Anyone lucky enough to have seen Guillermo del Toro’s fishy romance The Shape of Water, will have marvelled at another slice of beautiful macabre from the director of Pan’s Labyrinth. Well, prepare to be further amazed by the fact it was made for only $20 million, and looks more spectacular and real than the majority of its big screen counterparts.
While speaking to KCRW’s The Business (which you can listen to here), Del Toro revealed one of the ingenious ways in which he cut costs using old-school filmmaking techniques, in particular the stunning underwater sequences.
“I decided early on that the scenes underwater that needed more control, like the opening and closing of the movie – which are almost balletic – I could not build sets that size on a tank…so I unearthed a very old technique that I used when I was an effects technician in my twenties that is called ‘dry for wet.’ That is, you shoot these scenes with the people and the props and the furniture suspended on wires, you fill the stage with smoke, and you project what is called light caustics, which is the light of the water, through a projector. And you shoot it in slow motion. And it looks like under water. You add a bubble here, a bubble there, a little bit of debris with the computer and you erase the wires, and use a fan to move the cloth as if it was underwater. That way I had beautiful images on a budget.”
It’s the kind of technique that makes del Toro one of the most unique directors working today, and when you see it play out during the films remarkable opening credits sequence, you wonder why more directors don’t put a little bit more effort into the craft of filmmaking.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of The Shape of Water here
From master storyteller, Guillermo del Toro, comes THE SHAPE OF WATER – an other-worldly fairy tale, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1963. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of silence and isolation. Elisa’s life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment.
The Shape of Water is out now in the US and released in UK cinemas on February 14th 2018.
