Guillermo del Toro is a director with as varied a film catalogue as you’ll find. Cutting his teeth in horror and creature features, he’s gone on to tackle the comic book movie, create beloved romances, and now with his latest, Nightmare Alley, dives into the dark world of noir.
We went through all 11 of his feature films with del Toro himself, to recall his fondest memories from working on each of these projects, and to discover the lessons he learned along the way.
“Cronos is full of emotional content for me”, del Toro explains. “I mean, it's really a movie that’s almost like a family album. I'm very moved by it. As a director, I see some of the traits that have been continued in my career, but I also feel it's a very interesting movie because it's an old soul movie for somebody in his 20s.
“There are many things I would like to do over again in the movie, but there are some things that I loved - Federico Luppi, I think is fantastic and the industrialist places where I first started doing a certain camera move that I call the hinge, which is where I discover spaces by following a character. So it is full of good memories, like a family album.”
“It's one of the fundamental films for me, in that I learned to defend and understand that the audiovisual as aspects of a movie are narrative. I learned that those aspects are almost always unassailable, because the studio was so focused on the story and the characters changing, and it was so aggressive, but they allowed me to operate unchecked on the visual of the film. I'm incredibly proud of the way the movie feels and looks, and is where I started moving the camera in a way that became sort of my style in a sense.
I think that the movie has a couple of scenes that are amongst the best I've done.
“I think that the movie has a couple of scenes that are amongst the best I've done. The attack on the subway car by the insects is beautiful. The killing of the two kids and the dog is really nice, and her being taken into the platform by the giant insect is beautiful. The rest is really hard for me to disassociate from the hard memories.”
“The Devil's Backbone is basically what I call my first film. It's my third movie, but it's the first time I operate, protected and cared for, with Pedro Almodovar as producer, so I am able to bring that moving camera style that I started trying on Mimic. I bring it to maturity. It was not advice, it was a liberation. He basically said to me, ‘You have the reins, you are protected and we support you,’ and that was a huge change from Mimic.
“Blade II wanted to go first and they were trying to push their way, and I said, ‘If you want to take it away, take it away, but I need to do The Devil's Backbone before I do Blade II because I need to be completely in control as a director and complete recuperate the certainty of being in control before I go and deal with a star and all the action and all the big production. And that was exactly the thing that healed me.
“I think the ghost in that movie is one of the best creations in terms of characters that I have done visually and the reflection of what it is to be a ghost is so beautiful. It's a movie that is thematically, in a strange way, very related to Nightmare Alley. The character of Eduardo Noriega is basically a version of Stanton Carlisle in an early way.
“There's beauty to that film – I see some sequences or details of that movie in other movies. It's a director's directorial movie. A lot of directors like that movie, and I see it quoted, or we discuss it when we get together, so I'm very proud of it. I think it’s amongst the three best movies I've ever done.”
“It was absolutely a blast. It's when I started to want to experience huge changes from one movie to the other. I really almost came to the system of not repeating the same movie consecutively. I wanted a huge change. So if Devil's Backbone is chamber music, Blade II is black metal. It goes to what I think is the essence of action movies, which is very close to the musical genre, in that you basically have musical numbers tied by a story that is very melancholic… a variation in the Frankenstein theme with the character of Luke Goss. I love being able to combine insane action and brutality with this sort of little tragic story.
I had interest in the superhero movie when it was not pursued by the large sort of industry of the system.
“When I did Blade and I did Hellboy, it was sort of a counter to everything that was being done. It was a time in which superhero movies were not that dark, and I wanted to make them dark and make them adult. I loved the first Blade, and I thought I could add a layer of savagery to that franchise. I had interest in the superhero movie when it was not pursued by the large sort of industry of the system. I liked it when they were sort of contestatory, they were something different. I like to do things that are counter to what is being done.”
“One of the things that fascinates me about Mike Mignola (Hellboy’s creator) is that he combines the blue collar sensibility for Hellboy's job and at the same time, a deep knowledge of mythology and a deep sense of epic themes. I was very attracted to that. It's something that attracts me also to the Jack Kirby comics that I read when I was a kid. There's a pop grandeur to it, and I wanted very much to do it. It is one of the movies that I really wanted to do before I died because I love the character.
“It has a curious soundtrack. It has a comedy undertone in the relationship between Abe Sapien and Liz and Hellboy, and it also has horror moments with Kroenen and the Lovecraftian creature at the end. Kroenen is very different in the movie than Kroenen in the comics and the relationship between Broom and Hellboy is infinitely more tender in the movie. I've always been attracted to stories of fathers and sons.”
“Pan's Labyrinth represents a great fusion of everything I had learned in terms of tools and experiences in the movies that preceded it. For me personally, it kind of articulated all the movies at the same time, it made them make sense. There was a certain exuberance in the worlds and in the monsters of Pan's Labyrinth that I couldn't have done before. There was the emotional depth of The Devil's Backbone and the melancholy of The Devil's Backbone and Cronos. At the same time, there was the handling of effects and action that came from Blade and Hellboy. I was able to do set pieces with a lot more nimble camera work.
Pan's Labyrinth defines exactly where I was in my life at that moment, wondering if there was magic in the world.
“So it's almost like the first summation of what I have learned as a filmmaker, all put to the service of one of the most personal – if not the most personal – movies I've done. It ranks really high in that way. Pan's Labyrinth defines exactly where I was in my life at that moment, wondering if there was magic in the world. Not in a whimsical sense, but if the world was either terrible or beautiful or both at the same time, and the answer was both at the same time.
“The movie connected with an audience, and it still connects with an audience in a way that I think closely resembles the way I connected with movies when I was a cinephile.”
“Again, the will I have to go from one movie to an unexpected place next, it starts there. I didn't want to continue in the vein of what had been so successful in Pan's Labyrinth. I thought it was really dangerous not to go into a space that was different and more expansive. The funny thing is that Hellboy II, which I like more than Hellboy 1, is Hellboy by way of Pan's Labyrinth. Again, it’s the summation of everything that came before.
“It has an inventiveness and an exuberance, it's almost that pageantry of monsters and a celebration of the rare and uncanny as beautiful things. It also has the sense of loss that Pan's Labyrinth has regarding magic. You're basically portraying the twilight kingdom of a magical race. All the characters in the troll market are hiding, the nature God is fading, the prince is going to be the last in his lineage at the end of the movie. I think it also was a little reflection about what it is to be visible in the world and what you do with that, which I was feeling very much. It's strange, but every movie I do responds to what I feel about the world at the moment I make it.”
“Pacific Rim, on a good day, is amongst the top three I like. I think of it as one of the most beautiful movies I've made; the audio visual universe of that movie is absolutely arresting. I was trying something that was curious for me, it was to execute a completely silly premise in a completely serious, technically serious and narratively serious way whilst acknowledging that the solution to giant monsters would not be giant robots in the real world.
“I think the fact that the movie was badly damaged by a very complicated political, almost palatial entry in the wars between Legendary and Warner Brothers, which happened right at the release of this movie, but it's a movie that still managed to gross over $400 million worldwide. I really wanted to direct a sequel in which I revealed the nature of these consuming monsters that control the kaiju and reveal that the monsters were us. It was us in the future.”
“If I have tried to make action movies that have some strange core that goes against pure escapism, like to me, there's a melancholy on Pacific Rim and a melancholy on Blade II, and on the Hellboys that goes counter to the purely escapist action movie. I wanted to try an anti-perfect romance stance on a gothic romance. So I wanted to show that the love story really starts not when they first fall in love, but when they know each other and they know each other for the good and the bad, and how perfection has no place in love. It was a reflection that I like and that becomes much more pure in the next movie, which is The Shape of Water.
If you like Crimson Peak, even if you don't know me, you're already my friend.
“It was important for me to talk about the love of monstrosity and the monstrosity of love. It’s a world creation, you have to understand that for me, the movies exist at two levels – the dramaturgical level, which is the story and characters that kind of exist similar to other forms, and the purely world creation audio visual experience of the movie, which is the place that I find the most sacred and the one where I deposit most of my craft. I think it is one of the most beautiful, immersive vibes, so to speak, that I have created in Crimson Peak.”
“It's very fond to my heart precisely because it did not do good. So there's a thing I say, ‘If you like Crimson Peak, even if you don't know me, you're already my friend.’"
“It's this idea that I think all of my movies try to advocate for understanding imperfection, which is an extremely hard thing to do. If you love the imperfect, then you really love. It's easy to love the perfect person. It is much deeper to love the imperfect person. This I understand in my relationship with my parents, my siblings, my friends, my loved ones, my kids.
“I think that is a beautiful reflection that goes counter to the romantic idea that in a Beauty and the Beast story, the beast needs to transform into a beautiful being, to be accepted. I don't like that. I don't think love should demand transformation. It should demand acceptance.
“The movie was very urgent for me to phrase that message to myself mainly, but it was a crucial moment in my life and I needed to talk about that. The movie, in a way, does the reverse of Beauty and the Beast. It reveals that Sally Hawkin's character was always not of this world, and I think that's why the ending is so powerful. I think the movies that I like the most that I've done all have one thing in common – they have incredibly strong endings.
“I think that's what comes with age a little. It's always exciting to open a movie, but the goal should always be how you close it. In a strange way, it's what the voiceover says in Hellboy: ‘What makes a man, a man? Is it the way he starts, is it his origins, or is it what it does with them and the way it ends?’ I think that the answer is the end.”
“I think that the beauty for me of Nightmare Alley is it is one of the movies I'm the proudest of that was released, or has been released at the most possible adverse moment, and yet I'm happy. So that shows the intimate love I have for it, because I don't need the external measurement of weekend release numbers or popularity, or the metrics of the business to love it.
“In many ways it’s the most elegant, austere and controlled movie I've done since The Devil's Backbone, and they are very linked in that sense. The idea was to follow a character through the most reproachable actions, but come to an ending that hopefully shows you that the heartbreak and the loneliness and the fear of that character led him there.
The partnership with an actor as remarkable as Bradley Cooper allows me to land that ending with every emotion that it needs to have.
“The partnership with an actor as remarkable as Bradley Cooper allows me to land that ending with every emotion that it needs to have, which is abandonment, complete loss, existential loss, and at the same time, relief. Relief that he can finally be seen for who he is. That's a really hard plane to land on a very narrow runway. The elegant construction of the movie, which is it cannot have ups and downs, but is rather a really slow ramp in an inexorable ending - which I think is essential in noir - this burn towards a flame at the end, I think is beautiful.
“The pride that that ending lands with nothing but the most basic tools of cinema, which is a lens and an actor in communion, is really moving. Moving as a director in his 50s, because you know that the gesture, when you're young, the gesture has to be exuberant, and as you grow older, the gesture has to be precise. There's a big difference.”
Nightmare Alley is out now in theaters worldwide.
Simon Cardy thinks it's always a good time to put on Pan's Labyrinth. Talk to him about giant toads over on Twitter at @CardySimon.
Continue reading...
We went through all 11 of his feature films with del Toro himself, to recall his fondest memories from working on each of these projects, and to discover the lessons he learned along the way.
Cronos
“Cronos is full of emotional content for me”, del Toro explains. “I mean, it's really a movie that’s almost like a family album. I'm very moved by it. As a director, I see some of the traits that have been continued in my career, but I also feel it's a very interesting movie because it's an old soul movie for somebody in his 20s.
“There are many things I would like to do over again in the movie, but there are some things that I loved - Federico Luppi, I think is fantastic and the industrialist places where I first started doing a certain camera move that I call the hinge, which is where I discover spaces by following a character. So it is full of good memories, like a family album.”
Mimic
“It's one of the fundamental films for me, in that I learned to defend and understand that the audiovisual as aspects of a movie are narrative. I learned that those aspects are almost always unassailable, because the studio was so focused on the story and the characters changing, and it was so aggressive, but they allowed me to operate unchecked on the visual of the film. I'm incredibly proud of the way the movie feels and looks, and is where I started moving the camera in a way that became sort of my style in a sense.
I think that the movie has a couple of scenes that are amongst the best I've done.
“I think that the movie has a couple of scenes that are amongst the best I've done. The attack on the subway car by the insects is beautiful. The killing of the two kids and the dog is really nice, and her being taken into the platform by the giant insect is beautiful. The rest is really hard for me to disassociate from the hard memories.”
The Devil’s Backbone
“The Devil's Backbone is basically what I call my first film. It's my third movie, but it's the first time I operate, protected and cared for, with Pedro Almodovar as producer, so I am able to bring that moving camera style that I started trying on Mimic. I bring it to maturity. It was not advice, it was a liberation. He basically said to me, ‘You have the reins, you are protected and we support you,’ and that was a huge change from Mimic.
“Blade II wanted to go first and they were trying to push their way, and I said, ‘If you want to take it away, take it away, but I need to do The Devil's Backbone before I do Blade II because I need to be completely in control as a director and complete recuperate the certainty of being in control before I go and deal with a star and all the action and all the big production. And that was exactly the thing that healed me.
“I think the ghost in that movie is one of the best creations in terms of characters that I have done visually and the reflection of what it is to be a ghost is so beautiful. It's a movie that is thematically, in a strange way, very related to Nightmare Alley. The character of Eduardo Noriega is basically a version of Stanton Carlisle in an early way.
“There's beauty to that film – I see some sequences or details of that movie in other movies. It's a director's directorial movie. A lot of directors like that movie, and I see it quoted, or we discuss it when we get together, so I'm very proud of it. I think it’s amongst the three best movies I've ever done.”
Blade II
“It was absolutely a blast. It's when I started to want to experience huge changes from one movie to the other. I really almost came to the system of not repeating the same movie consecutively. I wanted a huge change. So if Devil's Backbone is chamber music, Blade II is black metal. It goes to what I think is the essence of action movies, which is very close to the musical genre, in that you basically have musical numbers tied by a story that is very melancholic… a variation in the Frankenstein theme with the character of Luke Goss. I love being able to combine insane action and brutality with this sort of little tragic story.
I had interest in the superhero movie when it was not pursued by the large sort of industry of the system.
“When I did Blade and I did Hellboy, it was sort of a counter to everything that was being done. It was a time in which superhero movies were not that dark, and I wanted to make them dark and make them adult. I loved the first Blade, and I thought I could add a layer of savagery to that franchise. I had interest in the superhero movie when it was not pursued by the large sort of industry of the system. I liked it when they were sort of contestatory, they were something different. I like to do things that are counter to what is being done.”
Hellboy
“One of the things that fascinates me about Mike Mignola (Hellboy’s creator) is that he combines the blue collar sensibility for Hellboy's job and at the same time, a deep knowledge of mythology and a deep sense of epic themes. I was very attracted to that. It's something that attracts me also to the Jack Kirby comics that I read when I was a kid. There's a pop grandeur to it, and I wanted very much to do it. It is one of the movies that I really wanted to do before I died because I love the character.
“It has a curious soundtrack. It has a comedy undertone in the relationship between Abe Sapien and Liz and Hellboy, and it also has horror moments with Kroenen and the Lovecraftian creature at the end. Kroenen is very different in the movie than Kroenen in the comics and the relationship between Broom and Hellboy is infinitely more tender in the movie. I've always been attracted to stories of fathers and sons.”
Pan’s Labyrinth
“Pan's Labyrinth represents a great fusion of everything I had learned in terms of tools and experiences in the movies that preceded it. For me personally, it kind of articulated all the movies at the same time, it made them make sense. There was a certain exuberance in the worlds and in the monsters of Pan's Labyrinth that I couldn't have done before. There was the emotional depth of The Devil's Backbone and the melancholy of The Devil's Backbone and Cronos. At the same time, there was the handling of effects and action that came from Blade and Hellboy. I was able to do set pieces with a lot more nimble camera work.
Pan's Labyrinth defines exactly where I was in my life at that moment, wondering if there was magic in the world.
“So it's almost like the first summation of what I have learned as a filmmaker, all put to the service of one of the most personal – if not the most personal – movies I've done. It ranks really high in that way. Pan's Labyrinth defines exactly where I was in my life at that moment, wondering if there was magic in the world. Not in a whimsical sense, but if the world was either terrible or beautiful or both at the same time, and the answer was both at the same time.
“The movie connected with an audience, and it still connects with an audience in a way that I think closely resembles the way I connected with movies when I was a cinephile.”
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
“Again, the will I have to go from one movie to an unexpected place next, it starts there. I didn't want to continue in the vein of what had been so successful in Pan's Labyrinth. I thought it was really dangerous not to go into a space that was different and more expansive. The funny thing is that Hellboy II, which I like more than Hellboy 1, is Hellboy by way of Pan's Labyrinth. Again, it’s the summation of everything that came before.
“It has an inventiveness and an exuberance, it's almost that pageantry of monsters and a celebration of the rare and uncanny as beautiful things. It also has the sense of loss that Pan's Labyrinth has regarding magic. You're basically portraying the twilight kingdom of a magical race. All the characters in the troll market are hiding, the nature God is fading, the prince is going to be the last in his lineage at the end of the movie. I think it also was a little reflection about what it is to be visible in the world and what you do with that, which I was feeling very much. It's strange, but every movie I do responds to what I feel about the world at the moment I make it.”
Pacific Rim
“Pacific Rim, on a good day, is amongst the top three I like. I think of it as one of the most beautiful movies I've made; the audio visual universe of that movie is absolutely arresting. I was trying something that was curious for me, it was to execute a completely silly premise in a completely serious, technically serious and narratively serious way whilst acknowledging that the solution to giant monsters would not be giant robots in the real world.
“I think the fact that the movie was badly damaged by a very complicated political, almost palatial entry in the wars between Legendary and Warner Brothers, which happened right at the release of this movie, but it's a movie that still managed to gross over $400 million worldwide. I really wanted to direct a sequel in which I revealed the nature of these consuming monsters that control the kaiju and reveal that the monsters were us. It was us in the future.”
Crimson Peak
“If I have tried to make action movies that have some strange core that goes against pure escapism, like to me, there's a melancholy on Pacific Rim and a melancholy on Blade II, and on the Hellboys that goes counter to the purely escapist action movie. I wanted to try an anti-perfect romance stance on a gothic romance. So I wanted to show that the love story really starts not when they first fall in love, but when they know each other and they know each other for the good and the bad, and how perfection has no place in love. It was a reflection that I like and that becomes much more pure in the next movie, which is The Shape of Water.
If you like Crimson Peak, even if you don't know me, you're already my friend.
“It was important for me to talk about the love of monstrosity and the monstrosity of love. It’s a world creation, you have to understand that for me, the movies exist at two levels – the dramaturgical level, which is the story and characters that kind of exist similar to other forms, and the purely world creation audio visual experience of the movie, which is the place that I find the most sacred and the one where I deposit most of my craft. I think it is one of the most beautiful, immersive vibes, so to speak, that I have created in Crimson Peak.”
“It's very fond to my heart precisely because it did not do good. So there's a thing I say, ‘If you like Crimson Peak, even if you don't know me, you're already my friend.’"
The Shape of Water
“It's this idea that I think all of my movies try to advocate for understanding imperfection, which is an extremely hard thing to do. If you love the imperfect, then you really love. It's easy to love the perfect person. It is much deeper to love the imperfect person. This I understand in my relationship with my parents, my siblings, my friends, my loved ones, my kids.
“I think that is a beautiful reflection that goes counter to the romantic idea that in a Beauty and the Beast story, the beast needs to transform into a beautiful being, to be accepted. I don't like that. I don't think love should demand transformation. It should demand acceptance.
“The movie was very urgent for me to phrase that message to myself mainly, but it was a crucial moment in my life and I needed to talk about that. The movie, in a way, does the reverse of Beauty and the Beast. It reveals that Sally Hawkin's character was always not of this world, and I think that's why the ending is so powerful. I think the movies that I like the most that I've done all have one thing in common – they have incredibly strong endings.
“I think that's what comes with age a little. It's always exciting to open a movie, but the goal should always be how you close it. In a strange way, it's what the voiceover says in Hellboy: ‘What makes a man, a man? Is it the way he starts, is it his origins, or is it what it does with them and the way it ends?’ I think that the answer is the end.”
Nightmare Alley
“I think that the beauty for me of Nightmare Alley is it is one of the movies I'm the proudest of that was released, or has been released at the most possible adverse moment, and yet I'm happy. So that shows the intimate love I have for it, because I don't need the external measurement of weekend release numbers or popularity, or the metrics of the business to love it.
“In many ways it’s the most elegant, austere and controlled movie I've done since The Devil's Backbone, and they are very linked in that sense. The idea was to follow a character through the most reproachable actions, but come to an ending that hopefully shows you that the heartbreak and the loneliness and the fear of that character led him there.
The partnership with an actor as remarkable as Bradley Cooper allows me to land that ending with every emotion that it needs to have.
“The partnership with an actor as remarkable as Bradley Cooper allows me to land that ending with every emotion that it needs to have, which is abandonment, complete loss, existential loss, and at the same time, relief. Relief that he can finally be seen for who he is. That's a really hard plane to land on a very narrow runway. The elegant construction of the movie, which is it cannot have ups and downs, but is rather a really slow ramp in an inexorable ending - which I think is essential in noir - this burn towards a flame at the end, I think is beautiful.
“The pride that that ending lands with nothing but the most basic tools of cinema, which is a lens and an actor in communion, is really moving. Moving as a director in his 50s, because you know that the gesture, when you're young, the gesture has to be exuberant, and as you grow older, the gesture has to be precise. There's a big difference.”
Nightmare Alley is out now in theaters worldwide.
Simon Cardy thinks it's always a good time to put on Pan's Labyrinth. Talk to him about giant toads over on Twitter at @CardySimon.
Continue reading...