-I'm a fan of yours for a long time,
and I really enjoyed this film.
It's a strange, beautiful film.
You speak of a creature in the clip.
But tell us a little bit.
Cold war. -Yes.
It's set in the early '60s.
The facility, the lab, is in Baltimore.
Just outside of Baltimore.
And, yes, my character, I'm a colonel in the army.
And I go down and I find this thing in the Amazon River.
And we're trying to figure out what makes it work.
It's an amphibious being.
It can be in the water and the land.
And it's kind of tied into the Cold War.
The Americans and the Russians trying to figure out
if there is anything --
any kind of advantage they can get from this creature.
-You know, a lot of creatures these days are CGI.
That is not the case in this film.
And you were very cruel to the creature,
which may be difficult, because this was an actual --
there was an actor in here the whole time.
-Oh, yeah, there was a fella in there, Doug Jones.
If you're familiar with Guillermo del Toro's movies,
Doug has played several creatures for Guillermo.
-Yeah, "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Hellboy."
-The one with the eyes in the hand.
I don't know if this means anything to you.
But, yeah, Doug is kind of --
I've described him as Guillermo's monk.
And Guillermo seems to like that description.
He kind of --
Guillermo comes up with the most fantastical beings imaginable.
And Doug makes them a reality
along with, obviously, the design of the costume.
But I think the main pain Doug experienced was in his knees
because he had to spend a lot of time on his knees in the lab.
I don't think -- as far as I can tell,
we don't have any sour grapes between us.
-Oh, that's good. -Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-Like, when it was all over,
he didn't sort of passive aggressively
talk about his knees?
-No, no, no. [ Laughter ]
He's a very thin, thin man.
And the suit is, like, made out of rubber.
So it's basically like kneeling on a dish sponge
for, you know, five hours.
That's what I mean -- he's like a monk.
He's just very, you know -- he can go to another realm.
So me, like, prodding him is not really that big a deal.
-There are some beautiful old Cadillacs in this film.
Your character purchases one.
Is it true that you actually, like,
ruined one of the Cadillacs?
-Yeah, we had an incident one night.
There's a scene -- it's part of a chase sequence,
where I'm trying to figure out what's going on.
The creature has disappeared.
And so my character is in a mad dash
going here, there, and everywhere
trying to find the creature.
And there's a scene where I pull up in an old car,
and run into this building, run up this fire escape in the rain.
It's raining. It's night. You know, it's very dramatic.
And it's an old car, so the dash doesn't light up.
So it's really hard to see what gear you're in.
[ Laughter ]
So the second take we did,
I thought I clicked over into park, but I hadn't.
And I was halfway out
and I realized the car was still rolling.
And I tried to get my hand back on the gearshift.
But I was, like, sliding onto the ground.
And the car just very slowly ran into this --
like, a light post or something. [ Laughter ]
And ironically, they wound up using the first take.
[ Laughter ]
So didn't really even need to do the second take.
-Oh, gotcha. Yeah. -It was totally unnecessary.
But Guillermo did say that
because I was able to get rid of that light post,
he was able to do another shot he really wanted to do,
that the light post had actually been in his way.
-Oh, wow. [ Laughter ]
So you actually did a great favor to the production.
-Yeah, yeah.
So if he wins, you know, best director, he has me to thank.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
I've also read that you --
in between takes on film, which can sometimes be really long --
I don't think people quite understand how much time
is between the moments you actually act.
People think you're in character,
but that is incorrect.
-No, I'm just tired. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
-I'm tired. It's a really long day.
And I find small talk exhausting, so...
Just kidding. [ Laughter ]
No, so I -- I try to just kind of -- and also, you know,
the thing about it is, like, I'm used to doing theater.
I did a lot of theater starting out in Chicago.
And I -- some people say,
"How do you do something over and over and over again?"
But I love repetition.
Because as far as I'm concerned, you never get it perfect.
You never get it exactly right.
And there's something you're always --
it's not so much, like,
you can go deeper in your character or whatever.
It's just more like, "What am I not noticing?
What am I not paying attention to?
What other response could I have?"
It's just -- it's more like chess to me,
trying to figure out the exact way through it. Yeah.
-But do you find in film that --
Do you have the amount of repetition you have in theater?
Or is it just -- -Sometimes.
Guillermo says, you know --
Because Guillermo is a real perfectionist, very obsessive.
And he's like, "I may have met my match in Michael Shannon."
He would be happy to --
He's like, "We got it. Let's move on."
I'm like, "One more?"
He's like, "What are you going to do?"
And I'm like, "I don't know! Let's do it again!"
-Meanwhile, Doug's on his knees being like, "One more?"
-He's like, "Yeah, 10 more! Please!
I don't need these things."