In a recent interview
to Collider, director Guillermo del Toro spoke about his upcoming show, The
Strain, where a CDC team is sent out to investigate mysterious viral outbreak of what
seems to be ancient strain of vampirism.
During the interview del Toro was asked how much freedom did the network gave him to make the
show.
I got a call from the head of FX, John Landgraf, and he said, ‘Look I want
you to know that we encourage creator content. I want you to know that we are
delighted that you are here. Not just because you’ve made Hollywood movies, but
because of your more quirky idiosyncratic ones. I urge you to be as
idiosyncratic and as personal as you want in your handling of the pilot and the
series.’ And that’s when I went ahead and felt free. There were no afterthought
phone calls. They were very, very pleased. Because among the moments of
brutality I made sure the series had huge production value. I wanted the series
to feel big and daring in the scope of the pilot because you are trying to
establish a big world. We fluctuate in the first season between big scope
things and small things. I think the series, the idea for me is you can see how
a family spends time together. If they destroy each other or redeem each other.
We have scenes with dozes and dozens of vampires and I’ve enjoyed that.
The director went on to talk about being very hands-on on all the decisions, especially the ones pertaining to the make-up effects and VFX.
We knew we needed to map out the season and when we opened the writer’s
room, Chuck [Hogan] and myself were there to map out the season. We had a very
long pre-production, I had to supervise the sculpting of every single make-up
effect in the series to keep it under budget, I had to map out every aspect of
the digital assets in order to keep the whole season in scope and under budget.
It was a creative decision and a purely practical one. We would do it again
with a lot more knowledge of where we needed to go. There was a very beautiful
learning curve on the first season. It was incredibly useful for the actors and
incredibly useful to ourselves.
Although the first season had been entirely written,
del Toro says that there are always tweaks needed.
We were rewriting constantly. We were coming up with opening sequences for
Episode 3 while we were shooting Episode 5. We would come up with the middle of
Episode 6 while shooting Episode 9. I supervised every visual effect in the
series. I helped color timed very closely with each episodes. We kept it
moving.I would shoot occasional second unit on Saturdays for the episodes. It
was very useful to not have the burden of planning out the next week.
The Strain stars Corey Stoll, Sean Astin, Kevin Durand, John Hurt,
Mia Maestro, Jonathan Hyde, Richard Sammel and Jack Kesy, and premieres on July
13th on FX.
Source - Collider
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