Normally you might expect a movie like The Shape of Water to be made for anywhere from $40 to $60 million dollars, but Guillermo Del Toro managed to make it for less than $20 million. You might also be inclined to say that he probably took a lot of shortcuts and used a few tricks here and there to make sure that he came in under that budget, and you’d be right. It’s amazing the tricks a director can pick up throughout their career. Del Toro has been in the business long enough that he’s managed to pick up quite a few tricks of the trade that helped him out in this film, not the least of which were used to simulate an underwater feel.
For the underwater scenes there wasn’t enough in the budget for the cast to really be underwater, so Del Toro suspended them on wires and made a few adjustments to simulate the environment. The actors would hang suspended while the area would be filled with smoke and then what is called light caustics through a projector to give the scene the look of being underwater. Then he would film it in slow motion, using modulated fans to cause the ripple effect so that any clothing would appear to be fluttering in a current. After that it would be a matter of careful editing, erasing the wires and adding in air bubbles and debris, and voila.
He also used other sets that he’d been using for the show The Strain to keep costs down for the film and give it more of the kind of feel that he wanted. It had to be somewhat dark and foreboding, as that is Del Toro’s common look in his films. The settings played off perfectly with the movie as far as the trailers show and should lend a very dark and possibly hopeless feeling to them that is upset when someone with a kind heart enters. In this case the individual tends to glow like a beacon in one way or another as the surrounding environment tries to close in and squash whatever hope there is to be had.
That however is what seems to happen in a lot of Del Toro movies. The situation is typically hopeless, dark, and filled with dread of some sort, and then a savior emerges in one form or another. They don’t typically need to be the type to wear long, flowing white robes or be particularly heroic, they only need to have that faint spark within that makes them unique in a way that the others in the story are not. These figures know and understand absolute cruelty and the unfairness of the world around them, but they are not broken or even beaten down by it.
Del Toro knows how to tell a great story and he knows how to bring a film in under budget it would seem so it might be worth going to see The Shape of Water just to see if you can really point out what he did to make this film come in under cost.
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