Guillermo Del Toro Finally Makes His Own 'Frankenstein'

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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.
The great filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has written and directed a new reimagining of Frankenstein.

It takes inspiration from the 1931 film Frankenstein, one of the first best and most enduring horror monster films, but mostly from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, which many consider to be the first science fiction book.

She was only 18 when she wrote it. In Del Toro's movie, the final part of the story is told from the creature's point of view.

Some of the themes of his new film echo themes that he's been obsessed with for years.

Misunderstood creatures, men who behave like monsters, father-son relationships, religion, empathy, cruelty, misguided scientific experiments that take a terrible turn, and what Del Toro describes as the uneasy truce between science and religion, machine and man, and the realization that you are inescapably alone.

His other movies include Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, Nightmare Alley, A Reimagining of Pinocchio, filmed in stop-motion animation, and two Hellboy films.

In Del Toro's Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the surgeon who wants to create new life, a new man built out of body parts from the newly dead.

The creature he creates is played by Jacob Alordi, who's best known for co-starring in Euphoria, and also played Elvis Presley in the Sofia Coppola movie Priscilla.

Del Toro grew up in Guadalajaro, Mexico, and lives in L.A.

Guillermo del Toro, welcome to Fresh Air. Congratulations on your new film, which brings together so much of your other work.

And I know it's a dream come true for you to do your own version of Frankenstein. You first saw the movie, the 1931 movie, which is totally different from the book and your new movie.

But that movie really had a hold on you. Tell us why it had such meaning for you.

Well, it was curiously enough on a Sunday after Catholic Mass, we came back home and then we would watch horror movies on Channel 6 all day. And it was the first time I saw Frankenstein.

And the moment Boris Karlov crossed the threshold, I had an epiphany. I had a St.
Paul on the road to Damascus kind of experience.

I realized I understood my faith or my dogmas better through Frankenstein than through Sunday Mass.

I saw the resurrection of the flesh, the Immaculate Conception, ecstasy, you know, stigmata, everything made sense and I decided at age seven that the creature of Frankenstein was going to be my personal avatar and my personal messiah.

It was a really profound transformation and it made an impression that lasted my whole life.

Can you compare how you saw the story as a seven-year-old to how you see it now?

Well, I saw it as a son when I saw it first, and now now I see it as a father, and more poignantly, I have become my father,

whilst trying to run away from the same mistakes of absence or, you know, mysterious emotions that I couldn't figure out as a kid. And I had a really profound moment to

be able to reconcile this knowledge with a beautiful talk with my own kids and stop this lineage of uh

uh pains and you know fathers are a big shadow particularly in Latin American families I imagine.

What's the pain you're referring to in Titanic? You know the relationship with your father?

It is my father

was always a mystery and he was really funny and warm but by turns he was also aloof and distant and had a lot of problem.

Even, you know, when he came back from the kidnapping, he was taken 72 days and I said, I'm going to get to know him real well and our conversations never lasted more than a few minutes you know and and he just couldn't and I and I I didn't understand that and I realized that

particularly with my profession I had a huge alibi to repeat this distance and I unfortunately couldn't I believe on time to to really change it and become a very dedicated father.

You mentioned the kidnapping. He was kidnapped and held for a million-dollar ransom.
Yeah. And you managed to get the money to pay the kidnappers and rescue your father.

And that's my understanding, is that's why you moved to the U.S. because of death threats.
Yeah, well, it was the constant threat and the PTSD, et cetera.

But a lot of the moments that happened during that kidnapping are actually obliquely reflected in the film. I tried to make it an autobiography of the soul for me.

Aaron Powell, there's three parts of the movie. There's the introduction.
Yes. Then there's the story told pretty much from Dr.
Frankenstein's point of view.

And then the final part is told from the creature's point of view.

I really wanted to read Mary Shelley's novel, which I've never read before speaking to you again.

And I wasn't able to find the time to do it.

I did, however, read your introduction to, like, I think it's a 2021 annotated version of your novel.

But anyways, in Mary Shelley's original telling of the story, is there a chapter that's from the creature's point of view, or is that just something you wanted to do? No, no, no.

There are so many things that are in the novel. You know, that is one of them.
When the creature meets Victor in the frozen north, he says, well, this is what happened to me.

And he proceeds to tell him his itinerary

of degradation and

humanization and learning the language

with the family of the hermit. You know, all of that is in the novel, but it's been rarely articulated.
And I found that

hinging the movie in the middle was structurally the best way to make the audience almost get a jolt and say, oh, oh, I've never seen this before.

Even if it's been dramatized briefly in other versions, this is the one that tracks the creature in a distinct chapter. It stars in the frozen north and is very discreet in color.

Then you have childhood and

young age of Victor, which is

idealized and very heightened visually by the fact that Victor is telling the story. And then the fairy tale, like...
Hey, I'm glad you said fairy tale. Yeah.

Because that seems to me like the part from Dr. Frankenstein's point of view

has elements of like horror film and monster film. But the second part, it's set in the woods.
It's like a fairy tale. In a little cabin.
Yeah, and

the old blind man, it's kind of a very fairy tale, benevolent character. There are spirits in the woods.

I mean, he's guided, the creature is guided by all sorts of animals into understanding the world. Yeah, and the

blind old hermit thinks that because he can't see, he doesn't see the monster that other people see. And in fact, he thinks the creature is the spirit of the woods.

Yes, that was very important to me that the three chapters were very distinct in style and very distinct in energy. The camera work is very different.

The color palette is very different and I think that I would say having seen most every version of

Frankenstein on film,

this is very unique.

The scale of the movie, both being epic and intimate, is very unique. But the fairy tale breadth of it all and the parable it feels like a parable of the prodigal father I'd say jokingly

are you trying to interpret Frankenstein

people always call the monster Frankenstein yeah

that's a mistake that came yeah that's from a play yeah

so are you trying to compare the creature

in Frankenstein to Jesus

I think so I mean I think the parallels are very, very curious. I triangulate the creature with Jesus and Pinocchio.

Yeah, in your version of Pinocchio, and I don't know if this is in other stories or in the original fairy tale,

Geppetto, who creates

the puppet Pinocchio, also has built or carved, I should say, a huge depiction of

Jesus being crucified for the church.

Yeah, no, that's completely original too.

That's original? Yes.

To me,

the myths are very related.

The two biggest mysteries in the Bible for me growing up, and I am a lapsed Catholic, but the two mysteries were the book of Job, in which man questions God, why do bad things happen to good people?

And the answer, basically, of God is, why not?

It's very comforting the way you put it.

Well, that's the way God put it. He says, who are you to question my wisdom? You were not there when I created the world, basically.

When we talked a few years ago, you mentioned that your grandmother, who was very Catholic,

exorcised you. Not exercised, but as in an exorcism.

She exorcised you twice. Yeah, with the holy water, yeah.
Did you feel like people saw you as unholy and a sacrilege in the same way that people see the creature in Frankenstein.

And even Pinocchio, when Pinocchio is kind of rowdy in church,'cause he's never been there before, he doesn't understand what church is, the people in the church call him unholy and a sacrilege.

Well, you know, you you I'm I'm very used to not fitting.

I I I'm always looking through the window into the world, you know, uh a little bit uh with a set of thoughts and a set of uh principles and ideas that don't necessarily conform.

Uh So my grandmother was in great pain that I would draw monsters all day. I would talk about the Bible, asking questions that were maybe too poignant.

You know, but we loved each other. And that is salient in my movies.
No matter how different we were, we can love each other. And that is, again, in Frankenstein.

There's Frankenstein in all my movies, from Kronos all the way to Pinocchio. Every single movie, I hesitate to think of one that doesn't have elements of it.

You could say in some ways that

the creature in Frankenstein is like artificial intelligence because he's created by man but then lives on its own and can destroy men if,

you know, without even understanding quite what he's doing.

So what are your thoughts about AI and did that kind of inform the movie in any way?

It did and it didn't. It didn't in the sense that I'm my concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity.
I think that's what drives most of the

world's worst teachers.

But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros.

He's kind of blind,

creating...

something without considering the consequences.

And I think

we have to take a pause and consider where we're going. If you have to teach an AI to think in ones and zeros,

you know, oh my God, I would love for a generation to get raising kids right one time, one time.

In the entire history of mankind, there hasn't been a single generation that was raised right all across the globe. And I think that's our biggest failure in a way, you know.

Ones and zeros don't get the alchemy. that you get with emotion and experience.
You get the information, but you don't get the alchemy of emotion, spirituality, and feeling.

I'm not saying it's impossible to replicate, but we have it readily available with

the next generation of children.

And that's why the painful thing that Jacob Elodi and Victor enact is a father-and-son relationship that is very relatable in the film, very relatable and very moving by the end.

Did you take advantage of any AI in making Frankenstein? AI, particularly generative AI, is I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested.

I'm 61 and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak.

I really don't. The other day, somebody wrote me an email and said, what is your stance on AI? And my answer was very short.
I said, I'd rather die.

Oh, those are strong words. Man, not for me.
I'm Mexican.

But I think, Terry, that

even when a human sings a song that has already been recorded six, seven times,

they're filtering their experience, their life. I often think of

Johnny Cash singing Hurt,

the Trent Reznor song, and making it entirely his own, or Joe Cocker singing the Beatles.

That's not aversion. That's not remixing.
That is filtering through alchemical pain and experience a work of art into making it your own.

The creature in Frankenstein is endowed with eternal life in your film. Cursed.
Cursed. Well, that's what I was going to ask you.
What do you think about, you know, his eternal life is hell.

The creature is alone, and he wants to end his tormented life, but he can't. There's no one in the world who's like him, and Dr.
Frankenstein refuses to make a companion for him.

And the creature says, there was only one remedy for pain, death, and you took that away from me too.

After the creature survived something that other people assume would have killed him, he says, there was silence and then merciless life. I felt lonelier than ever.

So when you think of eternal life, do you think that that's torment?

Oh, I do. I'm a huge fan of death.

I'm a groupie for death.

I think it's the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody.
You know?

It is the metronome of dead that makes us value the compass of the beautiful music.

I'm going to say this comes when my father was taken, every day was torment.

And I

used to see the sun rising and resent it. And I said, the sun doesn't care about my pain.
But then eventually I realized it was my pain.

that didn't care about the sun and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it.

I needed to understand that the the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know?

You mentioned the fear of death every day that your father was held hostage, kidnapped for ransom.

Of course, you'd be worried about death then. I mean, it was the threat of death hanging over him and his life was in your hands to save.
Putting that aside, as major as that is,

did you have a fear of death growing up and as a young man? Yes, as a young man, my grandmother and I

had a very precarious sense of death and life. My grandmother would say goodnight to me every day and say, let us pray that I'm here tomorrow.
And that is very

intense for a four or five year old to hear. And I would spend sometimes I would sleep at the foot of her bed and I would be listening in the dark for her breathing.

And if the breathing ceased even even for two seconds, I would be jolted and take a look to see if she was okay. And

that stayed with me for many decades.

I don't fear it anymore. I don't fear that anymore.
I feel losing people, yes, but me, I'm not afraid of dying, I hope.

You know, really, Terry, all these great questions, you know, when they get resolved, right when the lights flutter and you are no longer

a director or a general or a pope, right when you become just you and the lights are flickering out, that's when you realize what you did or didn't do in your life. And

that's the most momentous

thing anyone can experience. And you can go with great agitation or great peace.

We were talking earlier about the book of Job. Yes.

You asked your cast to read the book of Job. Yes, and the Tao.

What did you want them to take from it?

Because ultimately, that's the plea of the creature, too. The plea of the creature is why? You know, why

do this thing happen to me? And the answer comes at the end. The final image of the film is what tells you what we can do.
I mean, acceptance is so profound. You know, we...
We

are building a culture in which we have the idea of what things should be.

And when they don't happen, you can feel frustrated, rebel against them. But at the end of the day, they are what they are.
Martis Corsese

tackled the same sort of question in the Irishman. And the answer is very, very beautiful.
He says, it is what it is.

That's the book of Job. It is what it is.
The Tao says, all pain comes from desire. Which is absolutely true.
You want more awards, you want more money, you find yourself in pain. I do, you know?

But if you don't, if you don't want more, there's a zero that gives you peace. And the same with life.
So you found feeling insignificant

liberating. Liberating, which

can happen with reviews.

Do you read them?

Not anymore. Not anymore.
I'm 61. I don't.
But I did. I did.
Oh, my God. When I was younger, I would read every single one until I found the one that would never leave my brain.

I remember a few that are really well phrased. Do you want to quote one? Well, Jay Hoverman of The Village Voice wrote a great,

he put down Blade 2 beautifully. He said, the only thing remotely scary about Blade 2 is that it's done by the same man that did Devil's Backbone, which is beautiful.

On that note, let me reintroduce you again. We have to take a break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

He wrote and directed the new film, Frankenstein, his own interpretation of the Frankenstein story, inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. We'll be back after a short break.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.
Let's get back to my interview with filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro.

He wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein, a new interpretation of the story inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel.

He also fell in love at the age of seven with the 1931 film Frankenstein, which starred Boris Karloff as the creature. The creature is played by Jacob Alordi in the new film.
Dr.

Victor Frankenstein, the surgeon who creates the creature and brings it to life, is played by Oscar Isaac.

Del Toro's other films include Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, a stop-motion animation, PG reimagining of the Pinocchio story, and two Hellboy movies.

I want to talk with you about the 1931

film Frankenstein, which was directed by James Whale, who also directed the first film version of Showboat,

which which is quite a contrast.

And the first version of Waterloo Bridge, which is his version is so brutal and sort of brechtian. He was a very interesting director and a very interesting man.

Well, you know, I watched that movie so many times when I was a child because it used to be run

frequently on Million Dollar Movie in New York, and they would show one movie and run it over and over all week. And then I watched it again a few nights ago because I wanted to refresh my memory.

And part of what I love about the movie is just the otherworldliness of it. The cinematography is so good, and it reminds me of like film noir, German Expressionism.

And it's misty, it's stormy, it's dreamlike. It's very modern, by the way.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for 1931, this film

Well, Whale and a lot of this era of Hollywood filmmaker is extremely influenced by German cinema.

And to the point where Whale does an artifice that is not apparent to the audience until you tell them to look for it, if the shadows on the set didn't fall the way Whale liked it, he would spray paint them.

Whoa, really? Yeah, there's a lot of shadows in the window that don't correspond to the light that is being poured on the set. And

the shadows are painted with spray paint on the walls. And nobody knows.
Now that I told you, if you watch it again, you'll see it here and there.

Did the style of filmmaking, the shadows, the lighting, the mist, the nightmarish quality of the images, did that influence you as a filmmaker?

It did up to a certain point, and it did only on certain movies. Like, for example, on Pinocchio, the creation of Pinocchio is shot like a horror film.

But the creation of the creature in this film is shown like a concert, like a joyful cornucopia of anatomical parts, blood, ligaments, and muscles, which has never been shown in any other versions before.

But to me, it was mandatory because I wanted to see Victor at his professional best and at his artistic best.

So I talked to my composer, Alexander Desplas, and I said, we're going to do it with a waltz. And I'm going to shoot it like

a fun,

fun-filled concert of anatomical parts.

Did you study anatomy in order to do that?

Yes, first of all, I've been obsessed by medicine and anatomy. I was the world's youngest hypochondriac when I was a kid.

Congratulations, that's quite an achievement. It is.
There must be a Boy Scout patch for that. But I went to my mother every day and I said, Mother, I think I have trichinosis of the brain.

Mother, I have cirrhosis.

I read an entire encyclopedia of health as a kid, and I've been very taken by anatomy ever since. And we had a Victorian consultant, and I used

an entire medical library that I purchased from 1835.

I bought it in London, and I used it to make sure the terms and the procedures were up to speed, but not too advanced.

What did you tell your collaborators about what you wanted your Frankenstein to look like? Because he looks nothing like Boris Koloff.

I don't just mean his face, but he doesn't have like a bolt in his neck. He doesn't look all stitched together.

What I was trying to capture is the beautiful style of the illustrations of

an American artist called Bernie Reidson, who illustrated, for me, the best illustrated version of the novel ever, and who collaborated with me earlier on.

And it has a very Vironian, very doomed, very withering heights sort of look of a doomed hero.

And when he's first born and he's bald and almost naked, I wanted it to feel like an anatomical chart, like something newly minted. Not a repair job on an ICU victim, but

the skills of Victor. His exquisite sense of design.
The head is patterned after phrenology manuals from the 1800s, so they have very elegant, almost aerodynamic lines.

I wanted this alabaster or marble statue feel, so it feels like a newly minted human being. And we also tried to make it the way I remember the Jesus

images, life-size in the churches of my childhood.

The

original Frankenstein movie is so dreamlike, nightmare-like.

And

I think several of your films have very nightmarish imagery in it.

I read you were a lucid dreamer. Yes, as a kid.
As a kid. So explain

what you mean when you say a lucid dreamer. A lucid dream for me or

waking nightmares used to be called too, is you wake up in your dream in the exact environment that you fell asleep on. But there are elements that are not normal.
I used to see monsters.

I saw a burning figure at the foot of my bed, which is where the burning archangel comes in Frankenstein. And that figure extended its arms and said, I live.
And I woke up screaming.

When I was a very young child, I used to see a fawn, a goat man, come from behind an armoire while the church chimed midnight in the neighborhood. And with each chime, the figure would come up.

And then you wake up and

nothing is there, and you're covered in sweat. And that's sort of lucid dreaming or waking nightmare states, which are a disruption of the REM cycle on the brain.
But to you as a kid is

truly harrowing.

So you would dream that you woke up and escaped the nightmare only to find that the nightmare still is going on. So it makes the nightmare seem even more like reality.

Yes, which is why one of the best images in the novel of Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein

had never been rendered on film until now. And it was my favorite moment reading it

at age 11. I read the novel.
And it's the moment Victor wakes up

from the night of creation and the creature is standing at the foot of the bed looking back at him.

As a kid, I held my breath. I was shocked.
And

I prayed for decades that I could make that moment come to life on a film before anyone. And fortunately, nobody did it.
Well, we have to take a short break here.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein, a new interpretation of the story.
We'll be right back. This is fresh air.

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This is fresh air. Let's get back to my interview with Guillermo del Toro.
He wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein, a new interpretation of the story inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel.

When we left off, we were talking about how as a child, Del Toro experienced lucid dreaming or waking nightmares. That's when you think you've awakened from a nightmare, but you haven't really.

You're just dreaming you woke up, and the nightmare continues.

Do you think that your lucid dreams when you were a child relate to how you fell in love with movies when you were a child? Because movies are so dreamlike,

but they might haunt your dreams. You might be afraid of them, but you're not literally going to think that you live in that world.

You absolutely are absolutely right.

The first film I saw was William Wyler's Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier. I went with my mother to a cinema downtown that was super cheap and showed very old movies.

It was really gothic atmosphere with rain rain and the moors and Olivier. It's basically a ghost story in many ways, William Heinz.
And I fell asleep full of fear.

I dreamt my dream and woke up in the theater with the movie still playing. So exactly, my first movie was part of a lucid dream.
Exactly.

Wow. What was your emotional reaction to that?

You're looking at it.

I mean,

that's when I fell in love with gothic romance. And I couldn't have been more than four.
Why do I know it? Because I remember the house we were living in, where I was born.

And my father won the lottery, the national lottery, in 1969, which would make me five years old when we moved from that house to a giant house in the outskirts of the city.

Your father won the lottery?

In 1969. How much money did he win? $6 million in 1690, which is the entire budget of Planet of the Apes.

That's amazing. How did it change your life?

Completely. I mean, completely.

We moved into a house and lived a very sort of strange life. I mean, we had all sorts of pets.
We had eagles, a pet lion, 30 dogs.

You had a zoo. Yeah, we had like a zoo.
And we had,

I could go like Danny in the shining. I could go on my tricycle for hours in the long corridors.
Sometimes, like a magic realism novel, I would go for weeks without seeing a single adult.

I would find food on the fridge, I would find clean clothes on my drawers, and I didn't interact with many adults. I would just, you know, exist in a mysterious life

in an enchanted castle.

Six million dollars was a lot more then than it is now.

It was. And one of the things he did is he bought a library and filled it with books that he never read, but I read them all.
And that's where I read the Encyclopedia of Anatomy and Health.

And that's where I read all my classics, you know, Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn,

Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde.

Wow. So

what happened to the money? Because he was held for a million-dollar ransom

about 30 years later

and didn't have the money.

Well, what happened is my dad controlled everything. None of us had access to that money.

my father raised those he would say you want I would say I want to buy film for my camera and he would say okay

go to the car dealership and clean all the cars all week and Saturday I'll give you a third of it you come back another three weeks I'll buy you a reel of Subarate he didn't want to raise us as if we had everything.

So, you know, none of us had access to that money. He had the money to pay for the ransom, but none of us could access it.
Oh.

Yeah, I had some money left from Mimic when he was kidnapped. I put it all in.

Friends of his gave us loans.

It's a long story and not a very pleasant one about the nature of humanity, but we managed to collect it.

We had a negotiator that came from England, and that negotiation was paid by Jim Cameron, who has been my friend for more than 30 years. The director.

The director, yeah, who directed Titanic, among others. Titanic, Renator II, Avatar, yeah.

Did your father ever pay you back?

Yeah, eventually, I mean, that was a source of disconnect.

I had to move to Texas, and for a couple of years,

you know, we didn't stay

in very close contact.

you know, it's too personal to discuss. But, you know, eventually he came around and

he did pay me back. And

we, I think we ended up in great love and great understanding of the fact that my dad was not my dad. He was a guy that played my dad on my particular sitcom.

And my dad and I understood each other. We were, at the end of the day,

very similar and very different. But I loved him so much.

So I have to ask, you live in L.A.

There's been quite a large ice crack down there.

And you're Mexican, you have an accent.

Has anybody from ICE stopped you and asked for your papers?

Not yet, but

if we ever meet in person, I'll show you.

I have a wallet the size of a leather portfolio, and I always carry my papers.

I have been stopped in the past and asked to show my papers in the past and asked pointed questions in the past, pulled aside in immigration in the past.

So I have all my papers with me at all times, and

it is a very difficult time when there is no voice for the other. And I think that understanding that the other is you

is crucial.

Well, you experienced that when you were very young, too.

Exile

has

been momentous and extremely traumatic. I haven't haven't processed it, but I did it in the best way possible.
I looked for a home in Spain. I looked for a home in Toronto.

I made a home in Toronto in a way. And I, you know, when I go to Mexico,

I love going to Mexico. And at the same time, I have to admit that I get

sort of PTSD here and there, you know? PTSD? Yeah, I feel like

something may happen at any moment.

Because of the kidnappings? Yes, because, I mean,

it lasts 72 days, you go through all the stages of grief five times.

It increased my sense of

being unmoored in my existence, not belonging in my existence.

It reaffirmed that feeling. That was originally from childhood.
And now as an adult, I feel it in a different way.

But you know, as Marty Feldman puts it in Young Frankenstein, it could be worse. It could be raining.

Do you like Young Frankenstein? I adore it. That's a movie that is more, people think is based on the whale movies.

It's partially based on that, but more than any other movie, and I recommend this movie wholeheartedly, is based very much on Son of Frankenstein, which is a great Frankenstein movie.

Really, really terrific.

Do you have a favorite song from Young Frankenstein?

Yes, I think that the point of this agreement between Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, which is the most brilliant moment, is putting on the writs. Yes, yes.

I think that's not only one of the greatest comedies ever made, it's one of the great Frankenstein movies ever made. It is so much its own identity that people believe

erroneously that the blind hermit comes from young Frankenstein sometimes.

And it comes obviously from the novel and from Bride of Frankenstein, the whale movie, which is an exquisite sequel to the first Frankenstein.

Guillermo del Toro, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming back to the show.

Always a pleasure, and thank you for the wisdom and the careful guiding of this lengthy interview, which I adored every second of. I really appreciate you saying that.

I love talking with you. Same here.
Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein.

Ladies and gentlemen, mes dames et monsieur, Damon Und Heron, from what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues,

may I now present a cultured, sophisticated

man about town. Hit it!

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits?

Different types who wear a date coat, pants with stripes, or cut a weight coat, perfect fits.

Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper

trying mighty hard to look like Gary Cooper.

Come, let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks or rumbarellers in their midst.

That was Gene Hackman and Peter Borrell from the film Young Frankenstein.

After we take a short break, Justin Chang reviews a new film by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi after he spent seven months in prison. The film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

This is Fresh Air.

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This is fresh air. In February 2023, after spending seven months in prison, the Iranian filmmaker Ja'afar Panahi was released after going on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration.

Since then, he's directed a new movie called It Was Just an Accident, and like most of his films to date, it was shot in secret and without the approval of the Iranian government.

The movie won the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and was submitted by France, one of its co-producing countries, in the Oscars Best International Feature category.

It was Just an Accident is now playing in select theaters. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some of us as something close to a miracle.

For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panahi had been forbidden to travel outside Iran.

He'd also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity, and continued to shoot films in secret.

But then in 2022, Panahi was arrested again and imprisoned. When he announced seven months later that he was beginning a hunger strike, many of us feared it would end with his death.

Instead, he was released after two days and has been free to travel ever since. It's an astonishing real-life story.

one that for tension and peril may well rival the one that Panahi tells in his new film, It Was Just an an Accident.

This remarkable movie, which ended up winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, feels like a liberated work in every sense.

In his recent, more under-the-radar films, like Three Faces or No Bears, Panahi sometimes seemed to be speaking in code, or through layers of parable.

But there's nothing cryptic or ruminative about It Was Just an Accident.

It's a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage, a gripping and often shockingly funny revenge thriller that, as Panahi has said in interviews, was informed by the stories of people he met in prison.

It begins on a dark night, when an auto mechanic named Vahid, played by Vahid Mobasseri, hears something in his shop that catches his attention.

It's the sound of a customer's prosthetic leg, clomping slowly along, and it clearly triggers painful memories.

Some time ago, Vahid was one of several people arrested while protesting for workers' rights. In prison, they were brutally tortured by a man they came to know as Pegleg, because of his prosthetic.

Now Vahid could swear that the customer in his garage, whose name is Egbal, is Pegleg himself. But since Vahid was blindfolded during his torture, he can't trust his eyes, only his ears.

What Vahid does next is shocking.

The following day, after after tailing Egbal for a while in his van, Vahid knocks the man out with a shovel, ties him up, transports him to a remote area, and tries to bury him alive.

But Egbal regains consciousness and begs Vahid to stop, claiming that he isn't the culprit and has no idea what Vahid is talking about.

Vahid puts Egbal back in his van and drives off to find others who can verify the man's identity.

One of his fellow former prisoners is a photographer named Shiva, played by Maryam Afshari, who, when he finds her, is in the middle of taking a couple's pre-wedding photos.

The bride, who's dressed in her full white gown, turns out to be one of Pegleg's victims, too.

Before long, Fahid's van has picked up so many passengers that it starts to resemble a clown car, or maybe the yellow Volkswagen van from Little Miss Sunshine.

Most of those passengers want Igbal dead, but none of them can be 100% certain he's the guilty party, and they bicker relentlessly about what to do next.

As deadly serious as everything is, Panahi pushes the action and the banter to often farcical extremes. He's made a road movie in which the characters keep going around and around in circles.

It's startling just how funny it was just an accident can be. It's attuned to the comic futility, as well as the horror, of the situation.

There's an especially dry running gag, in which Vahid finds himself forced to bribe various people, from security guards to hospital nurses, a jab at the banal everyday corruption of life under an oppressive system.

As day bleeds into night, it was just an accident builds to a dramatic climax of lacerating emotional force, a sequence so intense you can practically feel Panahi's rage burning a hole through the screen.

His movie, in weighing the question of revenge versus mercy, is an obvious warning to authoritarian regimes everywhere. But it also feels like a warning to people living under those regimes.

Several weeks ago, I moderated a QA with Panagy in Los Angeles, a city he hadn't visited in almost 20 years.

While we were talking before the QA, Panahy turned to me with a grave look on his face and said, I'm worried about your country.

Justin Chang is a film critic at the New Yorker. He reviewed It Was Just an Accident.

If you'd like to catch up on fresh air interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with Ken Burns about his new PBS series on the Revolutionary War, or with Malala Yousafzai, who's written a new memoir, check out our podcast.

You'll find lots of fresh air interviews.

And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/slash freshair.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberto Shorrock, Anne Marie Boldonato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Moniqu Nazareth, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman.

Our digital media producer is Molly Sevinesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.
Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.

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