“I’ve written 23 screenplays in my life, and I have only directed nine movies and produced another few. “They felt my take was too female-centric and didn’t support the budget properly,” he says. He encountered similar issues while trying to bring a live-action Beauty and the Beast to the screen for Warner Bros., a project that is now defunct. Even when the renowned production company Legendary Pictures signed a deal, del Toro had to forfeit 30% of his salary. Still, convincing a studio to finance a Gothic manse for a movie with an R rating and a feminist message–not exactly blockbuster material–took eight years. His attention to the craft inspired Wasikowska to overcome her trepidations and Hunnam to reject top billing in Fifty Shades of Grey in order to play the fourth lead in this film. Del Toro has always been obsessed with such details: in pre-production he hands out 10-page biographies for each of the characters and asks his actors to keep secrets about their character’s pasts from other members of the cast. I think it was inception.”ĭecades later, he built a haunted house for Crimson Peak from scratch, including running water, a working elevator and secret rooms to stash corpses. “I fell asleep during the movie and dreamt of those Gothic images–the fog, the moors, the house. “They call those theaters ‘brick and rat’ because they gave you a brick to kill the rat that crawls up your leg,” he says. There was enough room for two powerful women, which is rare.”ĭel Toro has been dreaming up Crimson Peak since he saw his first film, Wuthering Heights, with his mother at age 3 in his hometown of Guadalajara, Mexico. “I worried that because Edith is the audience’s eyes, she wouldn’t have much story and could be outshone,” she says, “but Guillermo made sure that just because Lucille was a strong character didn’t mean Edith had to be a weak one. She may look as delicate as a porcelain doll, but Wasikowska has portrayed two of literature’s most resolute women–Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary–and, in the 2013 film Tracks, she played an Australian who treks across 1,700 miles of withering desert. Wasikowska hesitated before taking on Edith. “I wanted to find compassion for someone who does truly terrible things.” “I’m tired of female characters who are just adornments,” Chastain adds. “In Crimson Peak marriage is the gateway to horror.” “I didn’t want to make a movie where marriage is the ultimate blessing,” he adds. For his part, he took pleasure in upending the longstanding cliché of the fallen woman who gets her due. Gothic romance has long been “brilliantly written by women and then rendered into films by male directors who reduce the potency of the female characters,” says del Toro, who believes that recent small-budget films by women, like The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, may be the future of the horror genre. While Thomas or the doting doctor Alan (Charlie Hunnam) might come to Edith’s rescue in another story, these two are all but shunted aside as Chastain and Wasikowska proceed to play cat and mouse. The film begins by mirroring the plots of great Gothic romances such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca: naive Edith (Wasikowska) falls in love with brooding Thomas (Hiddleston), goes to his mysterious house and is confronted by Lucille (Jessica Chastain), a dark authority figure with a secret. Reimagining the sex scenes in a horror film is just one of the many contemporary touches to Crimson Peak, in theaters Oct.
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