How The Shape of Water’s visual effects turned a merman into a romantic lead
Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, The Shape of Water, contains many of the director’s hallmarks: it’s a meticulously rendered fairy tale about outsiders and misfits, it’s obsessed with ghosts of the past, and it puts a marvelous movie monster front and center. But The Shape of Water is also a romance, which presented a particularly unique challenge for the filmmaker and his collaborators. Design-wise, the merman who serves as the film’s romantic lead is a clear riff on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but over the course of the film, he and the film’s mute protagonist, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) fall in love and even have sex, which required a level of performance and relatability from the creature for the movie to work at all.
To realize…