PART ONE OF INTERVIEW WITH GUILLERMO DEL TORO

A few months ago I was honored in the extreme to sit with some fellow journalists for a small round table interview. Present were Sergio Mims of WHPK-FM/N’Digo and Peter Sobczynski of Liberty Suburban Chicago Newspapers/WKQX. I’ve edited the interview to include everyone although I don’t identify the journalists by name. I'll also give Sergio credit for the pics used here and in part two.

I’ll be amazed if Guillermo del Toro doesn’t take home an Oscar for Pan’s Labyrinth. He has some solid competition but the buzz has been steady and growing and such a win would simply acknowledge a fact that none of the other nominees have- his amazing track record. In his mother tongue he’s unstoppable and in English he’s relentlessly entertaining far outstripping the ambitions of other would be fantasists and horror fans turned directors. I’ll bet the Academy won’t be able to resist Pan’s stunning combination of performance, craft and mythic rumination. Part Two of the Interview will post on Monday.

INT: It’s interesting to note that in referring back to the fairy tale, which you often do in your work, you are creating something that is essentially timeless and yet your most critically acclaimed films are set in this specific time frame of the Spanish Civil War.
GDT: When I was writing a book about Hitchcock I discovered that he believed that for a tale to be universal it had to be told in a way that was very specific as to where and when it happens. The idea is not being able to imagine Shadow of A Doubt taking place anywhere else other than Santa Rosa California, or Vertigo without San Francisco. I think this is even more true of fantasy as a genre. Where you set it makes all the difference. If I tell you I’m going to do a vampire movie set in the White House or the Vatican it lends an entirely different weight to the story than if I set it elsewhere.

When I was doing The Devil’s Backbone I knew that it was a tale of Childhood innocence and war. The politics were unavoidable. Of course I have always been fascinated by the civil war in Spain It’s a horrible prologue to World War II. And an epilogue as well when you realize that the resistance lasted two decades. The allies didn’t get involved at the beginning because they didn’t want to upset the European situation and then after Normandy, despite the fact that the resistance worked tirelessly for the Allies against the fascists and Nazi’s Spain was left in Franco’s hands for another thirty years. I find that incredibly harrowing. A ghost as a metaphor for unresolved issues? What bigger unresolved issue can there be, what bigger generator of ghosts, than war?

INT: But your civil war films have a unique point of view.

GDT: As far as using a child’s point of view I guess I felt compelled from every direction. It haunted me growing up. No matter how far you are from the battlefield front lines a time of war creates its own climate. To be subsumed by that is terrifying. I think all children today are to some extent war children. It’s all around you everywhere you go.

When I was growing up as a Catholic I was always very bored with the sermon. What interested me were the parables. They were meditations on large truths wrapped in tales. And the tales were usually slender, right to the point. The mustard seed of faith, the talents you name it. You know exactly what the person telling the tale means. The fantasy genre is expressly concerned with parables and allows for truth telling in an age where skepticism and cynicism too often substitute for intelligence. E don’t believe in the government, or the family or God but we haven’t bothered to replace those things with anything else and so we feel empty, cynical and skeptical of anything that tells us things can be better. Fantasy, when it works, is a deeply spiritual thing.

I lived with my grandmother and great aunts in the guest room at the end of the house. And in that room I used to have a lucid dream every night at midnight of a fawn coming out of the wardrobe. I know it wasn’t real but the experiences I had growing up; my father being kidnapped for 72 days, working in an asylum, coming upon a bunch of aborted fetuses, I had to protect myself from all that. And at the bottom of that fantastic experience in my bedroom is a deeper truth I could feel safe in, that told me something I needed to know.

INT: So where does the frightening subject matter fit in to that?

Well in every movie I make I create what I call a walk out moment. It is the moment when you discover that perhaps you are not in the choir. At that moment you should feel free to leave the church! Not everything can be for everyone. Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s were drafted with a lot of detail and benefit greatly from second viewings. For instance a common complaint about Devil’s backbone is that the ghost is not scary. That is on purpose. The point is that the scary thing is not the ghost, it’s people, humans. Pan’s same thing. I think that's one of the most important things we can realize today.

INT: Have you stopped to think you are creating a whole new generation of Famous Monsters kids?

GDT: I would like nothing better! My experience of Comicon used to be being stopped by people between the ages of 18-40. But after doing Hellboy I find myself getting stopped by 10-12 year old kids!! I love it. That’s who I made Hellboy for. When you are that age you look for insane adventure. That is the place where myth takes root, the spiritual place. For me myth is almost a religion. I think Jung was right when he said that archetypes were universal but become completely individual for individual people. The apprehension of the archetype is universal but the interpretation of the archetype is individual.

PART TWO ON MONDAY