Guillermo del Toro admits 'The Shape of Water' was "horrible to shoot".
Guillermo del Toro
The 53-year-old Mexican filmmaker is currently receiving lots of praise for his gothic romance - which has received 13 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director - but he's confessed that the team behind the film were out of money "every day".
He revealed to Den of Geek: "It was horrible to shoot.
"Logistically. Artistically, it was great - the actors themselves, the camera, the sets, all beautiful.
"But every day we were out of time, out of money. If you had a set that didn't need more than two walls, it was two walls.
"It was only what you needed. We were constantly maximising, to the point where we only had one Cadillac - normally you have two Cadillacs that are identical so you can crash one, but we couldn't.
"We said, 'if we're gonna crash the Cadillac, we have to shoot it in order', because we had no money to repair it."
The new film follows mute Elisa [Sally Hawkins] who works as a cleaning lady in a high-security laboratory in 1962.
Her life changes when she falls in love with a mysterious, scaled creature from South America that lives in a water tank.
She soon learns that its fate and survival lies in the hands of a hostile government agent and a marine biologist.
And del Toro admitted the film is about "celebrating imperfection, celebrating otherness" and joked that it's his first "life-affirming" movie.
He said: "It's about celebrating imperfection, celebrating otherness, falling in love with the other, you know?
"It's not so much tolerance as it is love. But it's a very humanistic movie. It's very life-affirming, which I normally don't do. I don't normally do life-affirming movies."
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