TO 'HELLBOY' AND BACK FILMMAKERS INFUSED ADAPTATION OF COMIC BOOK WITH SOUL, BEGINNING WITH STAR RON PERLMAN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Mike Mignola's cult comic book series ``Hellboy'' seems an unlikely candidate for big movie treatment. Even in this age of big comic book movies.

That's why it took the better part of a decade for the acclaimed, demonically funny franchise to hit the screen. Also, there was the way artsy horror director Guillermo del Toro (``Cronos,'' ``The Devil's Backbone'') wanted to make it. And it was rendered even less salable by del Toro's insistence on casting his favorite actor, the visually perfect but starpower-lacking Ron Perlman, to play Hellboy.

Then there was the promotionally tricky matter involving the movie's hero, an irreverent demon who swears, and often behaves like an angry truck driver. He usually saves the world from monsters worse than himself, and really isn't a bad guy to knock back a few six-packs with, but he still isn't an easy sell.

Anyway, del Toro wanted to remain true to the spirit of Mignola's beloved, if not widely known, comics while adding his own baroque touches. No wonder producers Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin were rejected by every financing entity in town before their relatively cheap (in the $60 million range) effects extravaganza finally found a home at Revolution Studios.

``We heard some crazy things on this movie.'' Levin recalls. `` 'Does he have to be red?' 'Does he have to have a tail at all?' 'Does he have to be called Hellboy?' ''

But the producers believed in the property. And even when interested actors with bigger star wattage might have gotten the movie made, the producers stuck with Perlman.

Gordon tells why. ``Wonderful actor, the right size, the right energy, a willingness. You know, any big name you give me, I'll tell you what you would have gone through to have them in makeup four to five hours a day.''

More than willing, the big guy loved being encased in Hellboy's scarlet latex from head to toe for five hours every morning during a punishing, four-month shoot.

An enthusiastic descent

``Would I turn this down? Are you out of your mind?'' says Perlman, who got his movie start wearing scads of Neanderthal makeup in ``Quest for Fire'' and is best-known for playing the soulful monster Vincent on TV's ``Beauty and the Beast.'' ``This is what you work a lifetime for. Try playing Hellboy for a day; you'll have the coolest time you'll ever have in your life.''

Even when the costume also requires a computerized rock-hammer hand, a tail with a radio-controlled mind of its own and two big, gnarly knobs on the forehead? (Hellboy breaks off his other-dimensional horns and sands down the stumps; it's a fashion choice.)

``To be transformed into somebody is the kind of challenge that I'm not a stranger to, and I've had a great deal of enjoyment solving those problems,'' Perlman notes. ``And I've been incredibly lucky that most of that transformational work has not been exploitative or crassly commercial. It's always in quest of a piece of humanity that is well worth spending time with, and Hellboy was the ultimate experience of that. Making the transformation every day to become that guy was the opposite of tough. It was the springboard that set me aglow and sparked my imagination in a way you hope to revel in.''

And despite Perlman's lofty exegesis, in case you're worried, Hellboy still swears like a sailor. But del Toro, too, talks a flowery aesthetic game when describing his vision for the movie.

``In '97, when I started writing it, I decided to make it about two things that were personal to me,'' the Mexican director says. ``One was, my father had just been kidnapped for 72 days. We bought him back, and for the first time in my life I felt like I wasn't somebody's son, I was a man.''

Thus, the movie emphasizes the father-son relationship between Hellboy and the kindly paranormal scientist, played by John Hurt, who raised him to be a hero from imp infancy. As for the other thing, del Toro also inserted a shy romance between the monster hero and fellow freak Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a pyro-kinetic fire starter who, in the comics, is no more than an evil-fighting colleague.

``I also wanted to give my own version of what love is,'' del Toro explains. ``My wife and I have been together for 21 years so far, and one of the things we've found out that was beautiful is that we love each other because we have defects, as opposed to demanding perfection from each other. So the movie's love story is a sort of anti-'Beauty and the Beast,' in a way. The man normally takes purity from the beauty and transforms from the beastly. I wanted to say that it's OK to have a dark side; you have to actually make peace with it and make the right decisions.''

Many more practical decisions had to be made in order to bring Mignola's darkly drawn vision to screen life. First, del Toro had to prove he could deliver an action hero hit, so he signed on to direct the horror comic book sequel ``Blade II.'' He also brought in Mignola as a visual consultant on the vampire-slayer thriller (which, like ``Hellboy,'' was filmed in the cost-efficient Czech capital, Prague), to gauge how well they might work together.

``Blade II'' was a hit, the two artists hit it off, and ``Hellboy'' finally became a go. But that doesn't mean profound creative differences were avoided.

``There were places in the script where I felt he was overstating certain things,'' Mignola says of del Toro. ``Emotion stuff always makes me very nervous, to have characters come out and say their feelings. All that stuff ended up getting edited out. But I don't remember any real hard-core fights. The things that I disliked in the script, most of them went out in a snap. One of them, I had to bribe out.''

Del Toro, it seems, went through greater pain to wed his and Mignola's sensibilities together. At the same time, he insisted that the comics writer/illustrator never deferred to him just because he was the director.

``Mike's line and his light are very concise, and he has the cleanest Gothic environments ever made, where an arch is just defined by a big shadow,'' del Toro notes. ``There was a lot of the comic I knew it was a lost battle to try and translate. But what I think 'Hellboy' is, rather than an exact translation of the comic, is a fusion of my concerns and Mike's.''

No OD of CG effects

Perlman, who appeared in ``Cronos'' and ``Blade II,'' has the same kind of reverence for del Toro. Especially when it comes to what the effects- friendly actor feels is the director's judicious use of computer generated imagery, even in such a fantasy spectacle as ``Hellboy.''

``Guillermo tries to use visual effects and computer graphic imaging purely as a punctuation and not as a sentence,'' Perlman observes. ``So, whenever it was humanly possible, he used real time, three-dimensional photographing of objects. Like Sammael was always a real person you could shake hands with. And Hellboy was, almost all the time, as well.''

Sammael is a multitentacled, ever-multiplying extra-dimensional creature that Hellboy constantly battles.

``Sometimes, Sammael's head is CG but the rest of the character is real; sometimes he's all CG but it looks real,'' del Toro explains. ``It's really about fooling the eye, combining. I think that only very lazy filmmaking resorts completely to CG.''

It's also about keeping it real. Or as real as a concept as wild as ``Hellboy'' can appear, anyway.

The result works for Mignola, too.

``It says something to the fact that the film is so faithful to my stuff that, on the screen, I saw what I was doing, then I saw the quick follow-through, which I wasn't doing,'' the graphic novelist explains.

As for Perlman, who at 53 finds the superhero business ``just delicious,'' headlining one of the most outre comic book adaptations yet was an oddly familiar experience.

``It's weird that I got to play the Beast and also weird that I got to play Hellboy,'' the actor reckons. ``But maybe not so weird. My whole life, particularly the early years of growing up, has been about finding a way to manage what I felt was monstrous about myself, and to either suppress it or overcompensate for it to the point where that wasn't the most obvious thing one saw when one looked at me. I have a true attraction to the people who are grappling with that problem. And I have no interest in anyone who doesn't see the monstrousness in themselves.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) GIVE 'em `Hellboy'

(2) no caption (`Hellboy')

(3) In a change from the comic book, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) embarks on a quiet romance with fire starter Liz (Selma Blair) in director Guillermo del Toro's movie. ``I ... wanted to give my own version of what love is,'' del Toro says. ``I wanted to say that it's OK to have a dark side.''

(4) ``Hellboy'' creator Mike Mignola, left, and director Guillermo del Toro found themselves in agreement - most of the time.