How Guillermo Del Toro Made ‘The Shape Of Water’ For Less Than $20 Million; Watch A Fish-Man Featurette

By Ben Pearson/Jan. 1, 2018 12:00 pm EST

In a new interview, hear in his own words how Guillermo del Toro made The Shape of Water into one of 2017’s most lush and wondrous cinematic experiences on a budget. And if you’re not concerned with the business/financial side of the equation, we have you covered with a featurette dedicated to the creation of the movie’s sexy fish-man. Something for everyone!

/Filmcast host David Chen pointed out that del Toro was a guest on a recent episode of KCRW’s The Business, where the director told host Kim Masters about how he used a clever cinematic trick to craft shots that look like they take place underwater:

The entire KCRW interview is very much worth a listen if you’re a del Toro fan – and even people who don’t love his movies know he’s great at great talking about making movies. But I wanted to highlight one other way he saved a tremendous amount of money making The Shape of Water that he mentioned at a Q&A we wrote about last month: he used a lot of the sets and crew from his FX vampire series The Strain.

“I decided early on that the scenes underwater that needed more control, like the opening and closing of the movie – which are almost balletic – I could not build sets that size on a tank…so I unearthed a very old technique that I used when I was an effects technician in my twenties that is called ‘dry for wet.’ That is, you shoot these scenes with the people and the props and the furniture suspended on wires, you fill the stage with smoke, and you project what is called light caustics, which is the light of the water, through a projector. And you shoot it in slow motion. And it looks like under water. You add a bubble here, a bubble there, a little bit of debris with the computer and you erase the wires, and use a fan to move the cloth as if it was underwater. That way I had beautiful images on a budget.”

And finally, as promised, here’s the featurette about the movie’s sexy fish-man, played by actor Doug Jones. I was shocked to hear how little time (relatively speaking) it took for him to get in and out of that make-up, and watching this just made me even more confused and disappointed that the film was snubbed in the best make-up category for the upcoming Academy Awards.

The Shape of Water is in theaters now.