Guillermo del Toro’s Amazing Creatures : The New Yorker
A great, long, New Yorker piece about Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth).
Some quotes:
On working with source materials:
“It’s like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night … bam.”
On script writing and The Shining:
“You’re reading, ‘Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors.’ You just don’t get it—how lonely they are, the rhythm of the prrr, the change of frequency in the wheels, the pattern in the carpet going frh, frh, frh, the lens enhancing the field and the perspective, and the moment he turns the corner the twins being there. You can’t explain that in words.”
On Atheism:
I got to know the embalmers. One day I visited, and there was a pile of fetuses, new arrivals. Maybe it’s magnified in my memory, but I remember it being this tall.” He lifted his arm to his waist. Del Toro had been raised Catholic, but this sight, he said, upended his faith. Humans could not possibly have souls; even the most blameless lives ended as rotting garbage.
On twice paying a ransom for his father’s life:
“I highly recommend you save your father’s life. You don’t see yourself as somebody’s child anymore. You become a man saving another man.”
On horror:
“The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.”
On technology in art:
“The great consolation always comes in the form of Hitchcock,” he said. “Hitchcock did 3-D, wholeheartedly, with ‘Dial M for Murder.’ He would try every gimmick, every lens, every camera mount. He’s the patron saint for my proclivities.” With some embarrassment, he noted that, at Comic-Con, he had introduced a line of “Pan’s Labyrinth” figurines. “Hitchcock would have gone to Comic-Con,” he said. “He would have signed collectible shower curtains. He was a showman and an auteur.”
