Written by the legendary creator of the HELLBOY universe Mike Mignola, and from the producers of THE EXPENDABLES and THE HITMAN’S BODYGUARD comes HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN, the fourth instalment in the iconic franchise.
Hellboy and a rookie agent from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) become stranded in 1950s rural Appalachia, only to discover a small community haunted by witches, led by a sinister local demon known as ‘The Crooked Man’ who has been sent back to earth to collect souls for the devil.
As Hellboy: The Crooked Man makes it’s way into Australian cinemas on October 10, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s director Brian Taylor about the similarities between filming action and horror violence, staying faithful to the Hellboy comics, and the disturbing scene he filmed that made him say, “Marvel would never do this”.
Nick: It’s a pleasure to meet you, man! Thank you for taking the time to chat.
Brain Taylor: You too! It’s a good collection you got back there.
Nick: Thank you. I was a product of the Blockbuster generation. I worked there for five years, and when it was closing down, that’s where the collection started. And I have to mention before we start – I’m genuinely a fan of your work. These are 3 movies I have in my collection.
I showed Brian my Blu-ray copies of Crank, Crank: High Voltage, and Pathology
Nick: And I used to have Gamer in that collection, but I leant it to someone, and it never came back!
Brian Taylor: Ah, let ‘em keep that one.
Nick: I’ll defend that movie! I love it. I watched your films as a late teen, and they were genuinely formative in my love for what you and Mark [Neveldine] call ‘punk rock cinema’! So, I’ve been excited leading up to our chat today!
Brian Taylor: Yeah, that was some true grindhouse stuff.
Nick: Grindhouse for the 21st century! But, thank you again for taking the time to chat about Hellboy, and I’d love to start with your decision to have the opening title card absolutely punch it’s way onto the screen as the very first thing audiences see in the film. So, I’m curious to know what your process is when it comes to a film’s opening title card?
Brian Taylor: Sometime title sequences are planned out. This particular one was not. We just found it in post. And it’s funny because, on this movie, I did something that I haven’t done since Crank 1 and 2, which is I designed the all the titles myself at home.
Because they kinda ran out of money, and they had some clowns that were gonna do it. And I saw what they were gonna do, and I was like, “I guess I gotta dust off my After Effects and Photoshop skills again!”
But I really wanted it to have, you know, that Hammer Horror, kind of, 70s folk horror feeling going on. I didn’t want it to feel slick and polished, like a normal comic book movie. Or even a Hellboy movie.
I love that just dropping right in, and then the whole idea in the beginning of the movie, the whole thing on the train, is that these guys are headed off on some mission we don’t know, to some other movie. More so kind of a movie we would expect. But, the train derails and they get dumped into this other movie.
Nick: The idea of someone playing Hellboy obviously comes with the assumption that the actor will be in prosthetics and makeup, and really adopt the physicality of the character. But I’m curious to know what the other characteristics were that Jack Kesy showed that convinced you he was the right Hellboy for this story?
Brian Taylor: Well, he kind of walks around as Hellboy, you know? You could really just put a couple of horns on him, and he’s that guy. When he did his audition, the first thing he did was smoke a cigarette, and put it out on his tongue and eat it, and then went into the dialogue! I was like, “Yeah, this kind of feels like Hellboy!” So, that’s part of it.
Definitely there is that physicality, and there is that swag and attitude. But this is a younger Hellboy. The movie is set in the late 50s, and Hellboy’s an angry young man. He’s just trying to find his way in the world.
I think one of the aspects of Hellboy that’s really important to me as a character, and I know it’s important to Mike Mignola as well, is the idea that all that wise cracking and sarcasm and all that, is just the surface. That’s how he projects to cover up what’s actually a lot of pain inside. This is a guy who carries around a lot of weight, and gravity, and anxiety. He’s got a lot of doubts in himself, like what’s his place in this world.
So, with a guy like Kesy, you can tell he’s a young dude, but he’s really lived, man. You could tell that guy carries around a lot of weight. He’s got a lot of gravity as a person. And he has that sarcastic wit, but you can see in his eyes that there’s something behind it, you know?
To me, he was just the guy. Because 90% of directing actors is just casting, right? If you cast wrong, you can do the greatest directing in your life, and it just, kind of, gets to ‘okay’. But, if you cast right, you can be a complete idiot, and still get a great performance.
There were a lot of names that came up for this. There were bigger names. But I knew we didn’t have a lot of time. I knew we didn’t have a lot of money. And so, it just felt important to get a guy who felt right, who really felt like Hellboy.
Then in terms of prosthetics, we wanted to strive to make it as transparent as possible. Like, a problem I think in the last film with David Harbour, who is a very charismatic actor, and people love him, but he had so much shit all over him. You know what I mean? It was like a full mask. You couldn’t see David Harbour. It didn’t look like him, it didn’t sound like him, it didn’t feel like him. I wasn’t seeing any of his personality shine through.
So, on this one, I wanted to make sure by working with the prosthetic guys – who were great, KM Effects in the UK – our mandate from the beginning was, “Let’s make this as transparent as possible”, because I wanted to put the camera really close to him. And I really want to see his eyes. I want to see his emotion. And I want to see his personality come through as much as possible.
Nick: You mentioned the 1950s, folk horror setting, and I was wondering what your process was when it comes to bringing that energetic, dynamic directing style your known for to a period piece film that’s set in an already established universe like Hellboy.
Brian Taylor: First of all, we didn’t reference the other movies at all, because, you know, they’re $200 million space operas. It’s just like a completely different world. We couldn’t even evoke that if we wanted to.
This is Mike Mignola’s favourite Hellboy story. It’s taken directly from his comic, and this is the story he wanted to tell. It’s a folk horror story. So, I didn’t reference any other movies, I just referenced the comics. And so, for the formalism of it, as opposed to me punk rock stuff I’ve done, it wanted to be more formal. It wants to be a throwback. More organic, and just keeping within that world.
You could picture the same actor with the same take on the character, sort of moving gradually through the eras. But, the 60s era would have the 60s aesthetic, the 70s more like a 70s aesthetic. And finally, when it gets to the 90s, it’ll look like Crank [laughs]. But that was the approach, not to be referential to any of the other films, but just talk a fresh look at the character, straight from the pages of Mike’s work.
Nick: How was the collaboration with Mike on the screenplay for this? I saw he has a screenplay credit – so I’m curious to know what those conversations were like around interpretation and adaptation.
Brian Taylor: It was great. I have a lot of respect for original creators. It think it’s 1000 times harder to invent something than it is to refine it. And to me, Mike Mignola, he’s a true genuine of the medium. There’s not many guys— I can’t really think of anybody who’s done what he’s done. He’s come up with this Zeitgeist, household name character, and a whole universe around him, without being affiliated with Marvel or DC. This is just one guy’s brand as an independent. That’s amazing, right?
So, he wrote the first draft. And when I came in, I was really excited because I knew what we were doing, which is try and make Mike’s vision of Hellboy come alive for the first time, really. But, it was funny, when I first read that draft Mike had written with Chris Golden, there were a lot of things in it that compromises and changes things. I think they did it because they felt they had to, to make it more like a movie.
Because this is ‘Hollywood’, for example, they made it more contemporary. There were like cell phones and stuff. And when I did my pass, I actually didn’t want to use their draft as a launching point, even though it was Mike’s. I wanted to go back to the comic book. I told Mike I was going to change a lot, but he would love the changes [laughs]. Because it’s going back all the way to what he originally did, you know?
So, I did a whole pass on the thing where I basically just took out all the new stuff and just brought everything back to the original as much as a I could. But he liked it. I knew he would!
Nick: I’d love to ask about filming action violence versus horror violence. I don’t know if the technicalities behind the scenes are similar or not. But I’m curious as to whether you approach to filming a scene changes whether it’s a manic shootout in Crank or the body horror violence we see in Hellboy?
Brian Taylor: That’s… an interesting question. I mean, the palette of the film is different. You want to put a lot of black ink on the screen, and make it look really shadowy, and then have things come out of those shadows. Things that you can’t quite see in the corners of the frames.
But I would do a lot of that stuff in action anyway. I kind of feel like it’s the same. I was thinking of the scene at the end when The Crooked Man and Hellboy are face-to-face, and he’s telling him exactly what he’s going to do to him, all the nasty things. And there’s some horrific stuff that happens, but it’s not that different from Jason Statham falling out of the helicopter, face-to-face with Ricky Verona. You still have those two guys that hate each other the most, right in each other’s face, just letting each other know exactly how they feel about them. So, yeah, I guess some of these things kind of feel the same.
It’s just a different mood in general. But action in particular feels pretty similar. In this movie, it was a lot more formal in general. I tried to stay away from handheld as much as I could. I just wanted it to feel more of its time. But that’s less of a horror thing and more of a period piece kind of thing. I mean, the big zombie fight in the church could have been any action scene.
Nick: I’m getting close to my time here, so I’ll close out on asking how you pulled off that disgusting, amazing scene where a raccoon enters a lady’s deflated body, skit suit thing. I can’t even explain it properly, but it’s super effective and looks incredible!
Brian Taylor: Yeah, I mean, it was pretty disturbing to shoot, let me tell you [laughs]. That’s one of those things from the comic book. That scene is just like it is in the comic, and you read it on the page and think, “Well, that could either be really bad CGI, or we do it the Clive Barker way with a bunch of silicone and lube, and a great performance by an actor.” So, that’s how we did it!
The woman who plays Cora, Hannah Margetson, is so amazing. When I watch that thing, and we’ve seen it a million times as we’re editing it, I almost can’t spot the handoff where it goes from prosthetic to human. And it’s a straight cut. It’s not CGI at all. It’s hard for me to find that moment when it hands over because it’s so seamless.
But that was really disturbing. It was one of those moments where, because the skin suit was so anatomically accurate, you could just feel it while filming that. I filmed that myself, and that was a handheld moment. And I’m just there with this withering, naked skin and it was definitely one of those moments where you go, “Marvel would never do this!”
Thank you so much to Brian for his time, and to Rialto Distribution and Ned Co PR for organising the interview. Hellboy: The Crooked Man is in Australian cinemas on October 10.
