Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) shows off her pyrokinetic ability to Ron Perlman’s Hellboy.

Budget Considerations
Though the film is lavish as a thrill ride, Irastorza admits that the $60 million budget was quite low for an effects-driven spectacle. Because of the limitations, he was especially thorough in supplying digital materials to the various visual effects vendors. “We didn’t do any motion capture at all. Cinevation, Rick Baker’s studio, built a maquette of Hellboy, and we also had Ron Perlman scanned — we had him costumed as Hellboy in a pure white makeup and a white body suit, and he was scanned digitally. The same was done for Sammael and Abe Sapient (Hellboy’s aquatic sidekick), so all vendors who were going to do a digital character would have the exact same specifications to start with. Some of the vendors said we gave them the best reference materials they ever received.”

In some shots an old and potentially gimmicky standby was used for Sammael: “There was a guy in a rubber suit for Sammael half the time — it went back and forth from a rubber Sammael to CG Sammael; sometimes three rubber ones and three CG ones in the background.” It is a mark of the excellence of the Tippet Studios that the CG and rubber Sammaels are blended flawlessly.

Extensive previs helped assure that top-notch effects would be brought in on budget. “Sequences were storyboarded and then I brought in an effects editor and he cut things together,” Irastorza adds. “We did music and sound effects and so forth to show what was going on. A lot of the animatics we did for the bridge scene are pretty close to how the scene was finally done. The same goes for the Westside highway sequence. The storyboards were pretty exact.”

Writer/Director Guillermo del Toro (left) and Ron Perlman prepare a shot. del Toro wanted Sammael (right, battling Hellboy) to recall Ray Harryhausen’s work. Photo by: Jay Maidment (left) and Egon Endrenyi.

An Accurate Adaptation?
Mignola had a laissez faire attitude, to say the least, when it came to exercising creative control over the adaptation of his comic. “When I met Guillermo, I said I like what you do, you can do anything with this character, I’ve done my version, so go on and make it Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy. Really I was looking for a way to let myself off the hook and not worry about the movie. And if he was making something radically different, I’d just sit back and cash the check. The truth is I’d rather see a director make the movie he wants to make, especially Guillermo, who brings his own sensibility to the material he chooses. But then he said, no, I want to do your character. So I said OK, if we’re doing my character, then we’ll have to cover a number of specific things.” This led to a long working relation between del Toro and Mignola, who participated extensively in the pre-production design, and was on set throughout filming. Mignola acknowledges that certain changes were necessary to make Hellboy a true movie character. “We sat down and agreed on what should be changed for the film, on certain things in the comic that wouldn’t translate to the screen.”