Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein’ Had a “Beautiful” Scene Cut That Lasted 7 Minutes

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic feast for the eyes, Frankenstein, had to make the grade amongst his closest contemporaries before passing over the final cut to Netflix. A longtime passion project for the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker behind two Hellboy movies, this Mary Shelley adaptation cast Oscar Isaac as the scientist Victor Frankenstein and rising star Jacob Elordi as the Creature, while Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, David Bradley, and Charles Dance fill supporting roles.

Apparently, nothing he does is up for public consumption until the industry’s greatest talents have had their say on del Toro’s work. “What I do – because we don’t test the movies – I show it to the 14, 16 most brilliant friends I know, and I’m blessed with good friendships,” he told Variety at the Palm Springs International Film Festival this week.

“Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Iñárritu, Jim Cameron, Rian Johnson, Steven [Spielberg]. A lot of people see the movie, they tell me what they think, and we have the agreement to be brutal.

“Jim came in and he said, ‘Look, there’s this section’ – which is not in the movie anymore – ‘This is beautiful, but you gotta take it out. And it was about seven minutes. When someone gives me a note that is in that circle, I do it. I don’t argue.”

So there you go, we have the Avatar visionary to thank for shaving seven minutes off the length of Frankenstein — that’s saying something, considering the movie is 2 hours 30 minutes. It’s a shame del Toro didn’t mention exactly what happened in the binned scene, though.

The Moment Jacob Elordi Nabbed the Role of the Creature

Jacob Elordi as the Creature and Oscar Isaac as Baron Victor Frankenstein

Netflix

When the movie first began streaming on Netflix last November, del Toro opened up to Entertainment Weekly about how Elordi won the part after original star Andrew Garfield was forced to back out.

“When I spoke with Jacob the first time on Zoom, I texted Oscar, timestamped, and I said, ‘I found him. We found him.’ You can talk about range, you can talk about this, but it’s essence. If the character’s essence is perfect for the actor, or the actor’s to the character, you don’t have to think again. You just tailor it to them, and watch them grow. They can’t fail.”

As for the Creature’s distinctive voice, his Australian portrayer has described the process of finding it for the movie. “While we were filming, [del Toro would] come back from the edit the next morning, and he’d say to me, ‘There’s a gravel that needs to be there,’ because I was developing with the Creature as the Creature developed in the film,” Elordi recounted. “I was lucky enough to, for the most part, shoot it in something of a chronological order. So I got to develop the voice as I played it live. But I had a lot of conversations with [pointing at Isaac] early on, and there was this kind of throat chant thing that we would practice and work on, but it was something that evolved.

“A Tibetan throat chant. But it was something that evolved, depending on the physicality of the scene or how he’s being treated in the moment affects the way his voice works. And there’s also a sensitivity that you want to find because you don’t just want to growl and do something that doesn’t mean anything. But I think the voice really comes from every incision, every memory, every different bit of flesh, every life lived — you have to build something that sounds like that.”