How to retell one of literature and cinema’s most familiar horror tales? Well, firstly, you go about locating the horror in, ahem, fresh places.  “The scene were James sucks the puss out of my hump …” begins Daniel Radcliffe with a sidelong grin at James McAvoy. “ ... it is in the script, but he doesn’t do it with his mouth. That was very much an onset twist, but it was great.”  Such are the nuts and bolts of Victor Frankenstein, a pungent reboot of Mary Shelley’s classic starring McAvoy as the titular scientist and Radcliffe as sidekick Igor. From the off, both the lead actors and the director, Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1, TV’s Sherlock), have been determined to get down and gory. During production this will involve a menagerie of animal parts, inventive puppeteering, electrical storms on- and offset, a hideous homunculus called Gordon, and two of Britain’s finest young actors.  As an “origin story”, it also fleshes out the personal history of Igor: when we first meet him, he is a filthy hunchback, imprisoned in a circus and forced to perform as a clown. Radcliffe, 26, is almost unrecognisable in these scenes and had to spend several weeks “road testing” the prosthetic hump. “Then I had a couple of sessions with a movement person,” the Harry Potter star adds. “But, definitely, if I’d had to do that for the whole film I would have been in trouble. Fortunately it was only 20 pages [of script].”  It is February 2014, and the cast and crew of Victor Frankenstein are bunkered in Crossness Pumping Station. This magnificent 1865 edifice is standing in for the scientist’s home and laboratory in a Victorian London at the dawn of the industrial and technological revolutions. McAvoy describes the sewage works on London’s eastern fringes as a “big s___house, but beautiful”, while production designer Eve Stewart opts for the more decorous “poo factory”. Appropriately enough, the action onset today is taking place in the building's bowels.  “To show the progressive nature of Victor Frankenstein I really wanted to investigate the heights of Victorian engineering,” says Stewart, a triple-Oscar-nominee (for Topsy-Turvy, The King’s Speech and Les Miserables and), by way of explaining her choice of location. “It is so fantastically interesting in Crossness that it gave me an incredible head-start with particular machinery and turbines – because I felt we had to explain how Victor was getting this enormous amount of electrical energy he’d need to create life.”  This sturdily physical set is begetting sturdily physical acting, admits McAvoy, 36. “It’s an example of the environment inspiring the action and making Dan and I go, ‘right, you’re up there, I’m down here, then we switch, then we chuck some stuff down …’ And we don’t need to do any of that. But it just feels that this room demands we tell a story about it.”  As I watch, Radcliffe and McAvoy bustle around an operating table surrounded by leavers, dials, cogs and flasks. They are filming a pivotal scene, in which Igor discovers the true nature of Frankenstein’s experiments. Over the course of several takes, they try out some familiar lines.  “It’s alive!” shouts Radcliffe. “It’s aliiiiiiive!” booms an even more animated McAvoy as the pair stare at a twitching monkey-dog thing. This is Gordon, Frankenstein’s prototype “monster”.  The core difference in this version of Shelley’s 1818 novel – written by Max Landis (son of American Werewolf In London director John Landis) – is the relationship between Igor and Dr Frankenstein, not least because Igor doesn’t feature in the book. The 26-year-old Harry Potter alum’s character begins the film an unfortunate wretch, a hunchback imprisoned in a circus. Only an obsession with a high-wire artiste (played by Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay) and an academic interest in human anatomy offer Igor a lifeline from his day-job as a much-abused clown.  Then McAvoy’s charismatic, grandiloquent doctor rolls up, rolls up. He’s visiting the circus in search of spare animal parts, the better to pursue his dream of stitching together new life. Frankenstein recognises Igor’s medical skills, springs him from his circus cage and spirits the younger man back to his home lab. Enter the pus-sucking scene, as the good doctor liberates Igor from the hump that has bent him double his whole life.  A double-act – a bromance, even – is born. The believability of this, states McGuigan, was fundamental to his film. Equally important, adds the director, “is that they have different kinds of energy; they rub against each other. For me James McAvoy is a powerhouse, the heartbeat of the film, if you like. Victor is incredibly intense and passionate about science, and he’s holding a dark secret. And with Daniel you have the soul of the film – even though he’s very grateful for what Victor did for him, he's also the one person who questions his morality.”  McGuigan, who’s directed four Sherlock episodes (including the BBC series’ 2010 debut, A Study In Pink), compares it to the Holmes/Watson dynamic.  “Martin Freeman was the one who would question Benedict Cumberbatch, which also allows Sherlock to be as sociopathic as he was. Because at least then there’s someone saying, ‘you’re a bit of an asshole.’ And everyone watching can go, ‘oh yeah, that’s what I was thinking.’”  The cast and crew’s enthusiasm for eschewing slick CGI in favour of ickily practical effects is a creative approach born of budgetary necessity. Shawn Levy (Real Steel) was originally attached to direct. He was subsequently quoted as saying his vision for Landis’s script would not be cheap. But the studio, Fox, preferred a more modestly budgeted vision. Enter Scottish director McGuigan.  “The studio said, ‘we’ll make this film if you can make it for this amount,’” McGuigan tells me over the phone from America, where he’s currently working on a secret Marvel project. “And ‘this amount’ won’t allow you to do motion-capture, CGI and all that stuff. Which was good for me – it took the emphasis away from the monster itself … And it became a case of seeing how much you could get through the camera – and with that comes invention.  “It was still a fair amount of dosh, don’t get me wrong,” he clarifies, “but it wasn’t what you would think it was. Hopefully you watch it and go, ‘that’s a $100 million movie.’ But it certainly isn’t.”  For Angus Bickerton, McGuigan’s desire for horror you “get through the camera” meant building Gordon from the fur up.  “He’s meant to be head and chest of a monkey, hind legs of a hyena, one horrendous long ape arm and one deer arm,” explains the film’s Visual Effects Supervisor. But, clarifies Rob Mayor of leading special make-up effects house Millennium FX, no animals were harmed in the making of Victor Frankenstein. “The whole of Gordon was sculpted in clay, moulded and cast out in a mix of foam latex and a soft silicon rubber.”  Still, even puppetry and minimal post-production effects have their limits. For the scenes where Igor flees an angry, flailing, sparking Gordon, the filmmakers had an even more practical solution.  “We had a stunt artist who’s very slight, and she stood in for Gordon in a silver mo-cap suit,” says Bickerton. “So in a couple of shots where Daniel’s wrestling with Gordon, he’s actually wrestling with a small, five-foot stunt lady called Talila Craig.”  At the other end of the physical scale, and of the story, is a six-foot-10 Frenchman called Guillaume Delaunay. Bulked out by prosthetics designed by Mayor, he plays the monster that makes an appearance as this Frankenstein races to a quasi-traditional narrative climax. With scientist-and-sidekick pursued by a God-fearing, pitchfork-wielding policeman (Andrew Scott, latterly of Spectre), in scenes partly shot at Aberdeenshire's Dunnottar Castle, Victor and Igor hole up in a remote fortress, intent on trammelling the power of lightning.  Offset, actual storms were buffeting the production. Stewart recalls a 2am emergency call, “when half the circus tent was zooming down the M3. But it did work brilliantly, the more slippery and slimy and awful it got. It was tough to work in but visually for me it was a joy.”  Not so much, perhaps, for Delaunay. “We shot him horizontally in his cage when he was being brought back to life,” recalls Bickerton. “We turned on all the water and the rain – we pumped out two tonnes of water in two minutes. So he’s covered up, draped with cloth, encased in a full body suit, getting drenched. Effectively we were waterboarding the poor guy.”  Still, at least he was secure. In constructing his cage, Stewart sought the help of a “guy who’d done big rock’n’roll rigs. He’d just been flying Pink over a huge stadium on her last world tour. So he was really helpful in getting the monster’s winches and harnesses sorted.”  Ultimately though, this film is less about the monsters than the men who make them – a message underpinned by the changing of the film’s title, post-shoot, from Frankenstein to Victor Frankenstein. As McAvoy says: “We’re giving the name back to Dr Vic.” Accordingly, the key science that matters in the Landis/McGuigan reboot is the chemistry between the leads.  When I meet them again in a central London hotel 20 months after filming, the actors are, of course, full of praise for each other. Radcliffe was first to commit to the production, and when McAvoy heard who his sparring partner would be, “I said yes immediately”.  “And I was really f___ing relieved when James said yes!” adds Radcliffe with a laugh. The pair had met only once previously, backstage at London’s Trafalgar Studios during McAvoy’s 2013 run playing Macbeth. “All I’d heard about James was that I was going to love working with him as we had a very similar work ethic and attitude.”  Still, for all the appeal of seeing two of Britain’s most exciting (not to mention successful) actors sharing a screen for the first time, as Igor’s voice-over says at the start of Victor Frankenstein: “You know this story …”  And right now we know it very well. While Victor Frankenstein was filming the Aaron Eckhart actioner I, Frankenstein was released. Earlier this month a new TV iteration, The Frankenstein Chronicles, starring Sean Bean, began on ITV Encore. In America, too, there’s a Shelley-inspired TV series looming, although it’s changed its name (twice) from The Frankenstein Code, first to Lookinglass and now Second Chance.  Presumably both these hugely in-demand actors needed reassurance from the off that this Frankenstein would offer something new?  “Yes,” says Radcliffe with a firm nod. “But as much reassurance as we needed was there in the script. It was very evident when you read the script that this is a story with a new energy and a new take on it, and a new central relationship between us two. Otherwise I would not have been there.”  “Dan and I are both quite front-footed,” McAvoy chips in. “That’s my default position. And he’s the same,” he said, gesturing to the co-star sharing couch space. “We got together, had a cigarette and said, ‘right, shall we get stuck in?’”  Victor Frankenstein is released on December 3
Join Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, and a disgusting monkey-hyena hybrid named Gordon as they jolt Mary Shelley's horror classic back to life