Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley marks the filmmaker’s first foray into noir. The movie adapts the novel by William Lindsay Gresham and arrives in theaters on December 17.

Bradley Cooper stars as an ambitious young carny, Stan Carlisle, with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words. Here, we see him hooking up with a female psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) even more dangerous than he is.

While del Toro’s latest might be a slight genre shift from his usual output, it very much bears his imprint in production design and sympathy for monsters. In this case, the monster happens to be human (read our full review here).

Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting participated in a press conference where del Toro spoke about his love of noir and the choices behind the film’s sets.

Why noir?

Del Toro explained how far back his love of noir extends: “When I was a kid, I wanted to do just horror, or fantasy and noir. They were my first loves. I did a whole noir little short in the provinces in Mexico about corrupt policemen. I was enamored, first of all, of the literature of the writing. I loved James M. Cain, Donald Westlake. I love all the black masks and detective stories. Chandler, Cornell Woolrich. And the harder ones, James Hadley Chase and so forth all the way to the neo-noir that started in Europe. The Italians, Massimo Carlotto, in Mexico, Paco Ignacio Taibo, and so forth. I was in love with that because I think horror is a genre that rips off the lid of the pretense of normalcy and exposes very raw moral questions.

“It’s very much a parable genre in a way, and it always attracts me that it reflects the time the movies were made in. You can see a post-WWII genre movie with Robert Mitchum, and you get the sense of the time, the anxiety of the time. You then watch post-Vietnam, and Elliott Gould, The Long Goodbye, and it reflects that time. The Postman Always Rings Twice. I thought these are genres that are very sensitive to what’s going on in the world at that time.”

Cinematographer and del Toro collaborator Dan Laustsen (Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water) revealed that the look for Nightmare Alley came from discussions rather than specific film influences. “When I’m doing a movie with Guillermo, we are never looking at other movies. We are always looking at the movie we are going to do. We are not like going back and watching Citizen Kane. We have a lot of ideas, and especially Guillermo has a lot of ideas in the beginning about how the movie should look, and everybody’s coming into the same palette.”

On the detailed production design:

Del Toro is known for his films’ “eye-protein,” a term he coined to describe how the lush production designs serve a purpose beyond aesthetics. That continues in Nightmare Alley, where color choices and shapes offer symbolism. The filmmaker explains, “When we came to everyone in the cast, we came in with all the drawings and paintings, and everything was ciphered. The circles were going to be framing Stan the whole time. It was seen through mirrors and reflecting this and that. He abandons the color red when he leaves the carnival. The only four things in red in the city are Molly’s dress, Lilith’s lips, the Salvation Army, and blood. And that’s it. The rest is art directed not to have any red on.”

Production designer Tamara Deverell (The Shape of Water) elaborated on this, “Well, the shapes were definitely a very distinct choice in discussion with Guillermo. I don’t know it was universal, this round shape that we had framing Stan, framing Molly. We used it in the dressing room. So, that was a constant theme for us. Curved arches are very much Guillermo’s thing.

“Guillermo’s such a fountain of knowledge and like he has the macro vision, but he has the micro vision. You end up paying attention to not just the big wide view of the set, but the little props become intensely important. It’s not just red to Guillermo; it’s pigeon red of the Chinese Zhou dynasty, a lacquer red that we have to copy. As a production designer, you embrace everything about Guillermo. It’s just visual, visual, visual, and I soak it up. I’ve been soaking it up for years, whether I worked on the film or not.”

Ron Perlman and Mark Povinelli in the film NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Photo by Kerry Hayes. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

Nightmare Alley’s set pieces are completely practical, too. That includes the stunning carnival. Deverell explains, “You know it’s funny the first approach we had for the carnival is I made little white blocks, literally like a little toy of the carnival, and Guillermo and I just played with them. This was so early on; how do we want this? Do we want to figure eight? Do we want to do a passage through? What are the alleys? Because it really was about alleys and passageway, even in the carnival. What was the geometry, the geography of the whole carnival? Then we modeled it up, and we did an entire VR thing in the carnival that you put the thing on, and you could walk through the carnival, which was fun.

 “We constructed 100% of the carnival, and we were halfway through when COVID hit. We literally came back and saw that half of the tents had just flown away. It was very heartrending, but I’m glad we got the film done. So, yeah, it was 100% constructed. It was heavily researched, especially the banners. We actually bought a couple of banners. We looked at a lot of Fred Johnson, who’s a famous, famous top-notch artist of circus banners, a lot and had a couple of actual Fred Johnsons in the art department to copy and replicate.”

Nightmare Alley releases in theaters on December 17, 2021.