Director Guillermo del Toro has spent the last year and a half working on one of his dream projects, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein that is set up at the Netflix streaming service. While we don’t know the exact date the movie is going to be released, it has been said that it’s going to make it’s way out into the world sometime in November of this year – and during a conversation at the Cannes Film Festival with composer Alexandre Desplat, who is composing the score for Frankenstein, del Toro said this is “an incredibly emotional movie.”
Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is a long-awaited passion project for the filmmaker, might have the following logline: Set in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century, the story of Dr. Pretorius, who needs to track down Frankenstein’s monster- who is believed to have died in a fire forty years before–in order to continue the experiments of Dr. Frankenstein.
Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight) stars alongside Mia Goth (Pearl), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), with Ralph Ineson (The Witch) showing up for a pivotal cameo. At one point, Andrew Garfield was in the cast, but he had to drop out and was replaced by Elordi… and it’s believed that the role Garfield had passed over to Elordi was the Monster.
Del Toro has been talking about making a new version of Frankenstein for more than a decade. Years ago, he had the project set up at Universal, with Doug Jones (The Shape of Water) on board to play Frankenstein’s Monster. The movie got far enough into pre-production that Jones even saw a bust of the Monster that was inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s artwork in an illustrated adaptation of Shelley’s novel that Wrightson spent seven years working on. But then the project fell apart. Now it’s finally happening at the Netflix streaming service, which previously teamed with del Toro on Pinocchio and the anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
While at Cannes, del Toro said (with thanks to Variety for the transcription), “Somebody asked me the other day, does (this Frankenstein) have really scary scenes? For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son… I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that.” Desplat added, “Guillermo’s cinema is very lyrical, and my music is rather lyrical too. So I think the music of Frankenstein will be something very lyrical and emotional… I’m not trying to write horrific music.” Del Toro then said, “We’re finding the emotion. And what I can say is, for me, it’s an incredibly emotional movie.“
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