An Evening with Guillermo del Toro
Mexican Filmmaker Lives for His Movies

By Luis Sanchez

Guillermo del Toro is the master of atmosphere. His movies are charged with mysterious symbols and dreamy spaces. His surrealistic approach and variety of work, as well as his tenacity, has made him a very important figure in the cinema world. Guillermo del Toro’s characters are charged with humanity; the good guys aren’t always so good and the bad guys are not always bad. The personality of his characters is never flat or two-dimensional; the director understands them and respects them as human beings with moments of bad decisions.

Del Toro lives for his movies and his family. He makes movies because he loves them with passion. He has worked as a projectionist in a movie theater, as a cinema critic, as a special effects artist, as a screenwriter and now as a director. To del Toro, his movies are a personal and interesting journey and have to be taken very seriously. “Showing your movie is like showing your ass in public … It’s like psychoanalysis,” he said.

His advice for new filmmakers is to always keep a journal of what they see in order to illustrate those moments filled with human experience and to go by their gut.

“If it feels wrong in your belly, it’s wrong.”

When Guillermo del Toro was eight years old he started directing his first movies on a Super 8 film camera. Later in life he directed many 16mm short films. He started thinking about the making of Cronos in 1985. The movie started with journal notes and drawings he collected for years. He then knew his movie would need special effects and started looking for somebody in Mexico who would do them for him. He said, “Nobody was making special effects in Mexico, so I went and learned the special effects so I could make Cronos.” He attended the Dick Smith’s Advanced Makeup Course, which led him to start his own monster and makeup effects company, called Necropia. The company was very successful for 15 years, working both in TV movies and feature films. At this time he started writing and directing some episodes of the horror anthology Hora Marcada.

His first feature film, Cronos (1993), was an original vampire story. The film explores the ideas of aging, immortality and the globalization of culture in modern Mexican society. In the film, an antique dealer finds an ancient beetle-like mechanical instrument inside an angel statue. He gains immortality and rejuvenation after being stung by the beetle and becomes addicted to it. The maker of the angel statues is an American businessman who has been looking for the beetle and will not stop until he gets the key to immortality, setting the grounds for the conflict between these two characters. The action takes place in Mexico City and the dialogue alternates between Spanish and English. The film won many awards at the Ariel and the Cannes ceremonies.

Cronos was followed by Mimic (1997), in which Mira Sorvino fights off giant cockroaches in the New York City subway system. Mimic was a great disappointment for the director. He didn’t have the artistic freedom he enjoyed making his first movie. He had to work closely with the producers in order to deliver a summer movie. Del Toro learned that a director shouldn’t be tied to the producers’ agenda because it can lead to chaos.

“I went to the shoot and I started hearing shit like DNA and I thought to my self ‘this is really bullshit’… but when I looked trough the camera and I saw the shot I had [envisioned] I said, ‘This is exactly how I imagine this shot. They (Hollywood) can take away my movie and the story of it, but they can’t take the essence of my movie,’” del Toro said.

El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) was next. This is a very personal film and the one he seems to relate to the most. The idea was conceived 16 years ago when del Toro had an encounter with what he called a really sad ghost. In the film del Toro revived his memories as a child growing up in Jesuit Catholic school. “The experience was horrible,” he said. He also wanted to explore war and what it does to humans. One of the most painful moments in the movie is an explosion that occurs in an orphanage. Both kids and adults are hurt. The explosion is not a show of fireworks as portrayed in many movies. The explosion is not a selective process; it’s a painful experience and hurts everybody in the frame. The scene ends with metal debris hitting the camera; “It hits you,” del Toro said.

In The Devil’s Backbone the camera is always moving but is never distracting. The technical beauty of the movie blends with the structure of the story. The well thought out textures and colors (especially sepias and blues), employed to heighten the psychology of the scenes and the characters, help the viewers understand the mystic truths present in the story.

Blade II is his most recent movie. Del Toro says that what made him decide to take on the movie was the fact that Blade is about a black vampire who kills vampires and would be directed by a Mexican. Del Toro believes that video games and comics are the mythology of today, our reality. He wanted to translate the comic strips into a movie. As he said, “Blade II is about kicking ass.” The fight scenes are filmed as a conversation between the characters. The battles between the different characters have a very strong sense of closure. Del Toro had never shot action before this movie, so he was a little bit nervous about doing it for the first time. A friend of his told him, “Do you know how to shoot a conversation and make it interesting? … Well … it’s the same thing.” His approach to the unknown is, “If something makes you afraid, study it.”

Del Toro believes that as a director he needs to be informed and needs to have a profound knowledge of the technical and aesthetic qualities of the different parts of the movie. In the words of del Toro: “The movie is God, and you [the director] are the Pope.”

Film stills courtesy of the Gene Siskel Film Center