incredibly controlled by one single actor, you cannot give that to a twenty or thirty animators and expect them to pull it off that perfectly. I think that there are animated characters that are memorable, The Beast of Beauty and the Beast, or Tarzan in the Disney, or Harryhausen characters, but especially in the Harryhausen [characters], it is one single animator. And even in characters that have worked like Tarzan, it is mainly Glen Keen.

CD: Is there any chance that you would attempt to work with an all digital character in any of your upcoming projects?

GDT: I am, actually. In Mountains of Madness there will be characters that will be CG, but they will be monsters. As far as, like, what they're calling nowadays a 'synthespian' [laughing]...I'd say, yeah, I wanted to do Wind in the Willows that way, but that's gone, so...

CD: Do you have a favorite scene or line delivery in Hellboy that you can hint at without spoiling anything?

GDT: Yeah, some of them are in the trailer...I love Hellboy's 'Aw Crap's...Yeah, he says 'Jeez'...lemme tell you the classic Hellboy lines that are there - you get "Aw Crap", "You can do better than that, big monster like you", "BOOM"...there are several. There are like almost all of the classic HB lines. But I also love some of the ones we came up with like "You missed!" or "How big can it be?", which are in the trailer. But the thing with Hellboy is that he is not a guy that does one-liners, the fact that in the comic and in the movies these things work (or not) is totally character dependent. They're not great one-liners, they're not "yipee-ki-yi-yay mother fucker"...

CD: Yeah, he's terse...

GDT: They're terse, but that's because Mignola basically writes in a very Hemmingway-esque way, with very short sentences, very punchy. So I always made sure writing the screenplay that all the Hellboy dialogue felt 'Mignola'. There's a great line, but people won't understand it until they see the movie, where he says "I'll always look this good", which is a great moment, but they won't understand it 'till they see the movie.

CD: What genres of films, or specific films, would you say most influenced you in making 'Hellboy'?

GDT: Y'know, I think that it has a lot of adventure movies, it has a lot of Doc Savage or Indiana Jones or any of these movies...more than movies, it's more literary, like pulp novels, y'know, serials. And it has a lot of influence from gothic horror, Mario Bava, Terrence Fisher, Universal Monsters, etc...

CD: Lotta Harryhausen in there...

GDT: Harryhausen...there's actually a very high quotient of Harryhausen, and it was because very consciously, Mike Mignola and I in preproduction said, 'This is our Harryhausen movie'. And there are quotes...the creatures quote Mighty Joe Young, King Kong...some of the Sinbad creatures...we tried to put very specific quotes. Like, Sammael, to give you an example, every time Sammael gets really angry, he pounds the floor like Mighty Joe, he pounds the floor when he's very angry. And there's a moment with Hellboy breaking the jaw of Sammael that is like King Kong and T-Rex, or the Behemoth does some stuff that some of the tentacled monsters of Harryhausen did, in the way their tentacles move and so forth...Y'know, it's just part of the fun.

CD: Did you learn anything new as a director that you will take away from working on this film?

GDT: I learned a lot to graduate my stamina, because this is the longest shoot I've ever had. And I think this is the first movie where I have felt fully confident in all the areas. Before, I would have a movie like, say, Devil's Backbone where I work with actors and camera and all that but its not as complicated technically, or Blade II, where it's complicated technically, but there's not much meat with the actors to work with [laughs]! Or for me to pretend that there's a lot for the actors to work with. And this is the first movie where both those disciplines go together, and I find myself going through it and enjoying everything. And the final thing is that I think that one of the most beautiful discoveries is that we shot for 117 days and the crew was as happy and as friendly and as together I would say 98% of the cases then as the beginning. If not stronger. And the last day was so heavy that some people were falling asleep on the set.

CD: How long is the current cut of the movie?

GDT: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

CD: Is it gonna stay that length, you think?

GDT: It will stay that length until the DVD, yeah.

CD: Did a lot of footage get cut?

GDT: We cut 45 minutes of the movie. I think that the final cut on the DVD will probably be 2 hours and 10 minutes. We're including a lot of scenes that are more permissible to put back after the movie's release, because if someone is buying the special edition, they want to see more. As opposed to trying to be prudent...I think that an action-adventure movie shouldn't be longer than two hours, but that's my opinion.

CD: Is any of that stuff that was cut in anticipation of the MPAA viewing it?

GDT: No, no, nothing, no I didn't do any of that. I really cut it because I felt it was interesting or beautiful or this or that, but it got in the way of the movie flowing. And right now I think that this movie, to me, is a movie that should play for adults and young people. And I don't want to lose one or the other, I think that it is such a nice, beautiful little story between Broom and Hellboy, and between Hellboy and Liz, that I don't want to give it too heavy a rhythm.

CD: Are you pleased with the way the film plays right now?

GDT: Yeah, very happy.

CD: What's the most recent thing series creator Mike Mignola has seen? Is he happy with what he's seen so far?

GDT: Mike saw about 40-50 minutes of footage last, and he liked it a lot. What he saw had no VFX, no music...nothing, so it's been a long time. But I'm flying him down to LA in the next couple of weeks to take a look at it and make any comments he has.

CD: Did he have any comments about what he saw?

GDT: He just enjoyed it.

CD: When you set out to make this film, you said that you wanted this film to be both your biggest in terms of scale and budget, but also thematically one of your most personal - do you feel that the finished film successfully achieved both of those goals?

GDT: Yeah, painfully so, because I think now I am more invested emotionally in the movie than I've ever been before in terms of a Hollywood movie. Devil's Backbone is a movie that, for example, in Spain made quite a bit of money. It was one of the three or four highest grossing films of the year, it made money in Mexico, it made very good money in the UK, France, etc, but when it opened in America, I basically was already happy with the movie's performance in the world, and I didn't pay much attention, and I was not that personally involved in it reaching an audience. Which is a shame because it has been now rediscovered on DVD. With Hellboy, I'm extremely involved and I hope that it finds its audience. I'm very worried that the campaign works, I supervise basically everything that is put out, the posters, the ads, everything...Because I think that it's almost like a gospel message, I want to see more people discover this character. And in a certain way the movie already helped. [Dark Horse Comics President] Mike Richardson was telling me that circulation of the Hellboy trade paperbacks has been incomparably bigger....

CD: Yeah, haven't they re-released those with new covers now?

GDT: They re-released them with i think 16 thousand just for one single chain of bookstores, I mean it really has gone up. But I think, I'm hoping, that part of Hellboy's mythos from now on will also be the movie. And I'm extremely concerned, in that sense, about the movie reaching an audience. So on a personal level, the movie reflects a lot of what I believe in, as a man, as a person, as a husband, as a man in love with my wife, as a son, and as a father. And the movie reflects all this in a very tender way. And I think people will be very surprised in two areas with the movie. First area, how big it is. I don't think people imagine that we did what we did with $60 million. I mean, when you have movies costing over $200 million now. And when you have more and more comic book movies coming out, and they don't seem to find their heart. I mean, why do we care about these humans? I mean, I remember reading Spider-Man, and I cared about Spider-Man as a superhero, but I cared about Peter Parker as a nerd. And I think Hellboy, the most personal aspect of Hellboy, which is absent in the comics, is that more emotional aspect. That is deeper in the movie.

CD: Speaking of differences between the comics and the movie, historically, you've shown an extreme sensitivity to retaining a faithfulness to the original material. However, at the same time, you've added a lot to the film which did not originate in the books - case in point, characters like FBI Agent Myers who is more of a dramatic conceit, or more significantly, the romantic relationship between Hellboy and Liz. How do you find the right balance between augmenting the original material and being respectful to the original intent of the comics?

GDT: Well, what I've said in the past is that adapting a piece of material is like marrying a widow - you have to be respectful to the memory of the late husband, but at some point you have to get into the honeymoon. So I feel that way, I think that it's a movie made by me of a piece of material created by Mike Mignola. So I'm very careful with what he created, I make sure he sanctions it, I make sure that he was comfortable with everything. We argued a lot, but at the end of the day, everything in the movie is things that he felt comfortable with and I felt comfortable with. I must say that this is a privilege, that I didn't have adopting Monte Cristo cause Dumas is dead. It's nice, when you have a universe as detailed as Mignola did it, cause I think he invented it as he went along, I think you have to be very careful to have him as part of the crew, as part of the guys that are making the movie. And I think that is the main rule - you cannot screw with it from a position of superiority - you have to be very humble, and approach it as a fan, as opposed to approach it in the usual Hollywood way, "I can make it better, this is my VISION of the way Hellboy would dress, I'm gonna dress him all in black leather" [laughs]. Well, no, Hellboy's 'suit' works for a reason. And we tried everything, we tried the short pants; he looked really bad. We tried the hooves...

CD: But aren't those still in one or two shots?

GDT: They're out, man, completely. Cause even in one shot, for one time, it looked like Ron Perlman was wearing women's high heel shoes made in black. But we literally used the Mignola hooves, the size of Mignola drawing it, and it just looked weird, like, I dunno, shoes, if you're not familiar with it. So we tried to reproduce everything, and whatever didn't work in a direct translation from the comic got refurbished, and became something different in the movie. That goes for relationships, too. I think that as a writer, it's just too irresistible to have a fire-girl and a fire-proof demon and not try to get 'em together [laughs]. And the fact that Liz is reneging of her identity and Hellboy is sort of comfortable with it, to a point...I mean, what is great about Hellboy as a character is he's a guy that has become at peace to a degree with his nature by punching monsters. He's basically a guy that tries to deny what he is by destroying other monsters. But not until the end of this movie, in the sense of the arc of his character, is he really at peace with his nature.

CD: As we're here right now, Marco Beltrami is recording his score for the film. How would you describe Marco Beltrami's score for the film? Is it what you were hoping for?

GDT: What happens is [Mountains of Madness co-writer] Matthew Robbins and I are very good friends with Marco, and we're always telling him that he should experiment with new things. I love his scores, I think he's a unique talent. But I like to cattle-prod him into trying new things. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I still think Mimic is a beautiful score, I think Blade II is lesser of a score...

CD: Well, it's sort of undercut by all that source music...

GDT: Yeah, it had all the source music, and a little bit of techno, which I didn't fully embrace. But it has also some stuff we like, like the Japanese drums, but that was because we were trying to find something new. And with Hellboy, I think it's without a doubt in my mind his best score yet. And it is the most varied one. He really has gone a little bit off his rocker [laughs], a little bit off the charts with stuff that he's trying, that makes it very idiosyncratic. It's not, I would say, a 'safe' movie score. He's a little more whimsical and crazy, quirkier.

CD: Do you have a favorite musical cue or character theme?

GDT: Well, my favorite is without a doubt the main title, y'know, it's just such a great superhero comic-book main theme mixed with a horror kind of underlying. It has that base that is really dark, and then the heroic horns. And other than that, I think that the love theme of father and son which is played with Broom and Hellboy, those are my two favorite cues so far.

CD: How are all the effects coming along?

GDT: Really great. Every time I see a Tippet shot it's like a holy day, where you just enjoy it so much. And we're getting great stuff from the other companies, too. Some key shots have been given to smaller companies, and they have come through in spades. I'm very happy.

CD: How are some of the effects shots that are augmenting practical effects shot on set coming along?

GDT: To give you an example, Sammael in some of the shots in the movie, his tentacles are CG, but he's real. In some others, we do the usual where we cut from the creature to the CG monster, but sometimes he's partially CG, which we experimented with in Blade, with Kroenen...for example, Kroenen, without his leather clothes, he's a makeup effect augmented by CG, and so on and so forth. Whenever the makeup was impossible, like Abe Sapien blinking, Abe Sapien sometimes more than the blinking part of his head is CG from the nose up, and so on and so forth...CG and prosthetics, for the first time I tried on Blade II and enjoyed doing them, and now it's getting better and better.

CD: Well, it's good to see films that are trying to integrate old and new technology like that instead of just dropping all the older techniques in favor of doing things entirely in CG...

GDT: Hellboy is even more physical oriented than Blade II. Cause on Blade II we learned a lot about what not to do in certain fight scenes with CG, and what to do...To this day in Blade II there are some shots that I think are really bad in CG (in front of the lights), and there are some CG shots that I think are absolutely perfect and invisible...

CD: Like the Reaper jaw opening...

GDT: Yeah, like the Reaper opening, Blade jumping over the bike - stuff like that. But I'm as proud of that as anything in, say, Spider-Man, which had four times the budget. And I think that in Hellboy, I must say that some of the stuff Tippet has done is just unforgettable.

CD: Looking ahead, you still have the hefty challenge of marketing this strange film - so far, your campaign consists of the teaser poster, the theatrical trailer, and the banners - what's up next from your campaign?

GDT: We have the first TV ads coming up the first week of March. We're gonna be coming up very intensively with 60 second ads. We're gonna go very heavy on television. I have seen most of the TV spots and they're great.

CD: I know earlier you've said that you wanted to create TV spots that represented the different elements of the film, like one for the horror elements, one for the love story, etc...

GDT: Yeah, those will be towards the end - the last, what they call the 15s and 30s, which are shorter, will address different sides of the movie. But there is an exclusive trailer coming out attached to the DVD at Best Buy, and I think they're gonna give it to you when you make a purchase, and it's gonna be there, and there's gonna be five hundred thousand DVDs in all the country. And we are coming up with an FX channel special in which they basically are doing an investigative report about the BPRD being real, and really existing, and being a branch of the FBI, very serious, no bullshit. And we have a new trailer attached to Dawn of the Dead, and I think a new trailer attached hopefully to Starsky and Hutch.

CD: The same new trailer for both or two separate new ones?

GDT: We don't know if it's gonna be the same trailer or a new one [for each], we're working really fast. We basically are getting all the effects ready for it. One of the reasons why we didn't come out on the Superbowl was that we didn't want to come out with uncompleted effects. We felt it was too risky.

CD: Are you hoping that the new theatrical spot may fill in some of the questions left from the original one, like who Hellboy is exactly, what his background is?

GDT: I think the new theatrical does, and if that doesn't do it, the TV spots will. And then we're starting sneak previews for everybody in March, we're gonna go to college campuses and do sneak previews, we're gonna show it certainly for the website [message board fans] where we're gonna do a screening in LA, sneaks for the press. We're gonna debut about 2-3 minutes of the movie on Yahoo! closer to release, like a week before release. And we're gonna put seven foot tall standees in theaters starting next week...

CD: What do they look like?

GDT: They're bitchin'...they basically are the teaser poster but fleshed out in 3D. With the big logo behind him and everything. They're very hard to not look at [laughs]. And we're gonna come out with the Drew Struzan poster in all the comic book specialty shops...

CD: Speaking of the Struzan poster, has the final decision been made for it to not be used in theaters?

GDT: Yes, it will not be used in theaters, but it will be used in a slightly altered form in newspaper ads, and in print, so it will see the light of day. What I didn't want to do was to alter it from what it is and make a poster out of it. Because I feel that if you hire Drew Struzan, use his poster. So the plight to keep it in tact worked, and we're doing a smaller number. Some people felt it was too conservative, and it felt like a movie you had seen before, and I think that my only battle with the Struzan poster was to preserve it in tact, and we won and it's coming out. Posters are very nice, but they are not the main marketing campaign.

CD: So now the official theatrical poster is just the teaser poster with the credits at the bottom?

GDT: Yeah.

CD: How's all the merchandising coming? You guys seem to really be pumping stuff out.

GDT: Yeah, I try to check everything. Last things I physically saw were the Sideshow and the Mezco toys, and the only thing I haven't seen physically are the beanie babies...[laughs]

CD: Yeah, those are interesting...

GDT: Hahaha, I'm buying one! I looove the Sammael! I think it's the cutest monster. But I think that both toy lines are just amazing, and I'm partial to some of the figures in each line, but I certainly will buy all the Kroenens [laughs] and the Abe Sapiens, y'know. And one thing I'm trying to do is that I'm trying to get a full line of the toys to be raffled in the website as a contest. Because one of the guys [on the message boards] wrote saying 'will you send me a complete set'...

CD: Yeah, I saw that - I'm sure he'll be thrilled that you even read his post!

GDT: And I felt very bad about not being able to say, 'here you go!' But I talked to the guys, and we're gonna put together something, and if he wants it, he'll have to work hard on winning. It's actually not going to be a raffle, it's going to be a contest...fan art, or writing a piece about why Hellboy matters or why he's so cool, something like that.

CD: Is the film still currently planning on releasing an official soundtrack, or just the score by Beltrami?

GDT: We're doing a score. What I have maintained always is that the movie is 80-90% score, it's not more. Because, I mean, I don't think Hellboy is a movie where you want to have hip-hop techno rapper stuff put into it. And by the same token, I mean the easiest association with the property of Hellboy is metal. And you want to be very careful with that. I listened to a lot of the stuff that the guys suggested on the [message boards], I particularly became very fond of certain groups, and I was already a fan of others, but we tried to keep it mostly score. We have a very quirky soundtrack. We have Vera Lynne, we have Tom Waits, we have Al Green...We have people that you would not expect to find on a soundtrack, and we're not guided by commercial choices, so to speak. But then again, we have a couple of songs that are contemporary, that I like a lot, and that I think are pertinent to the movie or what it's about.

CD: Will there be any kind of CD single release to coincide with the movie?

GDT: We're still investigating that possibility, everyday I listen to a couple of tracks, and if I don't like them I just say no...

CD: So you've come across some stuff that you would never ever use?

GDT: ...Yeah, but I should not offend anyone. Let me say this - some very high profile propositions have come over, but the whole thing about the movie is to resist temptation.

CD: You've always been someone who has been supportive of the DVD format, and getting as much material on there as possible - how is the Hellboy DVD shaping up?

GDT: Yeah, yeah - in fact, right now as we were recording the score, there was a guy from the DVD, the producer Javier, he was recording the whole session. I think this is gonna be a much more extra-oriented DVD than Blade II, which was already packed, this is gonna be the motherload. And I think that when you spend 19 bucks on a DVD, you better get what you paid for. So, Hellboy's gonna come out in August, with a regular version of the movie with some extras, in December it's gonna come out in a double or triple disk, with a longer cut of the movie, and also a special box with a bust of Hellboy with the gun.

CD: Any planned features that you wanna tease?

GDT: There's a lot of stuff, there's so many...I mean, we have interactive digital comics that Mike [Mignola] did, we have the whole program about the BPRD, we have three commentary tracks - we're gonna have the actors, who we're gonna have on an isolated screen, we're gonna have my commentary with [director of photography] Guillermo Navarro, we're gonna have a commentary with Mike Mignola, we have an interview with Mike Mignola and with me about comics and pulp detectives, we have a great feature with Scott McCloud about comics and film, which is very neat. And on top of all of that, we have all the regular extras that you might expect. We have cartoons that are playing in Hellboy's room isolated in their own little chapter. We have the UPA cartoons of Gerald McBoing Boing, and the Telltale Heart, which are masterpieces. We also have an isolated score track...it's really gonna be loaded.

CD: I know that recently you've said that things on the movie have been too busy to produce a video game to coincide with the film - are there still any plans for a video-game using the film's vocal talent after the film's release?

GDT: Quite frankly, it's not that that they were too busy not to do it, they were busy not to do it correctly, The problem is most people would put out the shittiest DVD and the shittiest fucking game just to gather some bucks. But I think if you put up a bad video game of the movie, and this is an aspect I have never been involved with, if you put out a bad game, its kind of a downer. Like, the Lord of the Rings game is awesome. I spend hours playing it. And, for example, I have never seen Buffy, but the game was very playable!

CD: We're gonna talk about that later, you must go back and watch Buffy...

GDT: No no, I hear the show is great, and I want to see it but my time is very limited and I don't watch much TV aside from the Simpsons and the Sopranos, the two families that I care for [laughs]...But I think that we want the game to be both scary and action in one single pack. And we have to wait to design it. I want Mike Mignola to be involved. We are, and this may fill the fans with joy, we are in talks with a Japanese company to do a Hellboy anime series, and what it will be is it will be short thirty minute chapters, so that you can do 'The Corpse'.

CD: Would you do the show with Ron Perlman as HB?

GDT: Doing the voice? Yeah, absolutely, Ron would do the voice.

CD: And the rest of the cast?

GDT: I would hope so, I mean I would hope so but certainly I think that the anime series is the absolutely fool-proof way of going 100% Mignola, unadulterated Mignola.

CD: So you would you try and reflect his art style in the animation then?

GDT: Oh, absolutely. One of the things I saw was this fan animation that this kid from Europe did, I wrote him and I told him, and I will try to get him involved in some way, as a consultant or whatever. I think that such a great job he did should not go unrewarded.

CD: It's clear from your bi-weekly visits to the official HellSite message boards that you have a strong commitment to the fans of the material - why do you make such a concentrated effort to keep them in the loop?

GDT: I just feel probably that Hellboy is a unique occurrence in my life. I would not do it for every movie. I did not do it for Blade, that's for sure, I didn't do it for any of the others. But my feeling is that Hellboy is such a special property, such a special mythology, that we all feel proprietary...I know I do, and I know that it's a movie that whether the fans end up liking it or not liking it, depending on who each one of them are, some of them may have a fit and a heart attack because we changed the design of the stone hand, or because the movie has a percentage of things that happen in a city, or because we're not always Mignola dark except in certain occasions...Whatever, I think that whatever happens, at least the least effort I can do for fans, as proprietary as I am, is keep them in the loop, beat by beat, keep the creator involved, beat by beat, and say, 'you wanna poke me? I'm here' And I really have become accessible to that degree, to the point where I correspond personally with several of them, and it has been that way from the start. I mean, the first thing I did when I became involved with the Hellboy project was publish my e-mail. The first thing, years ago, more than five years ago, on an Aint-It-Cool-News thread. I said, this is my address, write me here. And I think that I also have gained really good friends through it.

CD: We've heard lots of rumors about your plans for Hellboy 2, should the first film prove successful - can you share any further clues with our readers?

GDT: Well, y'know, I think that we...[laughs] We have a really fun opening, that's all that Mignola and I have discussed, and we have discussed a general direction...We certainly love when Hellboy travels in time, and we love when Hellboy travels to other locations, be it Eastern Europe or Japan or any of that, and we will make it much more like that...

CD: But you don't want to lose the supporting cast - there's so many great BPRD agents...

GDT: No no, we would actually gain. We would gain Roger [the Homunculus], Roger would be involved. We would have...somebody in a jar [laughs], and with a...I don't want to say more! But Kriegaffe will show up, y'know, but the reality is that it's still very embryonic...[laughs] I can tell you that the opening, I won't tell you specifics, but Hellboy becomes public. But it's through a very funny sequence. And I really enjoyed talking about that with Mignola [laughs].

CD: You've previously stated that if you were ever to cast the role of Pulp Hero Lobster Johnson in the movies, he would be played by Bruce Campbell...

GDT: Absolutely.

CD: While we don't know who you might bring into HB2, do any actors jump to mind for either Roger, Johann Krauss, Kate, Hermann Von Klempt, or any other potential new characters for the film series?

GDT: I love Johann. You don't need to cast anyone for that! [laughs] Except the voice. But, um, I like Roger so much...and I think Roger should be played a little bit like Abe, where you have one actor in the costume and another guy doing the voice...because I always imagined Roger's voice to be very deep and very terse. Very much like, almost like James Earl Jones, a great deep voice. And I love the plight of Roger, that was one of the things that blew me away in [the Hellboy comic storyline] Conqueror Worm, that he was almost, as I said in the prologue, Miltonian. He became a really moving figure.

CD: The internet has you attached to about 20 different movies on any different day - which ones are currently moving ahead, and have any dropped off the radar completely? Which seems like the project you'll move to after 'Hellboy'?

GDT: I tried to clarify that a little bit in one [message board] posting. A rundown: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, I'm not involved. I have never officially been involved, I will not be involved. The Wind in the Willows is gone. We're still turning in Mountains of Madness to the studio this month, we'll see what happens with that. I'm trying to raise financing for Monte Cristo. I've put away Crimson Peak, because I feel I have so many other pending ones, that I'd rather start getting them out. Mephisto's Bridge, unfortunately, is not showing any signs of being able to be financed. I want to do a Spanish movie that is the counterpart to Devil's Backbone, it is again in Spain during the fascist years and it's called Pan's Labyrinth. And, you know, part of me really feels like going to Spain and doing that, because it's almost like a vacation to be able to do another quirky smaller totally art house oriented little fairy tale, y'know? But, if any of the big ones, be it Mountains of Madness or Monte Cristo, would happen, I would love it. We're still developing Domu, we just got the rights. We're gonna have 30 days of a window to be able to find someone to partner with. I continue to produce, Alfonso Cuaron and I are finishing producing a movie in Ecuador. I may try my hand at producing a couple of horror things in the states. And I dunno, I mean it's very active, but I found out the hard way that whatever your plans are have very little to do with the way your career really goes.

CD: Heh, yeah. So in an ideal world, would you want to follow Hellboy up with Mountains of Madness?

GDT: In an ideal world, if it was a Hollywood project, I would like to do Mountains. In an ideal world, if it was a non Hollywood project, I would do Pan's Labyrinth.

CD: I'll bet some of our readers think that in an ideal world you would follow Hellboy up with Hellboy 2...

GDT: Well, but that is gonna take time. I think that if the movie connects with an audience, the worst thing you can do is just jump [right back in], I mean I want to have Mike Mignola involved as a co-writer, and I want to be very careful about doing it.

CD: If you had to convince someone who had never heard of Hellboy before to see it using only one sentence, what would that sentence be?

GDT: Get your ass in; you won't regret it! [laughs] I mean, I think the thing with the movie, it is a very rich movie. It is not a quick wham-bam-thank-you-mam ride. It's a very rewarding movie. I really think the world of it, and I hope people do. I mean, however large its audience is, may it find it. That's the only prayer I have, because there are movies in my life that I adore to the point of almost aching at how much I like them, and some of them are successful and some of them are not successful. If the movie was done for the right reasons than some of the audience finds it for the right reasons. I mean, I think the worst thing that I can say is that we live in a world that is sadly in motion almost purely by hype and money. We have almost lost the pleasure of discovering movies. We have to be force-fed, and its come to the point, to the very sad point that when we are not force-fed, we don't think the movie's an event. 'It must not be that great because it's not $200 million and it's not advertised up the wazoo and it doesn't have a happy meal.' And the other side of this that is equally, or even more, sad, is some people saying, 'this movie's great *because* it made half a billion dollars'. In my experience, as I said to you, Devil's Backbone did less than a million dollars, Mimic did more than thirty - there's no doubt which one is the better movie or which one I like the most. So I think that with Hellboy, it can be a movie that finds a large audience. It can be. It's that fun. And it's that easy to love. Now, it's all a matter of the ads, the posters, all that, to connect with an audience.

CD: It's your last chance to get a message to the fans who are eagerly Counting Down the days until April 2nd - any final words to relate?

GDT: It's a little late to say this, but I've been reading on the forums, or meeting people [who post there] like 'bboy' [a regular on the film's official message boards] that have been very careful about how much they find out about the movie, and they're very conservative about watching trailers and this and that. I can safely say, the less you know the more you're gonna be surprised. And the more you embrace it as like an 'elseworlds' [alternate interpretation from the comics] and you're not out there counting how many changes we [made from the comics], the more you're gonna enjoy it. But my final message is very simple: I would give my right hand to have the chance to have this movie in the theater to be discovered by myself. I mean, as a fan, I would *love* to be able to have an evening with this movie and a bag of popcorn alone!

CD: Haha, cool. Thanks again for so much of your time!

GDT: My pleasure, man.

What'd I tell ya? An interview fitting of the Beast of the Apocalypse himself, no? Due to the spoilerish nature of most of the footage I saw accompanying he scoring sessions these past few days (you'll like it once you see it in the movie, know that much), the rundown of my actual time spent should be coming a little bit down the road, and it will not be *too* extensive. However, it will also be accompanied by a few words from the man behind the music himself, composer Marco Beltramo (Mimic, Terminator 3), talking a bit about how he found the right musical sound for Hellboy and co. Plus, I'm workin' on getting a special treat for you guys to go along side the article, so keep your fingers crossed till then (just don't hurt yourselves - take finger crossing breaks). Keep an eye out for that update in the not-too-distant-future, hopefully. Until then, hope you enjoyed the GDT mega-interview! Keep it here at CountingDown for all the latest and greatest on the one and only Big Red, Hellboy!