47 Fun Facts About The Shape of Water

What is Elisa's job at the secret government laboratory in The Shape of Water?

A cleaner: she and Zelda are mopping blood off the laboratory floor when they find two severed fingers, their first sign of what the 'asset' in the tank can do.

In The Shape of Water, what food does Elisa bring the creature to win his trust?

Boiled eggs: Elisa smuggles hard-boiled eggs into the laboratory, then a record player and jazz records too, and their shared lunches by the tank become a courtship.

In which American city is The Shape of Water set?

Baltimore, in 1962: del Toro said that 'once upon a time in 1962' turns the story into a fairy tale for troubled times, so that audiences lower their guard and listen.

Which 1950s monster movie inspired The Shape of Water?

Creature from the Black Lagoon: as a boy del Toro watched the Gill-man swim beneath Julie Adams and felt, he said, 'an almost existential desire for them to end up together'.

How does Elisa communicate in The Shape of Water?

Sign language: Elisa is mute, with old scars on her neck, and her friends Giles and Zelda speak her signs aloud for everyone else.

Who plays the Amphibian Man?

Doug Jones said his first reaction to hearing that the creature was also the romantic lead was 'utter terror'; he then found its walk alone in a mirrored dance studio.

Who plays Colonel Richard Strickland?

Michael Shannon and del Toro agreed that in an old creature feature Strickland, the square-jawed government man, would have been the hero; here he turns out to be the monster.

Who plays Giles, Elisa's neighbour?

Richard Jenkins was cast without a meeting: del Toro simply emailed him, 'I want you to play Giles. I hope you like it as much as I do,' and Jenkins wrote back that he did.

What is Giles's profession in The Shape of Water?

Advertising illustrator: Giles paints a beaming family for a gelatin advert, only to hear that the client wants the dessert green and, worse, wants photographs instead of paintings.

Who plays Zelda, Elisa's talkative workmate, in The Shape of Water?

Octavia Spencer found it telling that the film's two voiceless characters are spoken for by an African American woman and a closeted gay man, people with few rights of their own in 1962.

Where did Strickland capture the creature in The Shape of Water?

A South American river: Strickland boasts that he dragged the creature out of the river muck himself, and sneers that the people living there worshipped it as a god and tossed it offerings.

Why does Strickland want the creature vivisected?

To gain an advantage in the Space Race: the creature can switch between two ways of breathing, and Strickland argues that cutting it open will show how to keep a man alive in orbit.

In The Shape of Water, the scientist Robert Hoffstetler is secretly what?

A Soviet spy: his handlers order him to kill the creature, but he cannot bring himself to destroy it and ends up helping Elisa smuggle it out of the laboratory alive.

Who plays Hoffstetler in The Shape of Water?

Michael Stuhlbarg's scientist catches Elisa in the middle of her rescue and, instead of raising the alarm, joins in, telling her how to keep the creature alive once it is out.

What does Giles keep buying in The Shape of Water just to see the young man at the counter?

Key lime pie is his excuse to chat; when the counterman proves a bigot and orders him out of his 'family restaurant', Giles goes home and tells Elisa he will help her after all.

Where does Elisa keep the creature in her apartment?

The bathtub is only a stopgap: Elisa means to free him at a nearby canal once heavy rain opens it to the sea, and while they wait for the weather his health starts to fail.

After the creature lays a hand on Giles in The Shape of Water, what does he find next morning?

His hair is growing back, and the gash the creature left on his arm has closed: the first proof of a healing power that it uses again at the canal.

What does the creature try to eat while Giles is supposed to be watching him?

One of Giles's cats, Pandora, ends up as his meal, yet Giles forgives him at once: he is a wild creature, he says, and cannot be asked to be anything else.

How does Strickland learn where the creature is to be released in The Shape of Water?

A calendar note in Elisa's apartment gives the plan away; Zelda's husband has already blurted out who took the creature, leaving her barely time to phone Elisa a warning.

How does Strickland die?

The creature slashes his throat seconds after healing its own bullet wounds, and Strickland's last words concede what he had mocked all along: 'You are a god.'

What happens to Elisa's neck scars in the final scene of The Shape of Water?

They open to reveal gills at the creature's touch, so that Elisa revives and can breathe underwater.

Del Toro hatched The Shape of Water over breakfast with Daniel Kraus, his co-writer on which story?

Trollhunters was the book they had met to plan; over breakfast Kraus mentioned an idea he had carried since he was 15, about a woman who breaks a captive creature out of a laboratory.

Which studio turned down del Toro's pitch for a monster remake in which the monster gets the girl?

Universal turned him down twice over: he asked to tell the story from the monster's point of view, then to let monster and heroine end up together, and it 'didn't go for' either.

Sally Hawkins studied Chaplin and Keaton to play Elisa, but which comedian did her director single out?

Stan Laurel, del Toro told her, 'can do a state of grace without conveying it verbally'; he gave her a set of silent comedies so that Elisa would move like nobody else in the film.

Besides 'royal and regal', what did del Toro tell the actor in the creature suit to 'sprinkle in'?

A matador: bullfighters, the actor explained, are graceful and confident and lead with the hips, which gave the creature a walk that was sensual as well as proud.

The creature's voice in The Shape of Water blends animal sounds with recordings of the director doing what?

Breathing: sound editor Nathan Robitaille 'harvested' del Toro's breaths between takes and layered them with animal noises, giving the director an unseen cameo in his own film.

Guillermo del Toro's Best Director Oscar followed wins by his fellow Mexicans Alfonso Cuarón and who else?

Alejandro G. Iñárritu had won twice running, for Birdman and The Revenant; del Toro opened his own speech, 'I am an immigrant, like Alfonso and Alejandro, my compadres.'

Fox Searchlight offered del Toro $3 million less if he made The Shape of Water in what form?

In black and white the ceiling was $17 million, against $20 million for colour; del Toro feared monochrome would look 'postmodern', and joked that colour got him three million more.

Where was The Shape of Water filmed?

Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario: the top-secret laboratory's brutalist exterior is really the humanities wing of the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.

What does Hoffstetler tell Elisa to mix into the creature's water to keep him alive?

Table salt: the creature needs salted water and a diet of raw protein, instructions the scientist hands over in the middle of the escape.

Who composed the score for The Shape of Water?

Alexandre Desplat said the opening melody turned out to be 'actually made of waves': without meaning to, he had written arpeggios that roll forward like water.

Which 1940s ballad does the mute Elisa suddenly sing in a fantasy dance with the creature?

You'll Never Know, the Oscar-winning song that Alice Faye introduced in 1943, turns the film into an old Hollywood musical for a few minutes: Elisa finds a voice and dances with the creature.

Which major festival prize did The Shape of Water win within days of its 2017 premiere?

The Golden Lion is Venice's top prize; accepting it, del Toro dedicated the award to young Mexican and Latin American filmmakers.

Alongside Best Picture and Best Director, which of these Oscars did The Shape of Water win?

Production Design: the flooded apartment of the opening shot was never wet, since the designers filled the set with vapour and hung the furniture and the actress on wires.

The Shape of Water is often called the second fantasy film to win Best Picture, after which?

The Return of the King won in 2004; fantasy wins so rarely that Forbes hailed The Shape of Water as the first outright 'sci-fi fantasy' ever to take the top prize.

Who hosted the 2018 Oscars at which The Shape of Water won Best Picture?

Jimmy Kimmel was back for a second year, twelve months after the night he hosted ended with La La Land wrongly announced as Best Picture instead of Moonlight.

A lawsuit claimed The Shape of Water copied a 1969 play about which captive laboratory animal?

A dolphin: Paul Zindel's estate sued over his play Let Me Hear You Whisper, but a judge threw the case out in 2018 and Zindel's son later accepted that the claims were unfounded.

Critic Rex Reed's scathing review of The Shape of Water went viral for naming the wrong man as its what?

Director: Reed credited the actor Benicio del Toro, misspelt his name and called him Spanish, when the film was made by the Mexican Guillermo del Toro.

Which car does Strickland buy in The Shape of Water after a salesman calls it 'the future'?

A Cadillac, sold to him as 'the Taj Mahal on wheels' and the car of a man headed for the future; he later corrects a colleague who admires its green paint, since the colour is teal.

Del Toro first told Sally Hawkins he was writing her a film, while drunk, at a party for which awards?

The Golden Globes: after what he recalled as more than a dozen tequilas, del Toro gave Hawkins a bear hug at an after-party and blurted out that he was writing a film for her.

The actor in the creature suit had already played a different amphibian man in which del Toro films?

Hellboy: there he was Abe Sapien, a talkative fish-man with a romance of his own in the sequel, though in the first film another actor's voice was dubbed over his.

What does Strickland carry to torment the creature in The Shape of Water?

A cattle prod, which he fondly calls his 'Alabama howdy-do'; he goes on using it even after the creature has bitten off two of his fingers.

What lies directly beneath Elisa's and Giles's apartments in The Shape of Water?

A cinema, the Orpheum: its gold-and-red auditorium is a real working theatre, while the two flats above it existed only as sets built on a sound stage.

What did The Shape of Water's composer deliberately withhold from the villain Strickland's scenes?

Any melody of his own: the composer reasoned that the story proves Strickland to be 'the devil, the alien, the non-human', so the villain gets no theme and no motif.

A year after naming the wrong Best Picture, which pair presented The Shape of Water's?

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were invited back after 2017, when they were handed the wrong envelope and read out La La Land instead of Moonlight; this time the card was right.

The Shape of Water was the first Best Picture winner with no acting or screenplay Oscar since which film?

Titanic won eleven Oscars in 1998 yet none for acting, and its script was not even nominated; The Shape of Water's screenplay and all three of its acting nominees lost.

Del Toro wrote Elisa for Sally Hawkins after admiring her in Fingersmith and which Mike Leigh comedy?

Happy-Go-Lucky made Hawkins's name as the relentlessly cheerful Poppy; del Toro admired it so much that he wrote the mute Elisa with nobody else in mind.