Director Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac on the set of Frankenstein, del Toro's latest film.Netflix
Guillermo del Toro desperately wants to know what’s in my bag.
Any other time, this might be an unusually curious request from an interview subject. But given that I’m carrying around a Criterion tote bag, procured during my visit to the DVD company’s mobile retail closet − basically, a van stuffed with Blu-rays, a pop-up space which drew day-long lines while it was parked outside Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox during last month’s film festival − I eagerly oblige. Especially since I happened to have just bought a copy of Criterion’s remastered version of Cronos, Del Toro’s 1992 directorial debut.
“Ah, I haven’t seen that in ages!” Del Toro exclaims upon seeing the Blu-ray.
“Do you revisit your own work often?” I ask.
“Only when I supervise a transfer, or if I stumble upon something and have to go back to the original image,” the director replies with a chuckle.
That’s understandable, given Del Toro’s screen time is stretched pretty thin. This is a man, after all, who typically watches at least two movies a day.
“Two a day, and I usually revisit about one-third of another, too. I have like 20 movies I watch every week. They don’t have to be hallowed classics. They are just movies that I obsessively find comfort in. Or it can be a new movie in a theatre,” he says. “But if I don’t see two movies a day, I don’t feel well.”
Del Toro has to be feeling pretty well these days. Not only because he has been able to keep up such a remarkable viewing schedule this deep into his 61-year life, but because the Oscar-winning filmmaker is eagerly hopping from one festival to another promoting his new movie Frankenstein, the production that he has been working his entire career toward.
Guillermo del Toro attends the premiere of Frankenstein during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in September.Cindy Ord/Getty Images
An epic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Del Toro’s film finds the director working in familiar thematic territory − what are The Shape of Water, Hellboy, and even Blade II if not inquisitions into the fine line between man and monster? − but with what feels like unlimited resources, this time courtesy of Netflix.
Del Toro’s version of Frankenstein is one that crosses decades and continents, with the starriest cast he’s ever assembled (Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz) and a gorgeously gory canvas.
The film is also, in its own way, the most Toronto movie that the director has ever made, even if there’s not a single familiar shot of the city in sight. Largely shot in Toronto, with Del Toro once again collaborating with familiar local artisans and his long-time Canadian producer J. Miles Dale, Frankenstein marks something of a semi-secret love letter to the Mexican filmmaker’s “second home.”
After shooting his English-language debut Mimic here in 1997, Del Toro has returned as often as he can: Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, and the filmmaker’s television series The Strain and Cabinet of Curiosities were all shot in and around the city.
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Del Toro’s influence on Toronto’s cinematic scene is so influential that, two months before Frankenstein’s TIFF debut, the filmmaker was awarded the key to the city by Mayor Olivia Chow, with Cinespace Studios renaming a section of its waterfront production hub as the “Guillermo del Toro Stages.”
“There are two ways that you can classify a Toronto movie. One is the craft, and the other is the geography,” Del Toro says. “I don’t know Toronto as a native, so it was more of a mythical landscape for me. Growing up, I was a projectionist in a cinema club, and I would show all the National Film Board shorts, experimental animation, stuff like that. And then I got into Cronenberg movies. So I thought, ‘Canada, this is a mythical land where everybody loves film!’”
While Del Toro long ago set up a home in the city, splitting his time between here, Los Angeles and his Mexican birthplace, Guadalajara, and immersed himself in the Canadian film scene − he’s a regular year-round presence at the Lightbox, and is also a member of the Canadian Film Centre’s board − he still feels like he’s something of a stranger in a strange land.
“I’m very infantile about my relationship with Toronto. Contrary to most Canadians, I adore it! Except the traffic, I hate the traffic,” he says with a laugh. “But I’m in love with how Toronto can be portrayed. I love when Denis [Villeneuve] portrayed the city in Enemy. For me, it’s an imaginary land. ... Toronto is one of the most architecturally undisciplined cities in the world. A lot of people don’t understand, in order to be a movie star, you have to have a face that’s slightly misaligned. That’s not perfect. It’s not symmetric. And to me, Toronto has that quality.”
Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature.HO/The Canadian Press
To that end, Del Toro has used Toronto to stand in for everything from Buffalo to Tokyo to, in Frankenstein, Victorian England. Although, he admits that when he was shooting his latest film, he had to slightly adjust his two-movie-a-day-minimum habit.
“The only thing that I don’t want to watch when doing a Frankenstein movie is Frankenstein movies. Just like the only thing I will not watch when doing a giant robot versus kaiju movie is a movie like Pacific Rim. I carefully avoid them,” he says. “Because these things are already in my DNA. I’ve already imbibed them.”
Now that he’s finally made his ultimate monster movie, though, Del Toro is looking for something different, if no less violent. Up next: a more intimate project titled Fury, starring Frankenstein’s Isaac that, as the director puts it, is “like My Dinner with Andre ... but with killing people after each course.”
To further pivot, the project will likely not be filmed in Toronto (where preproduction will still take place) but somewhere “where I’ve never shot before, like Texas or somewhere equally blank and arid,” says Del Toro.
“I want it to be daylight and all dolly and zoom shots and no cranes. I’m scared. I’m trying to scare myself into doing it.”
Frankenstein opens in select theatres, including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, on Oct. 17. It streams on Netflix starting Nov. 7.