How newly married Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan found the dark heart of ‘Nightmare Alley’

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s last movie, “The Shape of Water,” was a box-office hit that won four Academy Awards, including director and best picture. With a similar visual style to Del Toro’s previous work, beautifully lit and finely crafted, “Nightmare Alley” steers the veteran filmmaker into new territory. — Guillermo Del Toro on ‘Nightmare Alley’ It was shortly after making his first film, 1993’s “Cronos,” that Del Toro initially tried to pursue a remake along with actor and frequent collaborator Ron Perlman. One valuable resource was the introduction to the 2010 New York Review of Books edition of the novel — republished as a movie tie-in edition — featuring a foreword written by Nick Tosches, the writer best known for explorations of the underworld and demimondes, including his definitive 1992 biography of Dean Martin, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.” It was in Tosches’ essay that Morgan and Del Toro discovered the existence of a 1959 letter written by Gresham in which he said, “Stan is the author.” “There was a merging of him in Stanton,” said Morgan. The two watched a lot of movies together while working on the screenplay, noting how they purposefully stayed away from the greatest hits of film noir like “Out of the Past,” “The Maltese Falcon” or “Laura.” Soon they began sweetly rattling off movies they did watch, trying to recall their favorite movies with actor Charles McGraw or debating the true nature of a character played by Lizabeth Scott in “Too Late for Tears,” when Del Toro noted, “We’re turning into the lost interview from ‘When Harry Met Sally.’” Del Toro jokingly said that the two of them “became a two-headed monster” as they were working on the project.