'He immediately sort of lit up,' Kraus said. It was pretty much their first big meeting, and Kraus, who knew del Toro was a fan of monster films, brought up the idea he'd been kicking around for years.

My head was thinking about horror films.'įast forward 20 years or so when Kraus and del Toro met in Toronto to discuss their collaboration on 'Trollhunters,' a young adult novel about a teen battling mysterious creatures the two co-wrote and adapted into a popular, Emmy-winning Netflix animated series.

'I was probably supposed to be getting ready to play or watching a teammate play. He distinctly remembers, he said, standing by a tennis court in Iowa and thinking about the idea of a janitor working in a laboratory who discovers a locked-up creature and tries to break it out. 'It was always one of the things in the hopper that I never got to.' 'I had the basic idea for the story as a teenager,' Kraus said via phone from Chicago, where he lives with his wife, Amanda, who he met in Wilmington. It features gorgeous illustrations by James Jean, and both mirrors and expands on the plot of the movie. Kraus also co-authored, with del Toro, a novel for adults titled 'The Shape of Water,' which comes out Feb. Kraus, 42, has seven novels to his credit - the smart, edgy young-adult titles include 'Rotters' (Random House, 2011), which is about a father-son grave robbing team - and he's billed in the opening credits as an associate producer of 'The Shape of Water,' for which del Toro has been very vocal about giving Kraus credit. The idea for 'The Shape of Water,' however, was born in Iowa more than a quarter century ago, and was swimming around in the head of the writer Daniel Kraus when he lived in Wilmington for five years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nominated for seven Golden Globes - it won a Best Director Golden Globe for writer/producer/director Guillermo del Toro ('Hellboy,' 'Pan's Labyrinth') earlier this month - the film is widely expected to get a few Oscar nods when Academy Award nominations are announced Tuesday. Part romantic fairy tale, part monster movie, part spy thriller, with elements of wince-inducing horror and an edge-of-the-seat escape sequence thrown in for good measure, 'The Shape of Water' is about a mute cleaning woman (played by the extraordinary Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with a human-like amphibian creature (Doug Jones in a suit that evokes the Creature from the Black Lagoon) who's being kept in captivity at a top-secret government facility. 'The Shape of Water' has to be one of the more unlikely success stories of this, or any, movie season.

The shape of water daniel kraus