The movie Guillermo Del Toro “really hated” making
There are certain things audiences have been conditioned to expect from a Guillermo del Toro movie, whether it’s an intoxicating combination of horror and fantasy, elaborately immersive production design, or Doug Jones buried under prosthetics. There are many of his films to feature all three, but one of them stood out as being a particularly miserable experience.
In what should have been a milestone moment for his burgeoning career, the filmmaker followed up his debut feature Cronos by making the leap to Hollywood, where he was handed a significant budget and the backing of a major studio. Unfortunately, those are two of the major reasons why Mimic proved to be such a torturous time for its creator.
15 times more expensive than Cronos and boasting Mira Sorvino in one of her first leading roles since winning an Academy Award for Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, the sci-fi horror focused on a genetically modified strain of insects that evolved at a rate so rapid it allows them to consume and replicate humans.
Despite gaining strong notices from critics, the film flopped hard at the box office, with del Toro vocally dissatisfied by the theatrical cut. Like many filmmakers before and after him, though, the future three-time Oscar winner found himself at the mercy of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein.
With Weinstein both distributing and producing through Dimension Films and Miramax, his fingerprints were all over Mimic, much to del Toro’s chagrin. “I really hated the experience,” del Toro said at the BFI London Film Festival. “My first American experience was almost my last because it was with the Weinsteins and Miramax.”
Illustrating just how dismayed he was, del Toro even went so far as to label his dealings with Harvey and his brother Bob as being worse than the kidnap of his own father. “I have got to tell you, two horrible things happened in the late 1990s, my father was kidnapped and I worked with the Weinsteins,” he continued. “I know which one was worse. The kidnapping made more sense, I knew what they wanted.”
Weinstein even tried to have del Toro removed from the production at one point, but he ended up remaining in place when Sorvino and then-paramour Quentin Tarantino went to bat for him. Mimic may have turned out to be every bit as nightmarish behind the scenes as it was on-screen, but at least its director claimed a minor victory.
Acknowledging that he lost casting and story battles, the end product is “visually 100% exactly what I wanted”. Fortunately, Weinstein’s interference didn’t extend as far as sabotaging the filmmaker’s distinctive style, but del Toro’s first time helming a major Hollywood production was almost enough to swear him off Stateside cinema for good thanks to the off-camera battles.
