“Elisa is born in a place that she doesn’t quite belong in,” says del Toro. “She’s cleaning toilets and picking up garbage. Nobody sees her. She finds a place where she belongs and a person that shows her who she is, and not by dictating.”
He wrote the parts with actors in mind—Sally Hawkins for Elisa, Octavia Spencer for Zelda and Richard Jenkins for Giles. They were all willing; excited, even. In fact, Hawkins was more prepared for his call than del Toro could know. She had been writing her own story about a woman who didn’t know she was a mermaid. She and del Toro found the coincidence serendipitous. “It was so beautiful that we were on the same wavelength,” del Toro says. “I asked her if I could use this idea that she had scars on her neck that turned out to be gills. She allowed me to use another detail she had, which was that the character used a lot of salt to make the water in her bathtub habitable.”
Each of the characters represents something within del Toro. He knows how to write outsiders because it’s how he feels inside. “My youngest daughter told me, ‘I can see you in the amphibian man and I can see you in Elisa,’” he recalls. “I write them like that. Even the conversation Shannon has with the general is a conversation I’ve had with producers or studio heads at one time or another.” In the scene, Strickland begs his superior for reassurance. “When is a man done, sir, proving himself?”
That does not mean he is naïve to the harshness of an industry that would deny such optimism—if not in the art it creates, then certainly in the business of its creation. “I don’t know any other place than Hollywood that generates as much friction and pain,” he says. “It is the desire of the storyteller to mold the world in some manner. And that appetite is conducive to a lot of disappointment in an industry that is a very, very uncertain marriage of business and artistry. It wears you down, and the business part of it is almost infallibly crass, to say the least. You need to find your strength again in the stories.”
On Set For ‘The Shape Of Water’: Guillermo Del Toro “Bled” To Realize His Most Ambitious Project Yet
Emerging From The Dark Night 