The entire cast is back, led by Ron Perlman as the big red demon, Selma Blair as his firestarter girlfriend Liz Sherman and Doug Jones as psychic amphibian Abe Sapien. They are joined by new characters, including Johann Krauss (John Alexander and James Dodd, voiced by Seth MacFarlane), Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) and his empathetic twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton).

Like the first film, Hellboy II is based on characters and situations from Mignola's Dark Horse comic-book series. But where the first film closely tracked Mignola's graphic novel Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Hellboy II is an original story in which the title character and the team at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense must deal with an uprising against humans by magical creatures led by elf prince Nuada. Del Toro took a moment to speak with reporters last week about Hellboy II, which opens July 11.Guillermo del Toro, would you say that this Hellboy is more Guillermo and less Mignola?

Del Toro: I'm not sure about that. I think the first part of the sentence I agree with, but the funny thing is, there [is] accidentally Mignola-esque stuff and purposefully Mignola stuff, because Mike and I did come up with the basic storyline, and I think that that's the direction he's taking the magical world in the comics. By coincidence. When I told him, he said, "That's exactly what we're planning already." And there are moments in the film, like the moment the Golden Army opens, that [are] completely chiaroscuro, backlit by the fire, and if you freeze-frame it, that would be a Mignola frame. ... The difference is there was a lot more freedom for me to—I don't want to say appropriate, because it was not an act of will—to just feel liberated, you know? To do my stuff. ... Can you talk a little bit about the creation of the troll market scene, in which the BPRD team enters a fantastical marketplace filled with otherworldly creatures?

Del Toro: The idea was we would create a whole backstory, and a whole backstory for the characters, but we would never verbalize it. ... We would move the camera around as if we were in any other location: a shopping mall, a bazaar in the Far East. We would not do the thing that is done so often in these things, where you do a close-up of each monster that you spend some money on, and you give them each a little vignette. We said, "We are going to keep them in the background, as if we had wandered into a real place, and we're just shooting a real place." ...

We did get some notes and concerns [from the studio], and they were saying, "Why not shoot each creature? We spent $100,000 on this creature, and he's just in the background!" And I said, "Because that's where you're flaunting it. When you flaunt it is really when you don't care." You say, "Well, yes, there is a [20-foot] monster lurking in the background, but I'm never going to see it again." We have some things we designed called the Striders, which are creatures that are only seen in the opening shot. They're like headless elephants, ... and we never see them again. Never. And we spent a hundred-and-something thousand dollars in modeling them. And I said, "No, but that's the whole point." ... It's like when you're [on] the first date with the girl, you leave a big tip ... and that's really impressive. They go, "Hmm. He left a 40 percent tip. He's a nice guy, you know?"Speaking of loves and girls, you have a really cool love story for Abe Sapien, and Hellboy's got some domestic problems.

Del Toro: The two movies are semi-autobiographical [laughs]. And I do put a lot [in]. My wife recognizes a lot of the details, including the moment when, you know, you get asked, "Do you need everyone to love you? Aren't I enough?" ... It's never been verbalized, but you have those moments when you're a filmmaker, when you're a storyteller. At some point in your life, you have to say, "OK, who matters in my life?" And then you have to make a decision. And I think Hellboy, the way he has evolved and the way he is an irresponsible knucklehead, but adorable, I get that. It's empathy for me. ... There's a great moment which I have gone through when he gets asked, "Why are you with me?" And he goes [makes choking sound]. He can't speak. That's a male conversation, that's a male idea of conversation. ... Yeah, that and a beer. When guys are together, you've got the beer, and you're going, "Yeah. Yeah." That's an idea of a shared afternoon, you know? And I love that he's unable to verbalize things, but then it takes a spear in the heart for him to say, "No, no, no, wait. Let me tell you, I understand." I like that. So I write the characters from ... exactly things I do know and that are close to my heart.In your other films, such as Pan's Labyrinth, you've gone to folklore and mythology with some of the creatures, and Mike Mignola has used a lot of folklore in his Hellboy books. Is there a lot of that kind of stuff in this, or is it all made up?

Del Toro: I've always collected folklore and fairy tales. I think ... a good section of my library is dedicated to that and mythology. ... As I was preparing for Pan's Labyrinth, I realized one thing: There were a lot of rules that repeated themselves and this and that, and I started making notations, and I realized that they interacted also with Hellboy, the second movie. And you know, the idea of the underworld, or the world beneath, and the king and the world with humans and the creation of something to destroy [everything]: All that is somewhere floating in the Eddas [Norse mythology] or the sagas or the folktales, and I grabbed a lot from that.

For instance, [the fact that] trolls are afraid of canaries is something I made up, but it sounds perfectly reasonable. And what I found in life is, if you actually do the research, there are [such things]. I'll give you an example. [In] 1944, in the first Hellboy, I said, "Nazi submarines disembarked in Scotland." And I just came up with that. And then I did the research, and it took me a while, but I found many sightings. Actually there was a high-trafficked area by Nazi submarines in '44 in Scotland. ...You build your creatures out of makeup and costumes and puppets instead of using computer graphics and animation. Do you feel like CG loses a sense of character? What made you do that?

Del Toro: George Harrison's company ... was called Handmade Films, and I think films should be handmade. I have this idea that is a notion that is probably the same thing that leads me to keep the props from my films. I find a way to buy them, or I get them from the studio and I give them back a piece of salary or whatever, because I love that there are tangible things. ... We say, "Well, but, for an audience, they don't care if it's real." They do. And the fact is, the average eye of just a regular Joe is, although they cannot verbalize things, you're trained by thousands of hours of TV, thousands of hours of digital effects, media hitting you all of the time. And your eye knows. And it doesn't matter. Sometimes my daughters, who are pretty savvy at the ages of 7 and 12, they look at the movies, and they say, "That monster is computer-generated?" And I say, "Nope, it's real." But what is nice is they are confounded. And I know if I am fooling a 12-year-old eye, which, you know, plays more video games than anyone and watches more TV, I'm happy. ...

I'll tell you one effect that I bet you didn't notice. ... The Irish landscape, it was shot next to a freeway in Hungary. Instead of the sea and the cliffs, we had the most horrible freeway, with red trucks passing. And what we did is we shot high-definition plates in Ireland, and we composite them together, and that's invisible. So, you know, if you know when to go digital and when not to go digital, you end up having the eye fooled. And I learned this by screwing up many times in other movies.Do you do it also for the actors, so they have something to work to?

Del Toro: Yes, absolutely. ... If you come from theater, if you know the very essence of the craft, an actor only acts in reaction. A real actor doesn't throw, he catches. You know, the guy is about the look in the eye of the other actor, not waiting for the other line but being surprised by it. And in the same way, when you walk, yeah, by your second day you're fed up by any set. But when you walk the first day, and the Golden Army chamber is the size of a football stadium—because we built it in a stadium—and you receive that first impression, it's an imprint that's going to inform the rest of your acting. Even by the second day, it's a stinky set and you're tired of it, you know?How much, when you're adapting someone else's material, like Mike Mignola's comic-book series, is it a struggle or is it a pleasure to try and find ways to make it yours?

Del Toro: I said in the best analogy, it's like marrying a widow. You have to be very respectful of the late husband, but at some point, you're going to get in bed. The late husband is not going to matter anymore, or he better not. And I think that it's the same with material. There's a point where you go, "I have only my instinct to guide me through this section." It's co-exploring. And in the case of Hellboy, I've been blessed with a guy like Mike, who is the most generous landlord of the Hellboy real estate. He says, essentially, "Move in! Decorate it as you want and make it yours." And he has done that. ...

I've been directing with him on the animated series, which is a very different entity from the movies and the video game, [and] on the video game, which is a very different entity than the comics or the animated movies, and on the movies. And each of them has something in common, but each of them is also different. ... And he says, "Make it yours, because the worst thing that can happen is for you to try to look like me."

So Hellboy II is tortilla cinema.Would you do Hellboy III?

Del Toro: I would love that. There was a gap of four years between the first Hellboy and the second Hellboy, and provided that Ron takes his medicine, I think he can stay healthy enough and we can have a Hellboy III on the other end. The thing is, every time you take one movie, you are always postponing others, like At the Mountains of Madness [based on H.P. Lovecraft's book] or another of the small movies, one I'm trying to write called Saturn and the End of Days, which is the apocalypse seen from the point of view of a kid, a boy, a 7-year-old. And so, you know, every choice, you know—whatever day you drive on the freeway, you're not climbing Mount Everest, right?