When Reality Meets Fantasy
Guillermo del Toro takes us into the world of Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro may not be the world’s most prolific director – though with eight projects on the go at the time of writing he’s certainly not slow – but he’s certainly one of the most eclectic. Involved in filmmaking for the last twenty-two years, del Toro made his feature debut with Cronos in 1993 and the film took home no less than twenty awards, including the Mercedes-Benz award at Cannes.
Projects that followed included Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone, Blade II and, most recently, Hellboy. Films that have little in common save for their director’s immense attention to detail and craft.
His new film, Pan’s Labyrinth, opens in the UK on November 24th ahead of a US release on December 29th. Set in civil war-era Spain, it tells the story of a young girl, Ofelia, who seeks refuge from her step-father’s fascist tendencies in a fantasy world filled with centaurs, fairies and mandrake roots.
RT-UK sat down with del Toro to discuss the film, his career and his test screening woes in the first of an ongoing series of filmmaker interviews we’re calling Director’s Masterclass. A no-holds-barred chat with one of the world’s most exciting directors, please be aware that this feature contains some strong language.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was so different and yet so wonderful.
GdT: Thank you. The main thing is that it’s a movie that no matter what you think you’re going to get – especially from the promotional material – it’s disorienting the first time you see it because if you’re a genre guy you walk in and you’re faced with a movie that combines brutal reality with fantasy and even then it’s a dark fantasy.
I was being offered all these movies that were very much Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings type of movies and I was always turning them down. But then I found that I was very fascinated with that universe. I felt that maybe there was a way to do those fairytales but to do them in my own way. The movie came out of that need to do a riff in that universe. But not do Narnia, you know? [laughs]
It must be more exciting to be able to come up with the fantasy yourself rather than relying on a source.
GdT: Yeah, and this movie is not by any means or by any stretch of the imagination derivative, unlike every other movie ever made. And that’s what attracted me to it; it’s unlike any other movie ever made. That alone made it scary to do but made it interesting to do. For example, the rules of the fairytale world in this movie are all created by me but they are all created from a very careful study of the fairytale rules and the fairytale worlds of traditional stories. They feel real, they feel like something passed orally from generation to generation, but nevertheless they’re very different from every other movie.
How did you go about balancing the fantasy and the reality?
GdT: Some people are never going to get over the fact that those two aspects are side-to-side. I think that the people that will love the movie will get past that because they complement each other. I remember people raising some objection expressing their chagrin at Devil’s Backbone, saying, “How do you combine civil war with a ghost story?” It’s the same thing here; that’s the way I do it and sometimes you have to just do it; you can’t think whether it’s going to be OK for those people because sometimes it’s never going to be OK for them. They are intrinsically related, the stories, they could not exist without each others.
What is it about the civil war period that intrigues you so much?
GdT: It’s a world that is really powerful for a Mexican-born guy. It’s a world that changes Mexican history essentially, because we got all the refugees of the conflict in Mexico. We got a lot of them and culturally they changed Mexico. They came in with a lot of baggage that shaped the cultural landscape of Mexico. We’re really affected by it and on top of that it’s a world that is incredibly brutal. It’s brother killing brother, father killing son, it’s an incredibly brutal thing.
You realise in the movie that these people are reading the news about Normandy. They’re talking about the troops disembarking in Normandy in the newspapers and you realise that world war is going on at the same time
There’s a third really important story to be told – which has not been told properly – which is the story of the Resistance in Spain believing that the Allies would rescue them from Franco. Very few people know how important the Spanish Resistance was to getting back Europe. They fought against the Nazis, they fought against the mining of tungsten that the Panzer tanks were made of. Spain were the main suppliers of tungsten to the Panzer tanks in Nazi Germany. The moment the Allies started sabotaging the construction of Panzers, that was a huge boon for them. Few people know these things and few people know how many members of the Spanish Resistance ended up in concentration camps and how history turned away from them. And history turns away from Spain from 1944 to the mid 1970s when Franco died. It’s a forgotten fascist regime!
Are you planning to pursue these stories further?
GdT: I want to. I think the repercussions of the civil war have still not ended until this day. There’s a third film I want to do called 3993 which would complete the trilogy of these movies. It’s essentially about life in 1993 in Spain and how it’s directly linked to 1939 and how things have and haven’t changed. It’s done through a fantastic element so it’s the same thing. It’s about taking this story and saying, “Instead of looking at it in an Oliver Stone way, we look at it from a fantasy point-of-view.” It’s about being able to tell a story about a particular horror or moment using a parable or a fable as opposed to making a speech.
Which is how the world’s history has been passed on for thousands of years…
GdT: Absolutely. The Bible is full of them. So many stories are so much more useful when they’re parables. I think the problem is how linear we have become. How absolutely prosaic we’ve become. It’s almost like we are infected not so much by reality TV but by boring reality.
When I unfortunately do test screenings in America with American movies, the f**king question is always, “Why did they do… Could you explain…” You go, “F**k you. F**k you. Come up with the answer yourselves. Learn to watch a f**king movie and shut up.” It’s almost like imprudent children interrupting a bedtime story. “How could Dorothy get those red shoes? Who made them?” “F**k you, listen to the story. The Wizard of Oz is the Wizard of Oz because he is. F**k you!” It makes me really angry. But the strange thing and the really scary thing is how much even genre fans are affected by this. How much they want everything to feel sort-of linear and real and easy to digest.
I’m sure there’ll be a very frustrating end for some people in watching Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth in the sense that they’d much rather get their ghost story undiluted and scary as opposed to melodramatic and moving and strangely poetic. When I was a kid and I read things like Hans Christian Anderson or the Grimm Brothers and things like that, there was always an element that now we look at as part of the story but that was always very grim. No pun intended! Hansel & Gretel, for example, their parents essentially take them into the woods to get lost because they have no money to put food on the table. If you adapted Hansel & Gretel now, in a contemporary way, you could set it in 1930’s Ireland or England at the height of some of the roughest times and you would have people unable to put meat on the table who take their children to the forest, essentially, to let them die of starvation. [laughs] That’s the opening of those stories! I keep thinking, “If that’s the opening of those stories, why the f**k can’t I tell a fascist repression fairytale?”
People keep forgetting that when you look at a Bible painting and they’re wearing those purple clothes, that’s a contemporary interpretation that Leonardo or Michelangelo or whoever was putting in. They didn’t dress like that; that’s contemporary fashion in other words. That’s why it’s interesting to not look at the classics as dead and gone but alive and well. This is more experimental a movie than any of the others coming out.
You mentioned test screenings; was the entire Hollywood experience a negative?
GdT: No, it was great. You learn a lot. I am actually a fan of the process, but just not the way it’s used. I don’t think you need to ask an audience. You play a movie once, see how they react and then you go back and take another stab at the cut. The risk of asking for an opinion is that you’ll get one and that’s what I think is dangerous. When you ask someone, “Did you like the movie? Did you like this, did you like that?” they start to feel compelled to give you a smart opinion. These days smart equals sceptical.
I think cynicism and scepticism is an easy faking of intelligence. Since the 1950s, or the 1940s even, it has become more prestigious to be sceptical. I understand the routes of that movement and that position because in a world that was full of Kennedy-like perfection people raising their fists and saying, “F**k you,” were very necessary. In a world like ours – already a cynical, f**ked up world – I think romanticism is a far more risky proposition which is why I see myself as an absolute romantic, but I don’t work in the f**king Barbara Cartland mould. I believe in honour, I believe in beauty and I am moved by both. I don’t have a single shred of irony in the movies I make. There’s no irony in Hellboy, there’s no post-modern irony in any of the movies. They’re not self-referential in that way. They’re true romantic classics.
But that’s why the films work.
GdT: Yeah, but it’s harder to define yourself as a believer than as an iconoclast, isn’t it? And I am a believer.
Is it good to have the freedom to flit between the Hollywood structure and small independent projects like Pan’s?
GdT: It is. It makes it harder, to a certain degree, and it makes it easier to another. It’s harder to go back to Hollywood. Blade II made money, Hellboy made a lot of money ultimately as it was extremely successful on DVD. The reason we’re doing a sequel, though, is not because they like me but because it made enough money that they want another one. And we love the movie enough that we want another one.
But after those two movies, if I had cashed my chips I would have made a lot more money. I would have made a bigger, bigger, bigger movie, like, I don’t know, X-Men 3. And, essentially, I would be set for life, in the positive and negative sense. I believe that when people say, “I need to settle down,” I hate settling down.
It’s negative in the sense that I go back, restart my life, I do a small Spanish movie and put my salary into that movie, I don’t make money for two years. I’m not a cry baby; I’m just saying those are the circumstances. But the positive aspects are when you go and say to Hollywood, essentially, “Screw you, I don’t need you to make movies, I can make my own movies,” then that’s very good. And at the same time, creatively, it’s like taking a deep breath and saying, “This is who I am,” and declaring your independence.”
But, strangely enough, I also declare my independence from a lot of the more conventional people in the genre. A lot of people have trouble understanding the mixture of these things. These movies that I make are not, under any circumstances, the easy sort-of tits-and-gore types of movies. I if I did a movie with tits, gore and a lot of “F**k you dude!” I would have a lot more credence. I choose the most difficult paths in both worlds; I choose to make strange Hollywood movies and I choose to make strange independent movies!
And a strange Hollywood movie is your next project; how is Hellboy 2 coming on?
GdT: When I talked about it about two years ago with Mignola, we came up with two storylines. One of those storylines is actually incredibly relevant; I consider Hellboy as personal a movie as Pan’s Labyrinth. I told Mignola, “Why don’t we talk about the clash between fantasy and reality? Why don’t we talk about how we live in a world that kills imagination? What would happen if Hellboy came out of the closet, so to speak, in the movie?” So that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing, essentially, what if Hellboy was in the news right now? What would happen? What would happen if fantasy creatures all of a sudden said, “Screw him, let’s take over the world again.”
So it’s a very different tone of movie then?
GdT: It is a very different tone. But I’m trying to follow the same pattern as the first film. You know how a James Bond movie will always have an opening sequence, a girl, James having a post-coital cigarette? I think that a franchise is established by the beats so Hellboy 2 will have some of the same beats as the first one. That said, the idea is also that it’s a more sobre film than the first one and we’re setting up for – hopefully – if we’re lucky enough to do a third one it’ll break your heart. What we’re setting out to do with the third one is so tragic. We’re hoping we can build up this guy for our audience over the first two so that by the third one you’ll have a really hard time with it. If we get the funding, it’s a trilogy.
Pan’s Labyrinth is released in the UK on 24th November and in the US on 29th December.
