Guillermo del Toro
Director Guillermo del Toro talks about the genesis of his 'beautiful daughter' Pan's Labyrinth, how a visit from a faun prompted his love affair with monsters and why videogames are the narrative art of the future
# guardian.co.uk,
# Tuesday November 21 2006
Mark Kermode: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Guillermo del Toro.
Guillermo del Toro: Thank you. I put on a suit for this. Horrible tailor, though. Their two designers are called Big and Tall.
MK: You don't really need me here, do you? Just to start with, some thematic background. You have said that Pan's Labyrinth is like a sister movie to The Devil's Backbone. Explain what you meant by that.
GdT: Devil's Backbone was a movie that tried to create a microcosm of the Spanish civil war. I'm always doing this stupid experiment. I said I'm going to do a microcosm of the Spanish civil war through a gothic romance with a ghost. That sounds very logical, you know. But I guess it's not as far-fetched as doing an anti-fascist fairytale. In trying to do that, I chose that war because it was a household war. People that shared beds, shared dining tables and shared lives ultimately killed each other. I tried to use an orphanage as the classic haunted building of gothic romance and use the ghost story to prove the same thing that I wanted to prove in Pan's Labyrinth, that is the only real monsters are human. And the only thing you have to be afraid of is people, not creatures, not ghosts. And when I finished that movie, I showed it in Toronto. It was September 9 2001. We got rave reviews, lots of applause, people telling me "great movie!", blah blah blah. Then I take a plane cloaked in my petit bourgeois happiness at how well my film was received, landed in Los Angeles and then September 11 happened. That was when I realised that (a) I don't know shit, and (b) whatever I had to say about brutality and innocence had just changed. It changed so much over the course of the year that I had to make a movie that structurally echoed Devil's Backbone, and that you could watch back to back. Devil's Backbone is the boy's movie. It's the brother movie. But Pan's Labyrinth is the sister movie, the female energy to that other one. I wanted to make it because fascism is definitely a male concern and a boy's game, so I wanted to oppose that with an 11-year-old girl's universe.
Listen to a clip (MP3)
MK: When you say male and female, obviously watching Pan's Labyrinth, there are Jungian archetypes in it, and there's definitely uterine imagery. I'm assuming that's not just me being crass.
GdT: No. I very deliberately designed the idea of the fantasy world to be extremely uterine. We used a fallopian palette of colours: we used crimsons and golds, and everything in the fantasy world is very rounded while everything in the real world is cold and straight. You can see it in the not-so-subtle entrance to the tree. When we did the poster for the movie for Cannes, somebody said they wanted to call the movie A Womb With A View. The idea is that this girl's idea of heaven, ultimately, is to go back into her mother's belly. That is why the first time she goes to the fantasy world, she goes through the baby in her mother's belly. She starts talking to her brother, and the camera goes into the belly and through that we go into the magical land where the rose grows and so on. It's a single shot, four or five minutes long, and the narrative is linked in that way.
MK: Just before we show the clip from The Devil's Backbone, it's important historically but here we know less about the Spanish civil war than Spain or Mexico. Crucially, Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944 and Devil's Backbone is set in 1939. You once said, "For better or worse, it is a period that belonged only to Spain." What did you mean by that?
GdT: Well, it was a moment when Spain was alone, completely alone in 1939. Because everybody else was trying not to upset the balance in Europe, tiptoeing around Hitler. So the republicans were alone. Mexico offered help and offered to receive emigrants from Spain and sent weapons and ships and things. After tiptoeing so much around Hitler, the civil war ended in 1939 and six months later Hitler invaded Poland. 1944 was important because once again the resistance in Spain was fighting on the side of the allies to ensure that the outcome of the second world war would not be in Hitler's favour. They sabotaged the tungsten mines in Galicia in the north of Spain, the main source of material for the building of panzer tanks in Germany. So they were sabotaging these and fighting in France in hopes that after Normandy the allies would turn their gaze upon them and take down Franco. That never happened.
MK: We're going to run a clip from Devil's Backbone - it's the first appearance of the ghost in the orphanage. I think there are clear visual parallels between this and Pan's Labyrinth. This is from 2001.
[clip runs]
MK: There are a number of things that that brings up, but the most obvious comparison with Pan's Labyrinth is that it's about the world seen through the eyes of a child. You said earlier that innocence and brutality are the two things that your films deal with. What is it about that child's eye perspective on the monstrous? And describe to me your own childish experience of monsters.
GdT: I have said sometimes that I have spent 32 years recuperating from my first 10 years. Really. I had a pretty screwed up childhood, living in Mexico. I don't know if it's because I was living in Mexico and I'm a Mexican but I have had a life full of very, very fucked up and strange things. The two events that happen in Pan's Labyrinth and Devil's Backbone are based on things that happened to me. When I was 12, I heard a ghost that whispered and sighed. I was in my late uncle's room, in the house I inherited. This uncle and I had been very good friends - he introduced me to Lovecraft and horror writers. When we were talking, I said, "When one of us dies first" - of course, that's very easy for a 12-year-old to say - "he has to come back and tell the other that there is something else."
MK: No wonder The Ninth Configuration is such a big deal.
GdT: Yes. So of course he said yes, and of course he was the one who went first. So I was in my room, doing homework and watching TV, nothing auspicious for a gothic moment right? And all of a sudden I hear this incredibly sad sighing next to me. I turned off the TV, and it was a very slow process to get scared. I thought maybe I was breathing through my ears or maybe I was coming down with a cold, so I stopped breathing. It sighed with a lot of sadness. So I thought maybe it's a draught. So I went to check the window, but it was closed, and the sigh moved with me through the room. So I went back to the bed and thought that I was pushing the air out of the pillows, so I pushed the pillows and the sigh continued. Then, I put my ear to the mattress, where he used to sleep. And I heard the voice inside the mattress, sighing. And I ran out of that room screaming and never went back in. The event that Pan's Labyrinth is based on is even more fucked up. When I was a very little kid, I used to sleep in my grandmother's house. It was a huge Mexican house, with a patio and long corridors. And every night, punctually at midnight, in my bedroom, a faun would come out of the armoire. It must have been lucid dreaming, but for a child, it was as if it was real. I saw him.
MK: Describe him.
GdT: We have a small gothic temple in Guadalajara - that's like you having an Aztec pyramid in central London. Some people from Opus Dei erected this temple in the middle of my city and it's called the Expiatory Temple. So I would hear the temple bells ringing midnight, and as they started chiming, I would see the human hand of the faun come out from the armoire, then the smiling face of a goat, and then the hairy leg of a goat. I would clearly see him pulling his body out of the armoire and I would start screaming, repeatedly, every night that I slept in that bed. I would go to sleep at eight o'clock and wake up at 11.45, just in time to hear the goddamn bells. And you know, I've had a relationship with monsters in my bedroom since I was a kid. I really used to see them behind the chair. I used to have shaggy carpet in my bedroom - my parents bought one of those Austin Powers carpets - and it was bright green. At night I would try to climb out of my crib and I would look down on that sea of shaggy carpet and I would see a sea of green fingers, waving, waiting for me to put my foot on it so they could pull me down. So I wet my bed, and my mother spanked me. One day, I got tired of the spanking and got up in my crib and climbed down and said to the monsters, "If you allow me to go pee, I'll be your friend forever." They disappeared and I have peed happily since.
MK: There's a line from a Clive Barker short story that you quoted recently. The story is The Skins of the Fathers, and it refers to a place deep inside touched only by monsters. You said that as far as you were concerned, the most fragile part of you, the child within you, was touched only by monsters. It sounds to me like it's an entirely positive experience.
GdT: Yes. I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate. Who would you rather go out with at night? Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde? Frankly, I think that everything we try to deny about our bodies and our lives - about being fallible and mortal, that we're going to rot, and that our armpits smell, that we are imperfect, that we sin and screw up - all these are the things that actually make us human. And that's why I try to make the monsters the heroes in my movies. And I like to sometimes take the humans that are too perfect for a spin and debase them. That I loved in Hitchcock. I loved that Hitchcock would take a character that was very prissy, very clean and ascetic and just torture the hell out of him, or her, in the case of Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat.
MK: In a moment, we're going to show a clip from Cronos that has become your Hitchcock shower scene - it is the great Del Toro scene that people talk about. But first, there's a lot of religious imagery in your films, and you talk about going to church and being more interested in the gargoyles. You're not an atheist, are you? You're a lapsed Catholic.
GdT: Yes, I am. I think that once a Catholic, always a Catholic. You're screwed, you know. I feel guilty 23 hours a day. I feel guilty even when I'm sleeping. I've been through a few sessions of therapy. Yes, when I was kid, and I told the therapist about a short film I wanted to do. The expression on the face of the therapist, it cured me from going to therapy for a long, long time. When I was a kid, I would get bored during the sermons in church, except when they would read a parable. Parables were interesting to me - I'd rather hear about the grain of mustard or the talents than hear about this guy who walked on water. I was moved by stories that taught you something and I think that parables and ideas were, in the oldest ways, transmitted through tales about demons and angels. And I think that's the way I like to talk about things.
MK: That's clearly the root of the fairytales that later influenced Pan's Labyrinth. There was a book that came out at the turn of the last century that stripped back the fairytales to their original sources. What was that?
GdT: It was called The Science of Fairytale and it's a really interesting 19th century book that systematises - without a particular agenda, which is what troubles me about the psychosexual or megamythic approaches to mythology, which seemed to me to have an agenda; they needed to prove a point. But this guy just did a really studious and thorough systematisation of mythology from throughout the world, not just fairytales but also oral traditions and the heroic narrative. It talks about Inuit mythology and Indian mythology, from everywhere, and finds the common thread, without the desire to prove that there is a single hero with a thousand faces. It's more open than that.
MK: Now we're going to see the most famous scene from Cronos. The most important thing about it to me is that Cronos is a modern vampire movie, but unlike the other vampire movies being made at the time, it's not about sex. It's about addiction. It's about a character who's not yet learned to give up his body, which is of course something that happens regularly in film. Before we see it, tell the audience what they need to know in order to appreciate it.
GdT: The character in the film is a very prissy antiquarian that lives an incredibly secluded life. I wanted him to be alive only after he dies. Here, we see the first symptoms of vampirism in him. I don't like to think about vampirism as just an erotic alternative. Almodóvar, when we were doing Devil's Backbone, Pedro was watching the only sex scene that I have ever shot, which is the amputee sex scene, and he said to me, "You can kill 15 to 20 people but you're incapable of having them fuck." And I guess he's right. I am very prudish. To me this scene is incredibly erotic but it's absolutely perverse. And the idea was, how do I prove that this guy needed the blood like an addiction? If you're going to suck Winona Ryder, I'm up for it. Everybody would have their hand up. Or if you're going to have Brad Pitt suck you, I'm sure a lot of people would raise their hands. So I wanted to do the most vile thing to show he really needed the blood. So it's an addiction scene.
MK: And it's also worth mentioning that the scene stars Federico Luppi who, for people who've just seen Pan's Labyrinth...
GdT: ... is the King of the Underworld.
[clip runs]
MK: It doesn't matter how many times I see that, every time I see it I just think it's astonishing. Now, one of the things that happens at the end of Cronos - everyone here's just seen Pan's Labyrinth, so you know that giving away the ending is not a problem... You said once that the moment a character becomes immortal is the moment that he decides he doesn't mind any more whether he lives or dies. And the end of Pan's Labyrinth is similar in that it's about transcendence.
GdT: Yes, the idea is that the only true immortality is when you don't care if you die. The moment you stop giving credence to gain is when you become invulnerable to pain. This character is a very tight one at the beginning of the film - everything is very clean, very ordered and ordained, yet he ends up doing much more than this to survive. The way the scene is directed - if you remember, everything is black and white or blue except the blood, that's the only colour. And it's important that it's set on New Year's Eve. The movie's full of little symbols of how people change, how time passes, transformations. There's a gag from Cronos that I repeated in Pan's Labyrinth, of a huge discovery in a bathroom: in Pan's Labyrinth it's the girl with the book, and in Cronos, it's him discovering that his wounds are healing and he's feeling younger. And outside, there's someone knocking on the door talking about a green dress. Maybe that's a little too obscure for most people but the idea is how you can find in the most mundane of circumstances extraordinary things. I think that this movie, what is valuable to me is it's a vampire story set in a horrible New Year's Eve party that we Mexicans have all attended, with the silly music and the horrible costumes. I think that 90% of the work of a tale is the context. If I tell a vampire story and I set it in George Bush's government, the White House, it would instantly become something different.
MK: How much is the fact that you're Mexican relevant to that sensibility? There is this idea that somehow Mexicans understand death more than anybody else. How true is that? Explain that to someone like me who grew up in Barnet.
GdT: My deepest sympathies. I feel that we have, as Mexicans, two things: one, a natural distrust of institutions. I hate organised religion, I hate organised politics, I hate the idea of the military and the police. Because we grew up distrusting all these sacred institutions, the only thing you have left is a vague, national sense of impending doom. Why do we drink and how are we so merry? Because we know that pretty soon, our time's up. There is a sense of fatality that makes us pretty chirpy people. You try to live. The only reason that dying is important is that it gives life sense. The movie opens with the Alchemist, who lives forever, and you see the conditions he's living in. He is living beyond human means - he doesn't care about anything any more. So when people romanticise immortality ... it's about making the magical be immediate and here.
MK: In the same way that death is the thing that gives life meaning, you have a belief in the learning curve of pain, don't you?
GdT: Yes, because I've gone through many painful things: a movie with Miramax and the kidnapping of my father. Those two things were pretty harrowing experiences and to survive both with a degree of sanity is quite remarkable. You come out of the experience and you look at life in a different way. I think we live our lives seeking the shortest route, the closest parking space - everything quick, cheap, fast. And it's not better. Two-thirds of the satisfaction of getting something is the process of getting it. I wrote a Faustian screenplay based on Spanky by Christopher Fowler.
MK: Great novel.
GdT: It's a great novel, and I remember there was a moment after Spanky, who happens to be the devil, gives Martyn the car, the house, the girlfriend. He says, "You never wanted the car, you wanted the respect. You never wanted the girl, you wanted the love story. You never wanted the apartment, you wanted to feel you earned it. But you accepted it all." And I think that's a Faustian tale that we all go through in this time where apparently all ambitions never rise above reality TV. Our dreams in this culture are pretty screwed up dreams - they're incredibly banal. As we were discussing earlier, we're living in a culture where cynicism has replaced intelligence, true wit. If you're cynical, if you're sceptical, you sound smart enough to pass muster. But these are evidently very conflicted horror stories by a lapsed Catholic.
MK: You mention the two terrible things that have happened - the kidnapping of your father and making a film with Miramax. To address the more terrible of those, the experience with Miramax really was horrible, wasn't it?
GdT: It was! Technically, it was with Dimension, the genre division. And the film was Mimic. I went in trying to make a truly biblical story about giant insects. A story where essentially God was so fed up with us that he says, "I'm going to give insects a turn at running the planet." So the true villain in the screenplay I wrote was God. And there was nothing left of it - there were a few gimmicks and winks: it opens with the killing of a priest by the roaches with a huge sign that says Jesus saves; there's a rosary that was important in the original screenplay but that is now just an empty symbol; there's a broken church. But all that remains there is like vulture leftovers from the screenplay that was.
MK: How do you feel when you look at it, because of all the films you've directed, Mimic is the irreparable one. But it is still sort of one of your children, isn't it?
GdT: It is. I think that there's nothing more painful for a father than to have a perfect daughter who has lost her right arm. Her beauty makes it all the more painful. I see the movie and I ache for what it could have been. People say, "We love that sequence" or "We love that scary bit", and I do too. But I can't look at it. You know I used to think that evil, and the Hollywood system, was like a tidal wave that comes rushing at you and hits you full frontal, and that if you were a good swimmer, strong and pure of heart, you'd be able to swim through it and get to the other side. But it's more like mildew. It sort of permeates a wall slowly until it rots and only by the time it's falling on you do you realise what it is. It's perverse, slow and deliberate. And I think what it taught me is the Bartleby method, which is, "I'd rather not." When somebody says something I don't agree with, I say I'd rather not. It comes to the point where that is the strongest form of resistance. As a Mexican, it took me a long while to learn one word in English, "no". And that is the one word we have in common. But you come from an environment where making films is a collective endeavour, and all your friends help you make Cronos, and you're going to an environment where you think it's going to be the same. It wasn't. As a good Catholic, I don't blame anyone but me. I say I should have known, I should have thought, because I think pain teaches you to be stronger. I didn't learn fast enough, but I should have.
MK: On Pan's Labyrinth, you made no compromises at all. In fact, I believe you gave up your own salary to ensure it would be the way you wanted it to be.
GdT: It came to the point where the movie was going to cost X amount of money more, and they were hesitating about giving us the money to finish it properly. So I said take the salary, I don't care. We didn't make a contract seeking points in case the movie grossed so much. None of that bullshit. Just take my salary, on my word. And they took it. But you know, it's not the first time I did that. I did it on Mimic, curiously enough. I wanted a shot and they said no, so I said, "I'll make you a bet, I'll put my salary on that shot, and if it ends up in the cut, you pay me back." And they did pay me back. The second time I did it was on Blade II. I bet half my salary because I wanted to see those [redesigned] vampires very much. And I won it back. The third one as Hellboy, but I never saw it back. I put half my salary on that. So, if the kidnappers are watching, I'm not a rich man.
MK: We're going to show a clip from Hellboy. The thing with Hellboy is, you make movies in Europe that people consider as personal projects, but then you make Blade II and Hellboy in Hollywood, and you've always said that those films are every bit as personal to you as the European ones.
GdT: Hellboy is. On Blade II, there are moments I love, but that's [writer David S] Goyer's gig - Goyer and Wesley [Snipes]. I never understood Blade: why does he go out and kill these creatures? I would invite them home and serve them some food.
MK: But that wouldn't make such a great film.
GdT: I never understood Blade but then Wesley and Goyer did. But the vampire part of that movie is very much me. The whole backstory of the father and the son, and the son coming back to bite his father to death, that's pretty much personal. In Hellboy, it's the same thing - there's a beautiful father-son story, and a beautiful, very fragile, love story. And the scene you're about to see is very, very personal and sort of autobiographical - I was paraphrasing something I actually said to my wife. So, take a look.
[clip runs]
MK: And just before we take questions, it's worth saying you are now working on Hellboy 2.
GdT: Oh yeah. Very much so.
MK: Wanna say a couple of words about it?
GdT: The idea was, when we made this movie, that it was a one-off. But as soon as the movie opened strong and did well, I told [Hellboy creator Mike] Mignola, "Let's really plan what we want to do with this ourselves." We were talking about a sequel, maybe. Mignola is the eternal sceptic, he was going, "No, no, no." But I always wanted to do something with this love story that eventually would be very poignant. So the second movie continues essentially after the big kiss - what happens to the love story after the big kiss? What is the first year of marriage like? At the same time, the adventure is one that's very much like in Pan's Labyrinth. It's about the real world mining and undermining fantasy and magic, and how tragically we are destroying magic everyday. It's a battle for Hellboy to find his identity, and where he belongs as an adult. And all this is conducive to the third movie, which if we ever make it, would be quite heartbreaking.
Listen to a clip (MP3)
MK: So, let's take some questions.
Q1: You said in an interview that you turned down the chance to direct Harry Potter because it didn't give you a boner in the morning. What I'd like to know is what kind of projects are you looking at that excite you? And is there anything that you've looked at and just said no way?
GdT: I've been offered lots of things in the past and I look at them and I love them, but I realise that I'm going to love them as a member of the audience and that I don't see myself doing the best job on them. For instance, I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books, but I'd love to do one where one of the kids dies, or one of the main characters dies. I love for those things to have a little bit more tragedy. The books are beautiful. You can see that the writer has a huge background and knows the magic stuff. But at the time, there were only the first two films to go by and I felt these teenagers were a little too happy for me, too healthy. I like moping, pale creatures that go out to cellars, which was my childhood, basically. Blade II I turned down three times - like St Peter -and then Goyer said to me, "You wanna do Hellboy?" I said yes. "You think the studio will finance it from seeing Devil's Backbone and Cronos?" I said, "You're right." And on top of that, I asked if I could redesign the vampires, and then I got excited. What I'd love to do, if somebody told me to do whatever I wanted next, I would do either At the Mountains of Madness, the Lovecraft novel, or perhaps my version of the Count of Monte Cristo, which in my version is a gothic western where the count has a clockwork hand and set in Mexico in 1867.
MK: Isn't it true that they offered you The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and you said you'd only do it if the lion was not resurrected? Kind of takes the sting out of the tale a little bit.
GdT: Yes, I did. Believe it or not, I was the first film-maker they approached and I said I didn't want the fucking lion to be resurrected. What is the worth of that sacrifice if he knows he's coming back? I really enjoy the uncertainty of a guy or a creature going to die for something without knowing if there's anyone to bail him out. What's beautiful about the death of Jesus is him saying to his father, "Why have you forsaken me?" That incredibly mysterious and moving passage is so precious because he doesn't know. If he knew, screw that. That, and I also said I didn't want Father Christmas on my call sheet.
MK: But apart from that you'd be happy...
GdT: Apart from that. I love very much, and I would have given it much more weight, the way CS Lewis juxtaposes the war going on and the fantasy.
Q2: I'd like to ask you about your plans for the future, especially with regards to something that was reported in the Hollywood Reporter. You said that in the next 10 years, narrative media is going to shift to a hybrid of videogames and movies. You're obviously working on Sundown the game. Maybe you could expand on that a little.
GdT: I think that videogames are a genuine narrative form. There are videogames that are absolutely precious, like a videogame by a Japanese author called Shadow of the Colossus. It's an absolutely beautiful trip to another world that is as fantastic and as magical as a Miyazaki film. But those are the videogames that get the good rep. You're always hearing about Grand Theft Auto and the babes, the booze and the guns. I think this not only perpetuates an idea that the videogame is not a narrative form, but also perpetuates the concept among the people outside that think "videogame" is a sort of new adjective to debase a thing. I remember when I was growing up people used to say "a comicbook movie" to say what a piece of shit it was. They don't say it any more because it's become a more respectable narrative form and it makes money. Both things silence one camp and the other. Now they say "a videogame movie" with the same blind authority of someone who, at the most, may have played Pac-Man. And I do believe they are genuine narrative forms and we would have to be very stupid not to be immersed in and understand. We complain about them but we don't do anything to solve it. In the next 10 years, I see a huge shift whether we like it or not. It's going to take you either by surprise or you're going to be there to do it. It's going to be like going from silent films to sound. There are going to be a lot of us that cannot do the talkies because we are not familiar with the form. I think it's urgent that you get familiar with them. The art direction, soundscapes and immersive environments in videogames are as good, if not superior to, most movies. I'm not talking about [Krzysztof] Kieslowski or Bergman. I'm talking about most movies. They are far more advanced and far smarter about it, so I think it's something we all can learn from and it's urgent that we do.
Listen to a clip (MP3)
MK: I'd like to say for the record that I haven't even played Pac-Man.
Q3: At this stage in your career, how much control do you now have over Hollywood properties, such as Hellboy 2?
GdT: We'll find out soon, I'll be back to tell you, but I hope enough that I can control it. As I was saying I've been offered bigger franchises that I've turned down. I remember being offered Fantastic Four. I said to [former Marvel Comics CEO] Avi Arad that they're too white-bread for me, they're like the Kennedys. And I'm not interested in that. Even a dysfunctional, healthy family is boring to me. Either they're killing each other or I'm not interested. Also, I realised that my wife, who is the most astute observer of my psyche, one day she was cooking and listening in on a conversation I was having about a huge franchise. And at the end of the conversation, I told her, "They offered me X amount of money." She said, "But you're not going to do it, right?" And I said no. She said, "I know, because it could make money." I try to control them by making them for a budget, by not ever getting tangled under a $270m movie where everybody is shitting in their pants, because once you hit that number you've got to recoup that and it's a huge amount, an obscene amount of money that you have to make. Part of the freedom is knowing your limits. I think that the best thing other than being able to do everything is knowing what you cannot do and stick to it.
MK: Pan's Labyrinth, with 300 effects shots, cost...
GdT: €13.5m (£9.1m).
MK: Which is nothing.
GdT: Which is nothing, but there goes my salary, man. We had a distributor tell us, during pre-production, that if we made it in English, the exact same story and everything, they'd raise their backing to $30m (£15.6m). The answer was very immediate: no. Because the moment you start accepting anything that feels remotely wrong - and this is not just Catholic guilt, it's strategy - the moment you give in, you're giving up. You've lost control, it's not the movie you wanted.
MK: There was also a suggestion among some people in Hollywood that if you just lost the violence, you might ...
GdT: Somebody said to me, in a very well-meaning way, at a screening, "We love the movie but it's too violent. If you tone down the violence you could reach a great audience of kids." But that is totally self-defeating, isn't it? It's like the difference between Hustler and a gynaecology manual. There is a different approach, even though the graphics are similar. I think I've fucked up my National Film Theatre opportunity. It'll be the last time I wear a tie.
Q4: If you could have directed any legendary movie, which one would it have been?
GdT: Oh my God. I would love to be as smart and as subtle as Jack Clayton was when he did The Innocents. To me, that's one of the most beautiful horror movies ever made. Or I would have killed to do James Whale's Frankenstein, which is to me, to this day, the most beautiful monster movie ever made, and the very essence of what a monster is, which is the ultimate disenfranchised minority. It's Miltonian, how foreign the monster is to what it is to be human. I think it is Paradise Lost.
MK: While we're on the subject of movies that you didn't direct, and to humour me, tell the good folk here what happened with Exorcist Dominion.
GdT: There was a time between Mimic and Devil's Backbone when I got a call to go to Morgan Creek to talk about a sequel to The Exorcist, which was going to be Exorcist 4. I said, "Listen, I have an idea. Let's call it Exorcist: Chapter 4 Verse I." They used that title, by the way, for a while, without even asking if they could. And I did a little poster -it was all black and it just said, "God is not here. Exorcist: Chapter 4 Verse I". So I went and I pitched them this take on the material, which was that a possessed child murders a priest in the Vatican, and the police cannot enter the Vatican because it's a state. So they call in Father Merrin to investigate. This is the second time he faces the devil, the first time being in eastern Europe. In my take, the devil, in the guise of a young Nazi officer, says at the end of that episode, "You and I will face each other again. I will attempt to take three children in your lifetime. If you succeed in saving one of them, you will be free. If you don't you will be mine." And that was very epic, setting up what followed. So I finished my take about the Exorcist and they listened patiently and then said, "That's fantastic, but there's only one thing. We want the movie but we don't want there to be an exorcism in it." So I said, "But it's called The Exorcist." "Yeah, but the last movie had an exorcism and it didn't make money." That was the last meeting I took on that one. But that's sort of the Hollywood principle. I remember I was fresh out of doing Cronos and I sent Mephisto's Bridge, which is a novel by Spanky writer Christopher Fowler, to a studio and I got a phone call back from an executive that I actually considered was very smart. He said, "Listen, we don't want any devil movies right now, but don't you have anything with witches?" You're like, "Oh yeah, let me look." [mimes looking through folders] "Witches, witches. Oh yeah, I have one in my ass. Let me pull it out and I'll Fedex it to you." What the fuck is that?
Q5: There's a film that you might know, El Espíritu de la colmena...
GdT: Spirit of the Beehive, yeah.
Q5: Did you get any kind of inspiration from that film?
GdT: I would love to think so. It's to me one of the most beautiful films ever made. It combines two of my all-time favourite things: five-year-old childhood and Frankenstein. What I think is admirable about the film - but it's something I'm incapable of and am absolutely not attracted to - is its ability to be vague and sort of ethereal. What is beautiful about it is that [director Víctor] Erice is a true poet who not only implies and suggests but basically leaves everything floating. He has four balls in the air and he's not touching any of them; they're all circling magically. And the end is such an implausible, incredible, beautiful ending, when she finally meets Frankenstein, that it leaves you speechless. But in my movies, I have such a love for monsters that they are manifest, they are real and there. I love them, and I would kill for monsters to be real, for them to walk down the street. I would love to meet Hellboy and the vampires from Blade. I am that childish about it, and that glee is what prevents me from keeping things more ethereal. I want to see them. I'm not capable of doing movies where the monster is implied, there's just a creeping shadow and a whisper. I want them to step into the light. I love them - Godzilla, Creature from the Black Lagoon, all of them. And I try to do graveyard poetry with them, but they have to be part of the thing. And what I love, and what I find unattainable, from Spirit of the Beehive, is that capacity of a man that is occupied by something other than the fantastic and who allows the fantastic to gently seep into the reality of the girl. In my case, in Pan's Labyrinth, the fantasy world is as strong, real and palpable as the other world, if not more.
Q6: My friend and I have been out of film school for a year - we just want to ask if you have any advice for independent film-makers?
GdT: I have two pieces of advice - one will finally kick me out of the NFT, while the other one sounds more sane. The first thing is never give up on what you believe in. It sounds like saccharine crap but I actually think that if you're going to give up down the line, when it gets hard, or your personal life gets difficult, or you lose your family life, or no one's supporting you, then just give up now. If you don't give up, don't give up ever. If the critics hate you, and there's no audience and they don't give you money and your father thinks you're a moron, don't give up. That's one piece of advice. There's no such thing as "Well, I lasted 10 good years." Fuck you. When you can say, "I lasted all my life and still I couldn't do it", then you get respect. The rest is bullshit. The other thing, which is absolutely horrible, is that I must tell you that if you think it's hard at the beginning, it never gets better. I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit. This is the final piece of advice.
Listen to a clip (MP3)
MK: I have to tell you Guillermo, I think that's probably the note on which we should draw things to a conclusion.
GdT: Please can I say, if you love the movie - movies to me are like religion or a blind date; it's like falling in love in the cinema. If you, by any chance, did fall in love with my beautiful daughter, Pan's Labyrinth, tonight, do not think it glib of me to ask this, go out and say so to the world. Tell it. It's a small movie, it's a movie that the more you talk about it and love it, the more it will grow. And it really needs it. And I thank you if you ever do it.
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