The sinewy fish-man at the center of The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s new film, stands stoic and brave as the rain beats down. But when the director yells “cut,” the man inside the fish suit begins to shiver; the set may look like a Baltimore port, but this is Toronto. Two crewmembers rush over, enveloping the 6’ 3”, 140-pound Doug Jones in coats and their own body heat. Throughout the movie's grueling 45-day shoot, those two men—Legacy Effects co-founder Shane Mahan and monster sculptor Mike Hill, both of whom helped create Jones' costume—felt they had two separate jobs: tend to the suit and tend to the man inside it.

“When wearing any kind of a costume and makeup that's this extensive, you become a bit of a nursing home patient,” Jones says, wincing as he remembers his time in Toronto. “I can't see as well, I can't hear much, I can't feel much, and I got these webbed fingers on—I can't do anything for myself.”

Eliza (Sally Hawkins) falls for the fish-man known as the Asset in The Shape of Water. Fox Searchlight

Including, it seems, stay warm. So Hill and Mahan, worried the actor’s shakes would be visible during the film’s crescendo, had to cuddle him between takes. It’s a rare concern in the age of city-crumbling CGI, but in The Shape of Water the monster is also the main character, the emotional center of the movie, and del Toro insisted he have a soul beneath his scales. That’s why Legacy Effects spent three years turning a sketch from one of the director’s notebooks into a foam-latex masterpiece that Jones could wear while performing. It is the monster-maven’s most ambitious creature yet. “I wanted,” del Toro says, “to make the Michelangelo’s David of amphibian men.”

Like George Clooney, But Fishier

The Shape of Water is no Pacific Rim. It's a $20-million Cold War-era fairytale about a mute cleaning lady, Eliza (Sally Hawkins), who stumbles upon a top-secret tank where a team led by the brutal Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon) experiment upon a mysterious Amazonian fish-man. As Eliza falls for the fish-man, aka the Asset, del Toro delivers his twist on Beauty and the Beast, one where the beast need not be a prince to be loved.

It is not hyperbole to say that del Toro is obsessed with monsters. After directing three films in Mexico, he made his American directorial debut with the 1997 sci-fi/horror film Mimic and followed that up with a run of fantasy/horror movies populated with inventive creatures. But none demonstrated del Toro’s creature-building chops like Pan’s Labyrinth, his Spanish Civil War fable overflowing with deceitful fauns, helpful fairies, and the memorably terrifying Pale Man, a creature with eyeballs in the palms of his hands (and also played by Jones). The beasts del Toro dreams up are legendary, so when he reached out to creature-creators Dave Grasso and David Meng and said he wanted them to build one that would double as a romantic lead in his next feature, they couldn’t say no.