While filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is known for putting together intricately designed films, The Shape of Water is the pinnacle of his career thus far—an immaculately crafted film from top to bottom. The original story takes place in the 1960s, as the Cold War looms large, and revolves around a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins) working at a top secret government facility who falls in love with a Fish Man (Doug Jones) that’s being housed there. It’s a story of love, of outsiders, of the maligned and ignored, and it’s absolutely one of the best films of the year.

When I said Shape of Water was immaculately crafted from top to bottom, I meant it, and that certainly applies to the intricate, gorgeously realized production design by Paul Austerberry. The craftsman was originally prepping Pacific Rim 2 as his first film with del Toro, but when the filmmaker switched gears and decided to make The Shape of Water instead, he brought Austerberry along with him.

With Shape of Water now playing in limited release across the country (and picking up accolades left and right), I recently got the chance to speak with Austerberry about his work on the film. He discussed his collaboration process with del Toro at length, how they developed the specific look of the film, bringing the lab and apartments to life in ways that were both rich and full of architectural symbolism, and much more. Austerberry also gave a brief tease of what del Toro’s version of Pacific Rim 2 would have entailed and revealed that he was designing on Fantastic Voyage before del Toro decided to take a sabbatical in 2017.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

While interviews with actors and directors are certainly illuminating, this discussion with Austerberry shines a light on the other vital aspects that go into making a film come to life, and it’s a fascinating and insightful conversation made all the more interesting by the fact that The Shape of Water is, quite simply, a masterful concoction. Check out the full interview below.

This movie is amazing. I saw it back at TIFF and it just blew me away.

PAUL AUSTERBERRY: Fantastic. Yeah, it's an exciting movie to be part of that's for sure.

Is it nice to be able to, as opposed to you do the junket and then it's over, with this being in the awards season, is it nice to continue talking about this one as the months go on?

AUSTERBERRY: Absolutely. These kinds of things, these junkets don't come often because you don't get to awards season. Think of all the movies being made every year and there's not very many that end up potentially in the awards running, so it's very exciting. Especially when you're on a small movie, that's exciting. You're up against some pretty big things.

Yeah, definitely. Well if I'm not mistaken, this is your first time working with Guillermo so I was just curious, how did you first come to be a part of the project?

AUSTERBERRY: Well, I actually was working with Guillermo in the summer of 2015 on Pacific Rim 2. We worked for about eight weeks. We were gonna do a much bigger budget movie, and we went to China a couple times scouting. Then we did a bunch of designs for that film; we were quite well along in our weeks of pre-pre-prep before we really got going. But I had heard from [cinematographer Dan Laustsen] at the time that there was this movie called "Untitled Fish Movie" that Guillermo wants to be shot in black and white that was his passion project, and I was like wow this sounds really intriguing. I heard the basic premise and when Guillermo decided at the end of that summer, he said, "You know what, let’s do this passion project." So he moved on from Pacific Rim 2, he let someone else direct it and he stayed on as producer, but then I got to read an early draft of the script of this in the fall of 2015. I was very excited to do it, definitely wanted do it.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

It's a very bizarre script, but beautiful, and visually delicious. We were challenged by budget; it's a pretty ambitious little movie. Guillermo and [producer J. Miles Dale] were working on The Strain, and they thought, "You know what, we can put more money on the screen if we wait six months until the hiatus on that show" and basically it's a Fox production as well, [it airs on FX]. Guillermo said, “The studio sits free, the offices sit empty, let’s somehow save the money from studios and get a really good deal on the studios and offices and funnel that back into the film, put it back on the screen." And I thought that was really clever. It was really clever producing. And in the meantime I got to read the script thoroughly and I was doing commercials to keep filling the time that was available. I was here in LA with Guillermo a couple times going over some early three-dimensional drawings and things like that that I had of the design of the lab. It was good. The six months was not wasted, the script was more developed. We came in in the late spring of 2016, and we just went right into it. By the time I had my art director on there was only eight weeks of prep. It was a very [soundstage]-heavy film, I think we shot 17 out of 58 days on location only and all the rest was on the stage. It was quite a rapid run.

What were those early, very first conversations with Guillermo like about the design and the idea of this world?

AUSTERBERRY: I mean, he's a master of history of film. He pulled together visuals and he had some references from certain films. The arch window, for instance, was very important to him in Eliza's apartment. He showed me a still from The Red Shoes from 1948, and he wanted to incorporate that as part of this grand room above this theater. Guillermo lives a lot of the time in Toronto, so he's written certain locations into it and one of them was this place called Massey Hall, which is a music hall, not a movie theater—it didn't have a marquee, we built one outside. But it did have this nice little symmetrical staircase that descended from the center, from above, that he really wanted to incorporate so we had certain things —he had that as a notion, that was a given, so that influenced the design of the interior that was studio built. We had this romantic notion of the late 19th century architecture as the environment for her and Richard Jenkins’s character and we had to decide what to do for the contrast to be the chem facility where she worked.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

We met early and decided we're gonna go with this 50s, 60s, and 70s brutalist style architecture as the contrast to her sort of a more romantic design space. So we had a basic idea right away at the beginning and that let us develop the different interior sets with those things in mind. Color was very important to Guillermo—ironically, you know, because it was supposed to be a black and white film at one time. I was kinda terrified about that because it takes out a whole tool in your toolbox to help tell a story ... mood and everything. Thankfully, as you see in the final product, color was very important for the movie so I'm glad it came back.

That was surprising because, I mean Guillermo is so in tune with color in his films and he always talks about, "Well this color is tied to this character."

AUSTERBERRY: That's correct.

What was the black and white version of the film like, and how did you have to adjust your approach to it once it switched to color? Or did you?

AUSTERBERRY: Well we didn't really because it was just talked about and Dan Laustsen was excited about a black and white movie as a DP, that does not come around very often. You have to really deal with tone and textures. Right at the very beginning Fox had offered them a fair bit more money to do it in color, so of course Guillermo said, "Okay, of course we'll do it in color." I think it was a great choice because color is very important. And as you said, "What was it like working with Guillermo?" I'll tell ya; day one when we actually had the office, we had already been talking about ideas of the architectural backgrounds of these places and where a location might be in Toronto and the feeling that we wanna evoke and I brought images from a sanatorium in France to help influence the style of the lab inside.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

But the very first day that we had in the office he said, "Lets go through the color book" so we basically had a box set of three and a half thousand color blocks and we literally went through all of them really rapidly, because as you said Guillermo always has ideas about color for associations with certain moods and characters so he already had this in his mind. We just went through the colors we kinda liked together and we tagged them as this world, that world, Liza's world, Giles’ world, Hoffstetler’s world, the lab’s world. We went through it relatively quickly and then I cut about a hundred chips out and sifted through and narrowed it down to another forty chips and I stuck it on a board and Luis, the costume designer, he also did the same with fabrics. Guillermo did the same thing with him, then went through the fabric swatches. All three of us met together and then we made a board for paint, and a board for costumes and made sure they all worked together. That was our bible. That was before we even had a notion of a lot of the different styles of the different parts of the movie, the minutiae. But then you had this board, and all the way through we just consulted this board when we got to props, or when we got to picking the paint, or the wallpaper it was very easy to go into the world. It was already decided right at the very beginning.

We didn't really deviate from that world, we didn't have enough time to deviate from that world to be honest. It was just real rapid prep time. We had studio sets right off the bat after the first week of locations, in the studio, so there wasn't a lot of time to change. But having a director like Guillermo who's got very strong ideas about color and design it wouldn't have been able to be done otherwise I don't think because of the time we had. He's someone who will bring to the table a lot, narrow down the world to a certain range so we can really focus in the time we have and elevate it the best that we can. But he's not closed to changing some of those ideas, some things that he brought to the table in the beginning we did evolve into some fairly different things, and as long as it elevates the movie, he's happy to entertain anything.

I mean clearly, given the title, water is a theme throughout the film. Did that pose a difficulty in creating sets that needed to agree with water? Was that kind of a fun challenge? Especially when you get into the lab room with the tank, you have the water reflecting off the ceiling and stuff like that, which is fantastic, but then you also flood sets.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

AUSTERBERRY: Oh yeah, the water was...literally the shape of water. It sounds a little bit corny but her apartment is shaped by water. The lab, we could have, from the very beginning you could have gone with a sterile white lab, but of course we're not gonna do that in this kind of crazy fantasy movie where we want a rich color and rich texture and age and you want to evoke the mood of humidity and steam, because this god-like creature has come from this humid, dank environment of the Amazon where he was worshiped by the indigenous peoples as a god. Guillermo had this sketchbook image of the creature standing there in front of the sun, like a setting sun, back when he was found, back in the Amazon, so when Eliza first sees him in his full glory—you can only see his hand, I think, the very first time you see him. When he first emerges out of that green, slimy looking water, that tank, I shaped it like a stepped pyramid, like a ziggurat shape. Which you know in various early cultures, Egyptians, Mayans, Incas, they all had these stepped pyramids and obviously pointed pyramids in the Egyptians case, but it's just a symbol of wherever we are, it’s like a temple symbol. So when he emerges out of that he's emerging on top of this ziggurat-shaped pool and then we translated that setting sun into this array of pipes coming out like a sun, and behind they're dipping into the water so when he first emerges it’s like that image that Guillermo had of him standing there in this environment with a real sun in the background. Everything is there with steam and wet and dank for reflections, like you said and pointed out the reflected light.

So we have that environment with the creature and of course we contrast it with where Eliza is, and you see it at the very beginning of the movie when we're set sort of underwater and we're in water and we appear into this sort of submerged, dreamlike set and you find her floating there, which we did graphically, we did that in the studio with dry for wet with smoke. And that light that you're referring to, we projected caustic light

Oh wow.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

AUSTERBERRY: Yeah we projected images of caustic light in through a light haze of smoke to give that idea of being underwater, and then of course visual effects added the fish and bubbles and debris that's in the water and a few other things floating, but we did hang a wire with a lot of the stuff to lower it down into place. I guess to add to your question about shaping the water, her apartment, the idea of color there is she's in this aqua environment. The lighting was always in aqua colors and all the colors within the apartment were in that realm. The idea there was written in the script, and again you were talking about what it was like working with a visual director, he had written that light emanated through the floorboards of this. She lived above a theater, light emanated through the floorboards always, it was a 24-hour theater so the idea is that even when we come out of that dream sequence in the beginning, we still have this caustic light that is now simmering light that just comes through the boards of this floor, so were always evoking this idea of being underwater.

Guillermo and I's backstory for this apartment was a once grand room above—a late 19th century room above this old theater that had been split when the talkies came in the late 20s. It sort of split in half this arc window, each one of the dials is one half and she's in the other and together they become whole. I think Eliza in her diary says she's not whole, I think she's missing her voice obviously and Giles becomes her voice and they become, together ,a whole in the apartment—in theory the room would become whole and they would be together

That’s crazy.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

AUSTERBERRY: Yeah that was kind of like the thought of why is this arc split crudely down the middle? But the two of them together became this team and they completed each other in a way. But going by this—you're asking about being shaped by water, literally that set was shaped by water in many ways. The backstory was this half of the apartment up there had been damaged by fires at some point and had water damage and all the floorboards had buckled from the water and so the hardwood floor had been stripped off, leaving the subfloor below and sub floors can often have crude gaps. I was justifying how we could have light emanating through the boards, of course the plaster below that had broken off during that damage and had never been repaired in the old theater, so the light could emanate through. We had water dripping all the time that had eroded the ceiling, eroded the floor. One thing that Guillermo had brought to the table at the very beginning, and he wasn't 100% sure how it would evolve, was this image. He found this image from a photography competition in India. There was an old lady in front of this really decrepit humid stained wall, the wall itself was very artistic and it was a really very intense color.

And he said you know, Eliza doesn't have any means. Giles’s apartment is a contrast, it's full of stuff where she has very little stuff because she doesn't have much. But this one wall, the blank wall, it would be devoid of art at her apartment, but the blank wall would be a piece of art in itself. He gave me this picture and said this oughta inspire you to do something inspiring. I'm thinking what's gonna help me figure out what this wall’s gonna look like. I thought well maybe it can be like a map of a river and the cracks become the stream and rocks of something like that, and the rapids are part of this decrepit wall and I thought eh that's not, whatever. I thought well let’s think about one of the most famous shapes of water in art, and what came to mind was this great big wave off Kanagawa, which is this 1830s Japanese piece. You may not know the title but you've seen the picture—if you see it you'll know that's what it is. It's this wood cut of this wave crashing over, zooming down Mount Fugi in the background. It's a real famous image of water and I thought pretty literally a famous shape of water and I superimposed it over the wall I wanted to do this on, and I had this wave crashing and it looked like it was gonna engulf the door so if anyone in the movie, if they ever opened the door to come in it looked like you were about to be engulfed in the water by this wave literally.

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Image via Fox Searchlight

However it's subtle in the background, so I showed it to Guillermo and I thought he's gonna think it's too obvious, and he loved the idea. He said, “Oh my God yes let’s do it,” so we did it with textured plaster and then layers and layers and layers of complimentary washes of color to really knock it way back. When we first painted it Guillermo was like, “Oh my God it's so literal,” (laughs). I said, “Don't worry once we layer it in it'll get back.” It's there, you can see it but you can't really see it, it's a subtle meaning. As corny as that sounds.

No, that's really cool.

AUSTERBERRY: I didn’t work on Crimson Peak but some of the guys in my art department did, and I knew that he designed some subliminal shapes in some of the wallpapers on that film, so that's why I thought, “Oh I can put this big shape of water in here and knock it way back so that if you really know where you're looking it's there and has a little more meaning for us.” We could've always made the wall just beautiful on its own with no real meaning, but it has more meaning by basing it on this for our world, in our minds anyways.

I’m fascinated that you worked on Pacific Rim 2 for a little bit and I know that the story for the new one now is quite different from what Guillermo's version was, but can you kinda tease what that idea was kinda from a design standpoint?

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Production Designer Paul Austerberry on the set of THE SHAPE OF WATER. Photo by Kerry Hayes. © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

AUSTERBERRY: I don't know what happened but I think the script completely changed. But when we were doing it we were set in Shanghai, that's why we were scouting in China. We had some scenes in Shanghai and we were using the river and the craziness of Shanghai as our backdrop, it was sort of a wall at the end of the river. And then we were in the desert because there were scenes in the desert and we went way into the desert to some amazing landscapes to use as part of our background. And then of course I think we finished in the west coast, I think it was San Francisco that we were gonna end up in. San Francisco, where so many disaster movies take place (laughs). We were gonna destroy it with the great big battle between the kaiju and the big robots, so that was gonna be pretty exciting. So yeah, was I disappointed we didn't do that? Of course I was, that would have been a fun giant movie to work on. However I'm much happier that we did what we did because I think there was more. That would have been creative but this is more of an art film. A beautiful visual art film versus that, which would have been a fun movie as well but not the same kind of thing. And funnily enough I was also working for 14 weeks this summer with Guillermo again on Fantastic Voyage prepping, trying to develop that movie for him and James Cameron. We had some great designs going on there.

Well hopefully he circles back around to that at some point. But I do agree, I mean I think Shape of Water is the best movie he's ever made. So I am kind of happy that he, as much as I wanted to see Pacific Rim 2, I’m happy it worked out this way.

AUSTERBERRY: Yeah me too. I think in the long run, I mean would I say I would have liked to have done both? Of course I would have liked to have done both. But if I had to choose one, definitely this is the one that I'm very happy we ended up doing and I think were all very proud of the film, I'm proud for Guillermo and happy that it’s getting such great accolades.

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Image via Fox Searchlight