Fresh Air - Guillermo Del Toro Finally Makes His Own 'Frankenstein'

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

When Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was a kid growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, he would draw monsters all day. His deeply Catholic grandmother even had him exorcised because of it. But when del Toro saw the 1931 film Frankenstein, his life changed. "I realized I understood my faith or my dogmas better through Frankenstein than through Sunday mass." His new adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic book drops on Netflix Nov. 7. He spoke with Terry Gross about getting over his fear of death, the design of Frankenstein's creature, and his opinion on generative AI. Also, Justin Chang reviews the Palme d'Or-winning film It Was Just An Accident. Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors. On our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. The great filmmaker Guillemald del Toro has written and directed,

a new reimagining of Frankenstein. It takes inspiration from the 1931 film Frankenstein, one of the first best and most enduring horror monster films, but mostly from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, which many consider to be the first science fiction book. She was only 18 when she wrote it. In Del Toro's movie, the final part of the story is told from the creature's point of view. Some of the themes of his new film echo themes that he's been obsessed with for years. Misunderstood creatures, men who behave like monsters, father-son relationships, religion, empathy, cruelty, misguided scientific experiments that take a terrible turn, and what Del Toro describes as the uneasy truce between science and religion,

machine and man, and the realization that you are inescapably alone. His other movies include Pan's Labyrinth, the Shape of Water, which won four Oscars including Best Pick and Best Director, Nightmare Alley, a reimagining of Pinocchio, filmed in stop-motion animation, and two Hellboy films. In Deltoros Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the surgeon who wants to create new life, a new man built out of body parts from the newly dead. The creature he creates is played by Jacob Allorty, who's best known for co-starring in Euphoria, and also played Elvis Presley in the Sophia Coppola movie Priscilla.

Del Toro grew up in Guadalajaro, Mexico, and lives in L.A. Guillermo del Toro, welcome to Fresh Air. Congratulations on your new film, which brings together so much of your other work. And I know it's a dream come true for you to do your own version of Frankenstein. You first saw the movie, the 1931 movie, which is totally different from the book and your new movie. But that movie really had a hold on you. Tell us why it had such meaning for you. Well, it was curiously enough on a Sunday after Catholic Mass, we came back home and then

we would watch horror movies on Channel 6 all day. And it was the first time I saw Frankenstein. And the moment Boris Karloff crossed the threshold, I had an epiphany. I had a St. Paul on the road to Damascus kind of experience. I realized I understood my faith or my dogmas better through Frankenstein than through Sunday Mass. I saw the resurrection of the flesh, the immaculate conception, ecstasy, you know, stigmata, everything made sense. And I decided at age seven that the creature of Frankenstein was going to be my personal avatar and my personal Messiah. It was a really profound transformation.

and it made an impression that lasted my whole life. Can you compare how you saw the story as a seven-year-old to how you see it now? Well, I saw it as a son when I saw it first, and now I see it as a father, and more poignantly, I have become my father whilst trying to run away from the same mistakes of absence or, you know, mysterious emotions that I couldn't figure out as a kid. And I had a really profound moment to be able to reconcile this knowledge with a beautiful talk with my own kids and stop this lineage of pains. And, you know, fathers are a big shadow, particularly in Latin American families, I imagine. What's the pain you're referring to in talking about your relationship with your father?

It is. My father was always a mystery, and he was really. funny and warm, but by turns, he was also aloof and distant and had a lot of problem. Even, you know, when he came back from the kidnapping, he was taken 72 days, and I said, I'm going to get to know him real well, and our conversations never lasted more than a few minutes, you know, and he just couldn't, and I didn't understand that, and I realized that, particularly with my profession, I had a huge alibi to repeat this. distance. And I unfortunately couldn't, I believe, on time to really change it and become a very dedicated father. You mentioned the kidnapping. He was kidnapped and held for a million dollar

ransom. And you managed to get the money to pay the kidnappers and rescue your father. Yes. And that's, my understanding is that's why you moved to the U.S. because of death threats. Yeah, well, it was the constant threat. And the PTSD, it's. etc. But a lot of the moments that happened during that kidnapping are actually obliquely reflected in the film. I tried to make it an autobiography of the soul for me. There's three parts of the movie. There's the introduction. Then there's the story told pretty much from Dr. Frankenstein's point of view. And then the final part is told from the creature's point of view. I really wanted to read Mary Shelley's novel, which I've never read

before speaking to you again, and I wasn't able to find the time to do it. Yes. I did, however, read your introduction to, like, I think it's a 2021 anatoated version of the novel. But anyways, in Mary Shelley's original telling of the story, is there a chapter that's from the creature's point of view? Or is that just something you wanted to do? No, no, no. It is, there are so many things that are in the novel, you know, that is one of them.

When the creature meets Victor in the frozen north, he says, well, this is what happened to me. And he proceeds to tell him his itinerary of degradation and humanization and learning the language with the family of the hermit. You know, all of that is in the novel, but it's been rarely articulated. And I found that hinging the movie in the middle was structurally the best way. to make the audience almost get a jolt and say, oh, I've never seen this before. Even if it's been dramatized briefly in other versions, this is the one that tracks the creature in a distinct chapter.

It starts in the frozen north and is very discreet in color. Then you have childhood and young age of Victor, which is idealized and very heightened visually by the fact that Victor is telling the story and then the fairy tale like... Yeah, I'm glad you said fairy tale. Yeah.

Because it seems, that seems to me like the part from Dr. Frankenstein's point of view has elements of like horror film and monster film. But the second part, it's set in the woods. It's like a fairy tale. In a little cabin.

Yeah, and the old blind man. It's kind of a very fairy tale, benevolent character. There's spirits in the woods. And he's got. guided, the creature is guided by all sorts of animals into understanding the world. Yeah, and the blind old hermit thinks that because he can't see, he doesn't see the monster that other people see, and in fact he thinks the creature is the spirit of the woods.

Yes, that was very important to me that the three chapters were very distinct in style and very distinct in energy. The camera work is very different, the color palestine. is very different. And I think that I would say, having seen most every version of Frankenstein on film, this is very unique. The scale of the movie, both being epic and intimate, is very unique. But the fairy tale breath of it all, and the parable, it feels like a parable of the prodigal father, I'd say jokingly. Are you trying to interpret Frankenstein? People always call the monster Frankenstein. Yeah, that's a mistake that came from a play.

So are you trying to compare the creature in Frankenstein to Jesus? I think so. I mean, I think the parallels are very, very curious. I triangulate the creature with Jesus and Pinocchio. Yeah, in your version of Pinocchio, and I don't know if this is in other stories are in the original fairy tale. Geppetto, who creates the puppet, Pinocchio, also has built, or carved, I should say,

a huge depiction of Jesus being crucified and for the church. Yeah, no, that's completely original to... That's original? Yes. To me, the myths are very related. The two biggest mysteries in the Bible for me, growing up. And I am a lapsed Catholic, but the two ministers were the book of job in which

man questions God, why do bad things happen to good people? And the answer, basically, of God, is why not? You know, it's very comforting the way you put it. Well, that's the way God put it. He says, who are you to question my wisdom? You were not there when I created the world, basically. When we talked a few years ago, you mentioned that your grandmother, who was very Catholic. Very. Exercised you. Not exercised, but as an exorcism.

She exercised you twice. Yeah, with the holy water, yeah. Did you feel like people saw you as unholy and a sacrilege in the same way that people see the creature in Frankenstein? Yeah, in some ways. And even Pinocchio, when Pinocchio was kind of rowdy in church, because he's never been there before, he doesn't understand what church is. the people in the church call him unholy and a sacrilege. Well, you know, I'm very used to not fitting. I'm always looking through the window into the world, you know,

a little bit with a set of thoughts and a set of principles and ideas that don't necessarily conform. So my grandmother was in great pain that I would draw monsters all day. I would talk about the Bible asking questions that were maybe two points. poignant, you know, but we loved each other. And that is salient in my movies. No matter how different we were, we can love each other. And that is, again, in Frankenstein, there's Frankenstein in all my movies. From Chronos all the way to Pinocchio, every single movie, I hesitate to think of one that doesn't have elements of it.

You could say in some ways that the creature in Frankenstein is like artificial intelligence, It's because he's created by man but then lives on its own and can destroy man without even understanding quite what he's doing. So what are your thoughts about AI and did that kind of inform the movie in any way? It didn't. It didn't. It didn't in the sense that my concern is not artificial intelligence but natural stupidity. I think that's what drives most of the world's worst features. But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros. You know, he's kind of blind creating something without considering the consequences. And I think we have to take a pause and consider where we're going.

If you have to teach an AI to think in ones and zeros, you know, oh, my God, I would love for a generation to get raising kids. right one time, one time. In the entire history of mankind, there hasn't been a single generation that was raised right all across the globe. And I think that's our biggest failure in a way, you know. Once and zeros don't get the alchemy that you get with emotion and experience. You get the information, but you don't get the alchemy of emotion, spirituality, and feeling. That's, I'm not saying it's impossible to replicate, but we have to, but we have it readily available with the next generation of children. And that's why the painful thing that Jacob Elorty and Victor enact is a father-and-son relationship that is very relatable in the

film, very relatable and very moving by the end. Did you take advantage of any AI in making Frankenstein? AI, particularly generative AI, is I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. I really don't. The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, what did you stand on AI? And my answer was very short. I said, I'd rather die. Oh, those are strong words.

Yeah, not for me. I'm Mexican. But I think Terry that even when a human sings a song that has already been recorded six, seven times, They're filtering, their experience, their life. I often think of, you know, Johnny Cash singing Hurt, the Trent Resnor song, and making it entirely his own, or Joe Cocker singing the Beatles. You know, that's not aversion, that's not remixing, that is filtering through alchemical pain and experience a work of art into making it your own. The creature in Frankenstein is endowed with eternal life in your film. Cursed, cursed, cursed.

That's what I was going to ask you. What do you think about, you know, his eternal life is hell. The creature is alone, and he wants to end his tormented life, but he can't. There's no one in the world who's like him, and Dr. Frankenstein refuses to make a companion for him. And the creature says, there was only one remedy for pain, death, and you took that away from me, too. after the creature survived something that other people assume would have killed him, he says there was silence and then merciless life, I felt lonelier than ever. So when you think of eternal life, do you think that that's torment? Oh, I do. I'm a huge fan of death. I'm a

groupie for death. I think it's the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody, you know. It is the metronome of a dead that makes us value the compass of the beautiful music, you know. I'm going to say, this comes when my father was taken, every day was torment, and I used to see the sun rising and resented. And I said, the son doesn't care about my pain, but then eventually I realized it was my pain that didn't care about the sun, and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it. I needed to understand that the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know. You mentioned the fear of death every day that your father was held hostage, kidnapped for ransom.

Of course, you'd be worried about death then. It was the threat of death hanging over him and his life was in your hands to save. putting that aside, as major as that is, did you have a fear of death growing up and as a young man? Yes. As a young man, my grandmother and I had a very precarious sense of death and life. My grandmother would say goodnight to me every day and say, let us pray that I'm here tomorrow. And that is very intense for a four or five year old to hear. And I would spend sometimes I would sleep at the foot of her bed. and I would be listening in the dark for her breathing. And if the breathing ceased even for two seconds, I would be jolted and take a look to see if she was okay. And that stayed with me for many decades.

I don't fear it anymore. I don't fear that anymore. I feel losing people, yes, but me, I'm not afraid of dying. I hope. You know, really, Terry, all this great question. You know, when they get resolved, right when the lights flutter and you are no longer a director or a general or a pope, right when you become just you and the lights are flickering out, that's when you realize what you did or didn't do in your life. And that's the most momentous thing anyone can experience. And you can go with great agitation or great peace.

we were talking earlier about the book of Job Yes You asked your cast to read the book of Job Yes and the Tao What did you want them to take from it Because ultimately that's the plea of the creature too The plea of the creature is why You know why do this thing have happened to me

And the answer comes at the end The final image of the film is what tells you What we can do I mean acceptance is so profound You know, we are building a culture in which we have the idea of what things should be. And when they don't happen, you can feel frustrated, rebel against them. But at the end of the day, they are what they are. Marty Scorsese tackled the same sort of question in the Irishman.

And the answer is very, very beautiful. He says, it is what it is. You know, that's the book of Job. It is what it is. The Tao says all pain comes from desire, which is absolutely true. You want more awards. You want more money. You find yourself in pain.

I do, you know. But if you don't, if you don't want more, there's a zero that gives you peace. And the same with life. So you found feeling insignificant. Oh, great. Liberating. Liberating, which can happen with reviews. Do you read them?

Not anymore. Not anymore. I'm 61. I don't. But I did. I did. Oh, my God. When I was younger, I would read every single one until I found the one that would never leave my brain. I remember a few that are really well phrased. Do you want to quote one? Well, Jay Hoverman of the Village Voice wrote a great, he put down Blade 2, beautiful. He said, the only thing remotely scary about Blade 2 is that it's done by the same man that the devil's backbone, which is beautiful. On that note, let me reintroduce you again.

We have to take a break. If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film, Frankenstein, his own interpretation of the Frankenstein story, inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is fresh air. This week on Code Switch, we're talking about language,

the words we use to insult each other, to define ourselves. The dictionary has been a battleground in these debates for centuries. Revising these sensitive terms in these politically explosive times, there's a risk. Listen to Code Switch on the NPR app

or wherever you get your podcast. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein, a new interpretation of

the story, inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. He also fell in love at the age of seven with the 1931 film Frankenstein, which starred Boris Karloff as the creature. The creature is played by Jacob Allorty in the new film. Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the surgeon who creates the creature and brings it to life, is played by Oscar Isaac. Del Toro's other films include Pan's Labyrinth, the Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, a stop-motion animation, PG-reimagining, of the Pinocchio story and two Hellboy movies. I want to talk with you about the 1931 film Frankenstein, which was directed by James Whale,

who also directed the first film version of Showboat, which is quite a contrast. And the first version of Waterloo Bridge, which is, his version is so brutal and sort of Brechtian. He was a very interesting director and a very interesting man. Well, you know, I watched that movie so many times when I was a child because it used to be run frequently on million-dollar movie in New York, and they would show one movie and run it over and over all week. And then I watched it again a few nights ago because I wanted to refresh my memory. And part of what I love about the movie is just the otherworldliness of it.

The cinematography is so good, and it reminds me of like film noir, German expressionism. And it's misty, it's stormy, it's dreamlike. It's very modern, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for 1931, this film, well, Whale, and a lot of this era of Hollywood filmmaker is extremely influenced by German cinema. And to the point where Whale does an artifice that is not apparent to the audience until you tell them to look for it, if the shadows on the set didn't fall the way, he liked it, he would spray paint him. Whoa, really?

Yeah, there's a lot of shadows in the window that don't correspond to the light that is being poured on the set, and the light is, the shadows are painted with spray paint on the walls. And nobody knows, now that I told you, if you watch it again, you'll see it here and there. Did the style of filmmaking, the shadows, the lighting, the mist, the nightmarish quality of the images. Did that influence you as a filmmaker? It did up to a certain point and it did only on certain movies.

Like, for example, on Pinocchio, the creation of Pinocchio is shot like a horror film. But the creation of the creature in this film is shown like a concert, like a joyful cornucopia of anatomical parts, blood, ligament, and muscles, which has never been shown in any other versions before.

But to me, it was mandatory because I wanted to see Victor at his professional best and at his artistic best. So I talked to my composer, Alexander Desplah, and I said, we're going to do it with a waltz. And I'm going to shoot it like a fun-filled concert of anatomical part. Did you study anatomy in order to do that?

Yes. First of all, I've been obsessed by medicine and anatomy. me, I was the world youngest cypochondriac. I would come to my... Congratulations, that's quite an achievement. It is. And there must be a Boy Scout patch for that. But I went to my mother every day and I said,

Mother, I think I have tricky noses of the brain. Mother, I have cirrhosis. You know, every... I read an entire encyclopedia of health as a kid, and I've been very taken by anatomy ever since. And we had a Victorian consultant, and I used a... an entire medical library that I purchased from 1835, I bought it in London, and I used it to make sure the terms and the procedures were up to speed, but not too advanced.

What did you tell your collaborators about what you wanted your Frankenstein to look like? Because he looks nothing like Boris Kalloff. No. And I don't mean just mean his face, but he doesn't have like a bolt in his neck. He doesn't look all stitched together. What I was trying to capture is the beautiful style of the illustrations of an American artist called Bernie Riteson, who illustrated for me the best illustrated version of the novel ever, and who collaborated with me earlier on. And it has a very vironian, very doomed, very withering height sort of look of a doomed hero.

and when he's first born and he's bold and almost naked, I wanted it to feel like an anatomical chart, like something newly minted, not a repair job on an ICU victim, but the skills of Victor, his exquisite sense of design, the heaviest pattern after phrenology manuals from the 1800s, so they have very elegant, almost aerodynamic lines.

I wanted this alabaster marble statue feel, so it feels like a newly minted human being. And we also tried to make it the way I remember the Jesus' images, life-size, in the churches of my childhood. The original Frankenstein movie is so dreamlike, nightmare-like. And I think several of your films have very nightmarish imagery in it. I read you were a lucid dreamer. Yes, as a kid. As a kid. So explain what you mean when you say a lucid dreamer.

A lucid dream, for me, or waking nightmares used to be called too, is you wake up in your dream in the exact environment that you fell asleep on. But there are elements that are not normal. I used to see monsters. I saw a burning figure at the foot of my bed. which is where the burning archangel comes in Frankenstein, and that figure extended its arms and said, I live, and I woke up screaming.

When I was a very young child, I used to see a fawn, a goat man come from behind an armor while the church chimed midnight in the neighborhood, and with each chime the figure would come up, and then you wake up, and nothing is there, and you're covered in sweat, and that's sort of lucid dreaming or waking night, states, which are a disruption of the REM cycle on the brain.

But to you as a kid, it's truly harrowing. So you would dream that you woke up and escape the nightmare only to find that the nightmare still is going on. So it makes the nightmare seem even more like reality. Yes, which is why one of the best images in the novel of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is had never been rendered on film until now, and it was my favorite moment reading it. At age 11, I read the novel.

And it's the moment Victor wakes up from the Night of Creation, and the creature is standing at the foot of the bed looking back at him. As a kid, I held my breath. I was shocked, and I prayed for decades that I could make that moment come to life on a film before anyone. Fortunately, nobody did it.

Well, we have to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein, a new interpretation of the story. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film, Frankenstein, a new interpretation of the story

inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. When we left off, we were just. talking about how as a child del Toro experienced lucid dreaming or waking nightmares that's when you think you've awakened from a nightmare but you haven't really you're just dreaming you woke up and the nightmare continues do you think that your lucid dreams when you were a child relate to how you fell in love with movies when you were a child because movies are so dreamlike but they might haunt your dreams you might be afraid of them but you're not literally going to think that you live in that world.

You absolutely are absolutely right. The first film I saw was William Wyler's Wuthering Heights with Lawrence Olivier. I went with my mother to a cinema downtown that was super cheap and showed very old movies. It was really gothic atmosphere with rain and the moors and Olivier. It's basically a ghost story in many ways, Wuthering Heights. And I fell asleep full of fear. I dreamt my dream and woke up in the theater with the movie still playing. So exactly, my first movie was part of a lucid dream.

Exactly. Well, what was your emotional reaction to that? You're looking at it. That's when I fell in love with Gothic romance. And I couldn't have been more than four. Why do I know it? Because I remember the house we were living in where I was born. and my father won the lottery, the national lottery, in 1969,

which would make me five years old when we moved from that house to a giant house in the outskirts of the city. Your father won the lottery? Yeah, 1960. How much money did he win? Six million dollars in 69, which is the entire budget of Planet of the Apes. That's amazing. How did it change your life?

Completely. I mean, completely. we moved into a house and lived a very sort of strange life. I mean, we had all sorts of pets. We had eagles, a pet lion, 30 dogs. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You had a zoo. Yeah, we had like a zoo.

And we had, I could go like Danny in the Shining. I could go on my tricycle for hours in the long corridors. Sometimes like a magic realism novel, I would go for weeks without seeing a single adult. I would find food on the fridge, I would find clean clothes on my drawers, and I didn't interact with many adults. I would just, you know, exist in a mysterious life in an enchanted castle. Six million dollars was a lot more then than it is now. It was, and one of the things he did is he bought a library and filled in books that he never read, but I read them all. And that's where I read the Encyclopedia of Anatomy and Health.

And that's where I read all my classics, you know, Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde. Wow. So what happened to the money? Because he was held for a million dollar ransom about 30 years later. Yes. And didn't have the money. Well, what happened is my dad controlled everything. None of us had access to that money.

My father raised those, he would say, you want, I would say, I want to buy film for my camera, and he would say, okay, go to the car dealership and clean all the cars all week, and Saturday I'll give you a third of it. You come back another three weeks, I'll buy you a reel of Super 8. He didn't want to raise us as if we had everything,

so none of us had access to that money. He had the money to pay for the ransom, but none of us could access it. Oh. Yeah, I had some money left from Mimick when he was kidnapped. I put it all in. Friends of his gave us loans. It's a long story and not a very pleasant one about the nature of humanity.

But we managed to collect it. We had a negotiator that came from England, and that negotiation was paid by Jim Cameron, who has been my friend for more than 30 years. The director. The director. Who directed Titanic, among other things.

Titanic, Arinator 2, Avatar, yeah. Did your father ever pay you back? Yeah, eventually. I mean, that was a source of disconnect. I had to move to Texas, and for a couple of years, you know, we didn't stay in very close contact. He, you know, is too personal to discuss, but, you know, eventually he came around

and he did pay me back and I think we ended up in great love and great understanding of the fact that my dad was not my dad he was a guy that played my dad on my particular sitcom and my dad and I understood each other

we're at the end of the day very similar and very different but I loved him so much so I have to ask you live in L.A. There's been quite a large ice crack down there. Mm-hmm. And you're Mexican, you have an accent. Yeah, yeah.

Has anybody from ICE stopped you and asked for your papers? Not yet, but if we ever meet in person, I'll show you I have a wallet the size of a leather portfolio, and I always carry my papers. I have been stopped in the past. and asked to show my papers in the past and ask pointed questions in the past pulled aside in immigration in the past. So I have all my papers with me at all times

and it is a very difficult time when there is no voice for the other and I think that understanding that the other is you is crucial. Well, you experienced that when you were very young too. Exile as had been. Momentos, and extremely traumatic. I haven't processed it, but I did it in the best way possible.

I looked for a home in Spain. I looked for a home in Toronto. I made a home in Toronto in a way. And I, you know, when I got to Mexico, I love going to Mexico. And at the same time, I have to admit that I get sort of PTSD here and there, you know. PTSD? Yeah, I feel like. Something may happen at any moment or...

Because of the kidnapping? Yes, because, I mean, when it lasts 72 days, you go through all the stages of grief five times. Right. You know, it increased my sense of being unmoored in my existence, not belonging in my existence. You know, it reaffirmed that feeling. That was originally from childhood, and now as an adult, I feel it in a different way. But, you know, as Marty Feldman puts in Young Frankenstein, it could be worse. It could be raining.

Do you like Young Frankenstein? I adore it. That's a movie that is more people think is based on the whale movies. It's partially based on that, but more than any other movie. And I recommend this movie wholeheartedly. It's based very much on Son of Frankenstein, which is a great Frankenstein movie. Really, really terrific. Do you have a favorite song from Young Frankenstein?

Yes, I think that the point of this agreement between Jim Wilder and Mel Brooks, which is the most brilliant moment, is putting on the Ritz. Yes. I think that's not only one of the greatest comedies ever made. It's one of the great Frankenstein movies ever made. It is so much its own identity that people believe, erroneously, that the blind hermit comes from young Frankenstein sometimes. And it comes obviously from the novel

and from Bride of Frankenstein, the whale movie, which is an exquisite sequel to the first Frankenstein. Guillermo Zotura, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming back to the show. Always a pleasure, and thank you for the wisdom and the careful guiding of this lengthy interview, which I adored every second of.

I really appreciate you saying that. I love talking with you. Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the new film Frankenstein. Ladies and gentlemen, madame de monsieur, domen and heron, from what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues, may I now present a cultured, sophisticated man about town. Hit it! If you're blue and you don't.

know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits. Different types who wear a day coat pants with stripes or cut away coat perfect fits. Bring mehese. Dressed up like a million dollar trooper. Try mighty hard to look like Gary Cooper. Come let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks or Rumbarellers in their mix. Bally! That was Gene Hackman and Peter Boyle from the film Young Frankenstein. After we take a short break, Justin Chang reviews a new film by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi after he spent seven months in prison.

The film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This is fresh air. This is fresh air. In February 2020, after spending seven months in prison, the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahyhi was released after going to on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration. Since then, he's directed a new movie called it was just an accident, and like most of his films to date, it was shot in secret and without the approval of the Iranian government. The movie won the Palm Door, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and was submitted by France, one of its co-producing countries, in the Oscar's

best international feature category. It was just an accident as now playing in select theaters. Our film Critic Justin Chang has this review. When the Iranian director Jafar Panihi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some of us as something close to a miracle. For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panihani had been forbidden to travel outside Iran. He'd also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity, and continued to shoot films in secret. But then in 2022, Panihee was arrested again

and imprisoned. When he announced seven months later that he was beginning a hunger strike, many of us feared it would end with his death. Instead, he was released after two days, and has been free to travel ever since. It's an astonishing real-life story, one that for tension and peril may well rival the one that Panahey tells in his new film, it was just an accident. This remarkable movie, which ended up winning the Palmedore at Cannes, feels like a liberated work in every sense. In his recent, more under-the-radar films, like Three Faces or No Bears, Panahe sometimes seemed to be speaking in code, or through layers of parable. But there's nothing cryptic or ruminative about it was just an accident. It's a blast of pure

anti-authoritarian rage, a gripping and often shockingly funny revenge thriller that, as Panahy has said in interviews, was informed by the stories of people he met in prison. It begins on a dark night. When an auto mechanic named Vahed, played by Vahid Mobaseri, here's something in his shop that catches his attention. It's the sound of a customer's prosthetic leg, clomping slowly along, and it clearly triggers painful memories. Some time ago, Vahed was one of several people arrested while protesting for workers' rights. In prison, they were brutally tortured by a man they came to know as pegleg because of his prosthetic. Now Vahed could swear that the customer in his garage, whose name is Egbal, is Pegleg himself.

But since Vahed was blindfolded, during his torture, he can't trust his eyes, only his ears. What Vahed does next is shocking. The following day, after tailing Egbao for a while in his van, Vahed knocks the man out with a shovel, ties him up, transports him to a remote area, and tries to bury him alive. But Egbao regains consciousness and begs Vahed to stop, claiming that he isn't the culprit and has no idea what Vahed is talking about.

Vaheed puts Egbao back in his van and drives off to find others who can verify the man's identity. One of his fellow former prisoners is a photographer named Shiva, played by Miriam Afshari, who when he finds her is in the middle of taking a couple's pre-wedding photos. The bride, who's dressed in her full white gown, turns out to be one of pegleg's victims, too. Before long, Vahid's van has picked up so many passengers that it's starts to resemble a clown car, or maybe the yellow Volkswagen van from Little Miss Sunshine. Most of those passengers want Igbal dead, but none of them can be 100% certain he's the guilty party, and they bicker relentlessly about what to do next.

As deadly serious as everything is, Panehy pushes the action and the banter to often farcical extremes. He's made a road movie in which the characters keep going around and around in circles. It's startling just how funny it was just an accident can be. It's attuned to the comic futility, as well as the horror of the situation. There's an especially dry running gag, in which Vahid finds himself forced to bribe various people, from security guards to hospital nurses, a jab at the banal everyday corruption of life under an oppressive system.

As day bleeds into night, it was just an accident builds to a dramatic climax of last, incinerating emotional force, a sequence so intense you can practically feel Panahy's rage burning a hole through the screen. His movie, in weighing the question of revenge versus mercy, is an obvious warning to authoritarian regimes everywhere, but it also feels like a warning to people living under those regimes. Several weeks ago, I moderated a Q&A with Panahy in Los Angeles, a city he hadn't

visited in almost 20 years. While we were talking before the Q&A, Panahey turned to me with a grave look on his face and said, I'm worried about your country. Justin Chang is a film critic at the New Yorker. He reviewed it was just an accident. If you'd like to catch up on fresh air interviews you missed,

like this week's interviews with Ken Burns about his new PBS series on the Revolutionary War, or with Malala Yousafzai, who's written a new memoir, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of Fresh Air interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at w-h-y-y-y-dot-org slash Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishefsky. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorok, Anne-Baldonado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yucundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.