Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, The Shape of Water, contains many of the director’s hallmarks: it’s a meticulously rendered fairy tale about outsiders and misfits, it’s obsessed with ghosts of the past, and it puts a marvelous movie monster front and center. But The Shape of Water is also a romance, which presented a particularly unique challenge for the filmmaker and his collaborators. Design-wise, the merman who serves as the film’s romantic lead is a clear riff on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but over the course of the film, he and the film’s mute protagonist, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) fall in love and even have sex, which required a level of performance and relatability from the creature for the movie to work at all.

To realize the monster, del Toro relied on a combination of practical effects and computer-generated imagery. Actor Doug Jones, who has made a career out of playing memorable creatures under layers of makeup — he was the Pale Man demon from Pan’s Labyrinth, as well as Abe Sapien in Hellboy — was cast in the role of the amphibian man. Outfitted with a full-body prosthetic suit, he played scenes with Hawkins during photography. The team at visual effects house Mr. X then augmented that footage with digital effects to add additional nuance and performance to truly bring the character to life.

I jumped on the phone with digital effects supervisor Trey Harrell to talk about his work on the film, how gills became an important tool in conveying the creature’s emotional state, and the magic and beauty of shooting underwater sequences without a drop of liquid.

You’ve worked with Guillermo del Toro on several films, but The Shape of Water really seems to have been a passion project. How did working with him on this film stand out from the others?

We’ve worked on five or six projects with him, starting with him producing Mama way back when. And I personally worked with him on two seasons of The Strain, where we did a lot of very similar augmentation of practical prosthetic effects with vampires. So we had a lot of practice in understanding his eye, his aesthetic, the way he likes to film things. Crimson Peak was the last really big one we worked on with him, and it had a budget. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’m not going out on a limb saying somewhere between three and four times the budget of The Shape of Water. And he really had all of the toys at his disposal on Crimson Peak. He had a long pre-production period, a long shoot, a long post-production.

“There was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.”

Shape of Water, they filmed between seasons of The Strain, because they had to get every penny’s worth out of their $19.5 million budget. And they would use soundstages that were on hiatus, that they were already paying for through The Strain. Tore down all the sets, built all the Shape of Water sets on the sound stages they already had. It really was a guerrilla operation to make this thing look like a $100 million movie when they were spending $20 million. Also, I feel like this was a little closer to Guillermo’s heart, and it’s such emotional material that a lot of the cast and crew were just hugely emotional over the film. He always brings the best out of the artists and craftsmen around him, but there was a level of devotion to this particular show that I’d never seen before.

The creature is a challenge because he’s a movie monster, but the audience has to believe he’s real to invest in the romantic relationship with Elisa. What were Guillermo’s initial directives when you and your team first discussed the movie with him?

The marching orders from Guillermo directly was that he’s the romantic lead of the film. He is not a monster. We have a square-jawed FBI agent [played by Michael Shannon], a former military guy, who’s actually the monster in the film — spoiler alert! And we’ve got this creature with this incredibly evocative personality, and the audience needs to fall in love with him alongside Elisa, the heroine, for this to work at all. So Guillermo had been developing the creature, and the prosthetics and makeup, over a period of about four years prior to going to film. He’d been working with a company called Legacy Effects, who designed and implemented the makeup and prosthetics and all that, which we then augmented digitally at the end of the process.

How did you decide what you were going to augment, and how much?

Every single shot in the film where the amphibian-man is on-screen is digital in some capacity — at least his eyes. We worked from the eyes, always, outward, and tried to affect the smallest footprint we could on the makeup, because we believed really strongly that in order for the audience’s suspension of disbelief to work, they had to accept without question that this performance happened onstage, that it was just captured in front of the camera completely, and in the moment. So we were very, very careful to keep the creature’s range of motion inside of Doug Jones, the actor’s, range of motion. We used scans of Doug Jones performing a lot of emotional states and poses to inform the creature’s design and how his face would work. So the vast majority of the film, we replaced and augmented somewhere from the top of his forehead to his brow, down to his upper lip. That’s the lion’s share of the work.

For a small handful of shots in the film, he’s entirely digital, most often because the range of motion Guillermo wanted couldn’t be achieved in-camera. Like if he’s swimming underwater, and there’s an acrobatic move he does when they’re floating in the lab. Any time you see him underwater, he’s usually digital, like, for example, when the tank rolls in and he’s revealed to Elisa and the audience [early in the film]. That’s fully digital water in the tank. The creature is completely digital inside that. And there are a handful of shots that are really over-the-top emotional beats, kind of punctuation. Some of the stuff with the cat, or during the torture sequence, we would replace his entire head, because they couldn’t get an amplified performance out of his gill covers. We went kind of big with his jaw and his gill covers as means of punctuation on really, really heightened emotional beats. So in those cases, his entire head is digital, but his body’s not.

I love just casually talking about using gill covers to express emotion, as if that’s a given, the same way we talk about a smile or a frown. How did you create his emotional language? Was that trial and error, or something that was sorted out in the initial design process?

A little of both. During the makeup process, one piece of animatronics that was actually fit into the suit was a servo system that was able to perform the gill covers on set a lot of the time. But there was trial and error over the course of the show. We had a couple of parts that we refer to as the “Jurassic Park beat,” where the creature kind of hisses or gets pissed off, and you see this really fast rattling of the gill covers on the side of his face.

You know, it’s a mute performance, so having additional muscle to work with is great. But we had to use it really, really sparingly, because it had a tendency to get cartoony really fast. So we only really pushed that performance at two, possibly three points in the film.

What did you try that ended up being too cartoony, or too obviously effects?

We had three months of pre-production before principal photography started, and probably the first month or two of principal photography, to get to know the creature as well as Guillermo did, which is no mean feat. [Laughs] Back to the eyes, Guillermo’s got the best pair of eyes in the room at any given time, and he knew the creature as well as his own children. So we had to get up to speed extremely fast to find the core of the character. We tried not to go too far into puppy-dog territory, because for us, that was pushing a lot of Disney beats, and kind of making his performance saccharine.

“Guillermo knew the creature as well as his own children.”

And with the creature, it was very important for Guillermo to establish and maintain that he starts out as a creature, but he’s still a creature at the end. She hasn’t changed him to fit her worldview, you know? It was really important to not defang him. For better or worse, the cat scene in particular is about that: that is Frankenstein’s monster meeting the blind girl by the river, where he never changes his nature. So we worked with Guillermo for months trying to come up with range-of-motion tests for the creature, trying to determine exactly how much of his eyes should move. Whether he should get wrinkles in his forehead when he bunches up his brow. Which isn’t possible for a foam and latex suit, but we felt it conveyed so much emotion when you could see him push his face that far, that we felt it worked.

What are you keying off of to create the performance in a situation like that? You can’t see what Doug’s brow is doing under that makeup, so how do you construct the performance?

Well, we were absolutely blessed with the cast we have. That is not hyperbole. Between Doug and Sally and Michael Shannon… it’s not only Doug’s performance we’re keying off of. It’s the other actors in the scene as well. And Sally and Michael Shannon are such intuitive actors, and they have such a precise rhythmic timing. It’s not a secret anymore that the film was shot entirely like a musical. It wouldn’t have been a tonal leap at any point in time if any of the characters burst into song, and that was intentional from the onset, tonally. So we key off of Doug’s performance, and straight up, he is the best in the world at what he does. I don’t think he gets enough credit for just being a consummate actor, because his face is always covered up. You almost never make contact with his eyes. But he gives us a hell of a lot to start with, and the other actors round it out. And for this film in particular, there is such a musical rhythm to all the scenes and dialogue that the animators were really able to key into the inherent rhythm and that inherent kind of syntax and punctuation, and really elaborate on a performance we felt was under the surface to begin with. There’s very, very little in the film that we didn’t have any guidance on at all in-camera.

Were you utilizing motion capture for the digital underwater sequences you mentioned, or was that pure animation?

Purely hand-animated. The entire film is. We have no motion capture. We did scan Doug out of costume in a wide variety of emotional states and poses, but we use that as the foundation for the shapes of the creature’s face and his extremes. As kind of rails to put the creature on, to keep him grounded.

“90 percent of the underwater photography relies on an old-school stagecraft technique called dry-for-wet.“

The underwater stuff is interesting. So, 90 percent of the practical photography for underwater relies on a really old-school stagecraft technique called dry-for-wet. There’s no water at all in any of the tanks, except for three or four shots at the beginning of the love sequence, which were actually filmed in a tank. But the beginning and end of the film, and most of the stuff with Doug in the tank in the lab, are done with this dry-for-wet process, where you put the actors up on wires, you float props around, we pinned Elisa’s hair back. Her hair is replaced digitally in every shot where she’s underwater, because Guillermo wanted to be able to art-direct the silhouette and the flow. Traditionally, you would film that at extremely high speed with a fan underneath her, but we didn’t feel we had the level of control we needed, so we augmented her hair and her clothing. And the creature, you know, you see his fins kind of undulate underwater. We have hundreds of layers of effects elements, in particular the grass and the sea life and the bubbles and all of that stuff, to help complete the illusion.

That technique brings a magical realism to those sequences, and it sets the tone for the entire movie from the opening shot. How did that change the way your team worked?

Oh, absolutely. It was extremely deliberate on Guillermo’s part to establish the tone of the film going in. This is a fairy tale. A lot of it happens within Elisa’s dream world and her fantasies, and we needed to let the audience know that everything was a heightened reality to begin with. So very deliberately, we tried to make the opening and closing of the film look a little more impressionistic, a little more surreal, like stagecraft. Almost stage-lit beautifully as a tableau. And I really think that helped reinforce to the audience what kind of world we’re in, what kind of rules were in play, and then tonally setting the mood for the entire thing.

That’s such an important aspect of the process that can go by almost unnoticed at times. You’re setting the stage for what the audience should expect this movie to be. It’s world-building, in a sense, but it’s not about mythology or backstory. It’s about establishing a feel for the story.

Yeah, we were not trying to make something look like it was underwater photorealistically in the dry-for-wet stuff. It’s very impressionistic, and it goes back to the work with the creature as well. I never wanted the audience for one second to doubt that everything they’re seeing just happens in front of the camera, on-screen. I don’t want to get in the way of the story, I don’t want to get in the way of the emotional beats. We went out of our way to hide the seams between the practical and the digital in a different place in every single shot of the film, because we didn’t want the audience to catch on where to look.

Movie audiences like to debate whether practical effects are better than CG, yet here the illusion is built using a combination. Is one style of effect better suited to some situations than the other?

There’s a charm to the practical effects, you know? I’m of a certain age, and for my eye and my aesthetic, I just really respond to practical makeup, and the limitations of filming something practically. You know, there’s a reliance on just pure spectacle in the majority of the films out there right now. And to really go back to basics, and focus on the craft and the story and the emotional beats, is something of a rarity for films. Especially the films we in the VFX world work on these days.

“There’s a lot of crazy tech there, but in the end it always comes back to the creature.”

Did any particular challenges stand out in your mind?

Well, it took us a very long time to make absolutely sure, and be able to go into reviews with Guillermo and say without one shred of hesitation, “This head track is perfect, his eyes are just perfectly on model.” It took a huge amount of time to know the creature as well as Guillermo did. Establishing the dry-for-wet underwater look took a lot of time. It wasn’t a particularly horrifying process, but there was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of back-and-forth where we got into the zone. And we might go and make it look a little too real, and we’d have to edge it back, and then it looked a little too stagey, and we’d have to edge it back somewhere in the middle, and that process happened between our preview screenings and the festival screenings. We were just constantly going back and forth, trying to find the perfect balance, especially for the opening and closing sequences.

And you know, the water-simulation effects, the hero stuff, like opening the bathroom door and having the flood come out, or the stuff inside the tank… or even wrecking the front of the Cadillac. Most people wouldn’t realize that it’s cheaper, and you get more art direction control, for us to replace the entire front of that Cadillac and art direct it within an inch of its life, and then put digital rain raining on top of it two inches from the camera. There’s a lot of invisible stuff like that. We built a huge amount of Baltimore [digitally]. But we hope that stuff just disappears, and people just remember the creature’s performance, and remember Sally’s performance, and just focus on that part. There’s a lot of crazy tech there, but in the end it always comes back to the creature for us.