At a tribute organized by the British Film Institute in London, Guillermo del Toro laid out the shape of a project he says began when he was 11 years old and that he has carried through decades of resistance from the industry. Del Toro told the audience he first set the goal to adapt Frankenstein as a child and that, even after starting work in the early 2000s, he faced repeated refusals: "Durante 25 años todos los profesionales de la industria me dijeron que no realizara Frankenstein."
The scale of that refusal matters because it underlines how central the novel has been to del Toro’s imagination. He said he started writing and designing the film in the early 2000s and kept returning to Mary Shelley’s themes: "Empecé a trabajar en la película a principios de los 2000. Para mí, la novela siempre fue una respuesta sobre la soledad y el deseo de aceptación." He added that he wants the creature in his film to speak with the same eloquence Shelley gives it: "Quise que la criatura fuera tan articulada como en el libro, porque así es en la obra de Shelley."
Those are not small stylistic decisions. Del Toro framed Frankenstein as a work that folds Shelley's novel together with other touchstones—he called it a reinterpretation of Paradise Lost and a meditation on the human condition—because the creature’s voice and the story’s moral questions are, to him, inseparable from their literary roots. Preserving that spirit, he said, is the point: to use the monster to explore difference, loneliness and belonging, rather than to reduce the creature to a special effect.
The context del Toro offered at the London event made his persistence easier to see. He described a creative formation built on limited means and improvisation in Mexico: "La identidad mexicana está en cómo enfrentamos las cosas cuando no tenemos recursos: con ingenio y melodrama," and he gave a concrete example: "En México nos arreglamos con lo que hay. Hice películas en fábricas en demolición, reutilizábamos decorados y transportaba engranajes en camionetas que yo mismo vendía para financiar efectos." That practical, do-it-yourself ethic fed his view of what cinema can be and how monsters function in it.
There is a clear tension between that Mexican inventiveness and the expectations del Toro says he encountered abroad. He rejected a simple narrative of oppression: "En el primer mundo, si eres latinoamericano, quieren que hables de tu opresión. Les asusta tu alegría y tu cultura." He argued instead that his films fuse Mexican melodrama with other traditions—he pointed to Hellboy as an example: "La imaginación mexicana puede dar vida a algo tan americano como los cómics. Hay mucho melodrama y locura mexicana en Hellboy." The friction is between an industry that repeatedly told him not to make Frankenstein and the filmmaker’s insistence that his cultural outlook is a creative advantage, not a label of victimhood.
Del Toro also returned to the personal and almost mythic reason he keeps working with monsters. He told the audience he made a compact with them as a child: "Hice un pacto espiritual con los monstruos siendo niño. Hoy son mi forma de ver el mundo." That formation, he said, explains why he treats horror as a spectrum with political and emotional stakes: "Hay dos tipos de horror, el represivo y el liberador; yo apuesto siempre por lo anárquico."
The short answer to the question his talk posed is that del Toro never abandoned the project. He began the Frankenstein effort as a boy, began formal work in the early 2000s, and survived a quarter-century of professionals telling him not to do it. If the question is whether he intends to make a Frankenstein that honors Shelley’s voice, his remarks in London leave no doubt: he wants the creature to be articulate and the film to preserve the novel’s spirit while probing loneliness, acceptance and the human condition.
That persistence—rooted in a childhood pact with monsters, sharpened by Mexican resourcefulness and articulated in a long argument with the industry—is the story he brought to the BFI stage in London. For del Toro, the refusal to stop is itself the method: "Nos decían que no podíamos, pero lo logramos porque creíamos en nuestra manera de hacer cine."
