“CGI Is For Losers”: ‘Frankenstein’ Team Talk Practical Effects, AI, & Netflix

Guillermo del Toro‘s dream project “Frankenstein” is finally arriving, getting the whole red carpet treatment at the Venice Film Festival. The film is one of the biggest yet for the director and today the entire team talked to the press and weren’t afraid of being candid.

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Every conversation in Hollywood these days about is about AI, the role it will play, the effect it will have on jobs, and how it will impact creativity. Asked about artificial intelligence, del Toro explained he sees it as a more existential threat compared to the very real socio-political problems the world faces.

“We live in a time of terror and intimidation, certainly. And the answer, which art is part of, is love. For me, forgiveness is part of love and so many other things. And the central question in the novel from the beginning is, what is it to be human? What makes us human? And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time where everything is pushing towards bipolar understanding of our humanity…,” the director said. “I think that the movie tries to show imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect, and the right we have to understand each other under the most oppressive of circumstances. It is very biographical to me, but it is, I think, biographical for anyone that tries to preserve their soul in the times we’re living in. And to me, artificial intelligence I’m not afraid of; I’m afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant.”

READ MORE: Guillermo Del Toro Wanted To Make ‘Frankenstein’ As 2 Movies, Says Netflix Is Giving It Its Biggest Theatrical Release

Christoph Waltz was more blunt about his views. “CGI is for losers,” he explained, celebrating del Toro’s preference for practical effects. However, the filmmaker was much more nuanced when it came to utilizing digital assistance.

“As a filmmaker, there’s no bad resource. There’s only badly used resources,” he explained. “We have digital effects, but you only do it when the limit of the physical has been not an easy solution. The more experience you have with the tools, the more you know how to do finer work with them.”

Oscar Isaac shared that for actors, the real thing is better for the craft than the working with ones and zeroes. “I say, ‘Let’s construct the wardrobe and tailor the sets, and then give them to the actors,’ because sets are wardrobes and wardrobes are sets. Acting is everything,” he said. “If you tell an actor, ‘look at a ball on a green screen,’ or you put them in a real lab with real windows and real light with real giant batteries, they are reacting to another actor. I always say there is a difference between eye candy, which is pretty, and eye protein, which is telling the story.”

While “Frankenstein,” like every del Toro joint, is tailor made for the big screen, this being a Netflix production means it will screen in a handful of cinemas for a few weeks before being dumped on the platform, where most people will see it. Asked about the release strategy — with Ted Sarandos in the room — del Toro remained philosophical.

“To me, the battle we are going to fight in telling stories is on two fronts, obviously the size of the screen, but the size of the ideas is very important. The size of the ambition. Can we reclaim scale, and reclaim scale of ideas,” he said. “It’s a dialogue, and it’s a very fluid dialogue. I’m very happy. You never know what’s going to happen….To reach more than 300 million viewers, you take the opportunity and the challenge to make a movie that can transform itself and that evokes cinema.”

“Frankenstein” opens in limited release on October 7th, before hitting Netflix globally on November 7th. [Deadline/The Hollywood Reporter]

Kevin Jagernauth

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