Trending badgeTrendingPosted 55 minutes agoSubscribe to Screen Time NewsletterCaret Down13 Absolutely Wild "Frankenstein" Behind-The-Scenes Facts That Will Make You Obsessed With Oscar Isaac And Jacob Elordi's Take On The StoryWhat if I told you that the creature makeup took 11 hours...by Natasha JokicBuzzFeed StaffFacebookPinterestLink The new Frankenstein adaptation, directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is officially out! Netflix So, here's just some of what went into creating the spectacle: 1. Guillermo was a child the first time he read Frankenstein, but it took three decades (and a $120 million price tag) for the movie to come to life. Araya Doheny / Getty Images for Netflix "I pitched it everywhere," he said to Variety. "It's been my sort of Mount Everest to climb." It was the first-look deal he signed with Netflix in 2020 that allowed him to broach his bucket-list projects, which also included Pinocchio. 2. Oscar was the first choice for Frankenstein, before a screenplay even existed. When there was one, Guillermo had him read 30 pages from the script in a hotel room - yes, every part. Netflix "We were just crying," Oscar told Variety. "There's just so much pain there." 3. Andrew Garfield, who is significantly shorter than Jacob, was originally cast as the creature - but, due to scheduling conflicts, had to drop out just nine weeks before production. Mike Marsland / Mike Marsland/WireImage "Mike [Hill, costume designer] said, 'We have nine weeks,' and I said, 'Wrong. We've had all our life.' I said, 'We've been preparing for this movie for all our life,'" Guillermo said, drawing a comparison between their production and the iconic 1931 adaptation, where the makeup was built every day without molds. "I said, 'It ain't gonna be harder than that. So we are prepared.'" 4. Coincidentally, when it came time for him to recast, both Guillermo's daughter and the CEO of Netflix suggested that he watch Saltburn and Priscilla. Araya Doheny / Getty Images for Netflix "I watched them, and I thought that he's a remarkable actor, and has a wonderful face and amazing eyes," Guillermo recalled. "Unbeknownst to me, while he was shooting Priscilla in Toronto he had told the makeup and hair team, which are the same team that I use, that he should be the one playing the creature (in my Frankenstein). And they told me that before I had called him, and when I talked to him, and saw his eyes, I said 'This is the guy.'" 5. Guillermo wound up casting Oscar and Jacob for the same reason: "Eyes. I cast the eyes." Theo Wargo / Getty Images "Oscar had brilliance, madness, seduction and pain. And Jacob was completely open. He had an innocence and an openness and a purity in his eyes that was completely disarming," he told CBS. 6. Guillermo, who is Mexican, and Oscar, who was born in Guatemala, would speak to each other in Spanish on set. The director would sometimes use the melodramatic tone of telenovelas as a reference. Ken Woroner/Netflix "We only spoke in Spanish to each other. He would direct in jokes mostly, like dirty Mexican jokes," Oscar said on Smartless, noting that the director had "zero pretension" about his work. 7. Guillermo designed the creature to resemble an "anatomical chart" and was partially inspired by a 16th-century statue of St. Bartholomew (the apostle that was flayed). PHAS / Universal Images Group via Getty Images "It has a very Byronian, very doomed, very Wuthering Heights sort of look of a doomed hero. And when he's first born, and is bald and almost naked, I wanted it to feel like an anatomical chart, like something newly minted," he told NPR. "The head is patterned after phrenology manuals from the 1800s. So they have very elegant, almost aerodynamic lines. I wanted this alabaster or marble, statue feel, so it feels like a newly minted human being. And we also tried to make it the way I remember the Jesus images, life size, in the churches of my childhood." 8. The creature is also frequently compared to Jesus and intentionally created on a cross-like apparatus. Netflix "We called it the crucifixion. There's even the metal thorns on the head," Oscar said on Smartless. "It wasn't an accident." 9. In the original novel, it's not specified exactly how Frankenstein built the creature - but Guillermo wanted to go, limb by limb, into the detail of it all. John P. Johnson/Netflix "I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together," he said. "There is a personality to the way he put together this creature." 10. Jacob would sometimes arrive at the makeup trailer at 10 p.m. and have to stay up all night as the creature makeup was applied. Ken Woroner/Netflix "You throw time away when you make a film like this," he explained. "I stopped having a clock, and I would just wait till the SUV arrived. That meant it was time to go. I didn't do breakfast, lunch or dinner, or think in terms of morning, afternoon, night. It was just one time." He's cla