Guillermo del Toro says he spent his whole filmmaking career working toward Frankenstein. In the editing process, he showed the movie to about a dozen of his closest filmmaker friends. "The reaction was uniformly encouraging and soothing and nurturing," he says. "They loved the movie, and they felt how much it summarized everything I've been trying for more than three decades of feature directing." John Wilson/Netflix Not unlike viewers of Netflix's Frankenstein, the first thing that actors Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi saw on set for the epic new Mary Shelley adaptation was a life-size 19th century Royal Danish Navy ship. Except here, it wasn't withstanding a harrowing snowstorm - it was hanging out in a parking lot. "You read it in the script, but you don't think that in the parking lot there's going to be an actual full-size Arctic expedition ship on gimbals," says Isaac. "It was really nuts." Elordi adds, "The scale of this thing was bigger than I could have imagined." Welcome to the world of Guillermo del Toro - a land of massive hand-built set pieces, long but impassioned working days, and boundless imagination. This has been true for the Oscar-winning filmmaker as long as he's been making movies, from Pan's Labyrinth to The Shape of Water, but it was always going to be different with Frankenstein: This is the movie he's waited his whole life to make. He wrote the script in evocative chapters, to honor the structure of the Shelley novel that changed his life. When he saw Elordi's Creature come to life for the first time, "The Creature that I read and imagined as a kid was now on my set - the Creature that I've been trying to give life to through makeup design, starting with Kronos, The Devil's Backbone and Blade II," he says. "It was like I was rehearsing." Related Stories Movies "Once You See That Stuff Projected, You Don't Really Turn Back": THR's Cinematographers Roundtable TV 'Euphoria' Drops Enlightening First Look at Main Cast in Season 3's Time Jump To realize his lush, feverish vision, del Toro enlisted an army of his most trusted collaborators, including costume designer Kate Hawley, production designer Tamara Deverell, prosthetic makeup wizard Mike Hill and composer Alexandre Desplat. Before the script was even written, these and other artisans were deep into building Frankenstein from the ground up. "I say there is no eye candy - there's only eye protein," says del Toro. "The departments should be as interactive as possible, and all of them are articulating not a look but storytelling through images." Cinematographer Dan Laustsen, who has shot del Toro's films for the past decade, says, "When he's writing the screenplay, he's making concept drawings that are very loose, but very specific, of special color palettes. We're always starting on the same level." "The Creature that I read for the first time in Australia was exactly how he came out onscreen," says Jacob Elordi. "I knew what to do as soon as I read it, and that is because Guillermo wrote something that is so, so good." Ken Woroner/Netflix Adds Hawley: "As each department makes inroads into their own personal world, you're aware of their journey and how that's reflected and mirrored within your world. We're always so conscious of each other's work and how we're echoing that or choosing to be in contrast with that under Guillermo." Take the aforementioned ship, which opens the film, trapped in ice as it's headed to the North Pole - it's a flash-forward to the site where the Creature is coming after his maker, a sick and aging Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Isaac), for the climactic confrontation that frames the film through to its moving conclusion. Deverell has long been fascinated by the Arctic and had always wanted to build a ship for a film. She didn't know if she'd get the chance for Frankenstein until word at last came through. She gave it her all, including the brutal surrounding icescape, and then was able to trust her colleagues to make the most of the space - specifically, Laustsen to evoke the majesty of her creation with the camera. "We weren't sure if we were going to build the ship," Deverell says. "We actually looked for a ship for a while." As the hand-built nature of the film came into focus, they decided to construct it as a full-size set after all. In total, the crew collectively spent more than 3,000 days of labor building it, step by step. Ken Woroner/Netflix "One thing I know working with Guillermo and Dan is they will shoot the shit out of everything. They'll go wide and go close and not be afraid of low ceilings, like they are in the captain's quarters," Deverell says. "They embrace all the bits of the set that I can offer. So when you're just exhausted and giving it your all, at least you know that it's going to be filmed so beautifully." Adds Isaac of the production setups: "They were 360 degrees; they were modular, so they could always be moved and rearranged to fit for the camera." Deverell built 119 sets total, i