Benicio Del Toro The Wolfman LA Press Conference
Were the asylum scenes also a collaboration, and how important is it for an actor to own their own madness?Benicio Del Toro: "All the asylum stuff, yeah, what can I say? The asylum sequence was difficult to do but I always wonder, wait, this guy is covered in blood and he gets arrested. So they can pin all the murders. So the idea of the asylum is we’re going to prove that he’s not a werewolf and then we’re going to like hang him or whatever, so it’s kind of like a trial. The idea that they’re vicious to him in the asylum, I really thought that it would work."
"My approach to it and the collaboration, some of those things, Joe Johnston for example believed that there should be a moment with the electroshocks which started to happen around that time. The water boarding was there already. That was tough to do because I was really actually strapped to that chair and as you’re dunked backwards, it’s supposed to be ice cold water. They used to do it back then. Maybe they still do it. My approach to it was I’ve been thrown in ice cold water and the instinct is to scream. All the senses just go like [pow]. So I decided I’ll scream, which was a choice but I didn’t know what that meant, which means if you’re going upside down, I learned this the hard way, when you’re going upside down as you’re screaming, your mouth is open and you’re screaming so you’re letting most of your air out and you’re upside down, you get clogged with water right here [in your sinuses]. As you’re coming back up, now you’re out of air and you can only exhale. You can’t [sniff], you can only AGHHH, but if you try to bring it in, it’s just all clogged in here. I was lucky to have a good set of stunt guys around which we worked a sign. If something happened, I would make a sign, they’d jump in, undo me and I’d just roll over so I could [breathe]. We had to do that once. It got to the point where I couldn’t breathe. I panicked for a second and just made the sign. The sign was maybe, I couldn’t even move my head because I’m strapped here too. So it was like I don’t remember the sign but we had a sign. Maybe it was with the hand or whatever, and they jumped in and unhooked me. So that was kind of difficult but looking at the result, I think it worked."
"And the collaboration with Joe, I remember that we talked about the idea of injecting him with some kind of drug, unknown drug and he played it out so that I’m not that coherent and give it a sense of the hallucination kind of a sense, a sense of the dream, a sense of which in the original there were these nightmares he was having. So all that stuff was incorporated in that asylum scene, which I thought it did work. I remember the scene in which Emily’s character, the vision of Emily’s character comes into the cell and there’s the mirror. I remember sitting there with Joe and I said, 'Why don’t we get the werewolf behind me to pop up too?' So we collaborated a lot with that sequence and some of it worked."
How has it been to open doors for other Latin American actors with your talent?
Benicio Del Toro: "What does it mean? Well, if I do, it means the world, no pun intended, the Universal logo. Well, when I came to Hollywood, there were three names really of Latin actors, three or four names, maybe five. There was Raul Julia, Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia, Antonio Banderas, Jimmy Smits. Now there’s a lot. I think now there’s more filmmakers, more writers, more directors, a lot of them coming from Mexico or Spain. They’ve managed to make movies in Hollywood that take hold, so I wouldn’t say it’s only me. I think there’s a whole generation of Latinos, but it’s changed quite a bit since I started. I think Hollywood, not only Universal, but I think Hollywood is a little bit more world-like. There’s more people coming from different parts of the world, I think, now than ever. Not only Latinos but a couple years ago, a French actress won the Best Actor. Just a lot from different parts of the world, so I think it’s good. It brings it back to like the silent movie era where there were a lot of different directors from all over the world, and actors from all over the world, just doing Hollywood pictures."
