How is that?
An example is the early vampires of Balkan and Slavic tradition who very often did not drink blood. They would strangle their victims or fornicate with them to death. If they drank blood, it was very often from the chest. It was this story of obsession and love. It seemed, well, visually it seems like a nice poetic motif.
But then I also thought about the origin of that folklore. These are people who experience sleep paralysis, where they have a nightmare of this vampire visitation. They have this pressure in their chest. So it’s also based on some sort of reality, even though piercing the sternum with the vampire’s teeth is ridiculous. So it was fun to explore those kinds of things that would keep it fresh, but also felt like it could be integrated into this world.
Was most of this movie done with practical effects?
I mean, there are tons of CG effects in the movie, but you try to do all the big, crazy things that would normally be done pretty much with a computer. That way you can use CG to fix things and enlarge them, and you’re less aware of the sleight of hand because you’re not paying attention to what looks fake, because things that would normally be fake are real.
I ask this because, working at WIRED, I think about AI a lot. In film, there is a lot of talk about “AI could do this, AI could do that,” but I look at their movies and I don’t think AI can do that. What do you also think about these things?
Guillermo del Toro’s claim that the greatest achievement of AI is to make “semi-convincing screensavers“It’s fair.” I think AI is best used to inspire humans to do more human things. That’s all I have to say about it.
I know we’re running out of time, but I have to ask: What monsters are you going to face next?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I mean, I’d love to see a Robert Eggers movie about the Ninja Turtles.
Maybe I should leave that joke out, because it’s probably going to go everywhere.
I mean, you already have Spongebob a lot of press recently.