Guillermo Del Toro

To avoid the obvious data stream you can find on imdb or Wikipedia. I want to attempt to try and better understand the man himself,
Director Guillermo Del Toro has long been regarded as a contemporary Master of Horror and has been influential in the genre of Sci-fi and fantasy. This is mainly because he excels richly at providing an eerie palette for mood and atmosphere to his varied film creations and his connection with monsters. He has stated in numerous interviews that he feels most at home when he is surrounded by his monsters. So let’s begin there, Del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico,  

Growing up as a child he found the monsters in pulp cinema magazines liberating and has called them the “immense minority”; one that was not evil as they are perceived to be, but outcasts from society, where he found pathos to them that he could empathize.

Angel of Death - Hellboy (2008)

Del Toro has been quoted as referring to them as the patron saints of misfits; outcasts from paradise. He goes on to define two poles of art, one that celebrates’ mankind as god’s greatest creation and the other as abandoned children or monsters. Monsters represent an image of humanity itself, the imperfection of the human condition; they are shown to us as a twisted reflection like a funhouse mirror, and within that reflection there are aspects of one’s self you don’t normally see. “The creation of a monster is to shock and provide horror, but in the process they define and complete us. And it has been this way for all of human history, because in one form or another monsters have constantly been with us”. A key example of that train of thought, is  Del Toro has a life size replica of the 1931’s Frankenstein with the young girl Maria. Near the end of the movie the monster meets a child by a pond.” They throw daises into the water, but when they ran out of flowers, the monster tosses her in. He realizes his mistake, but it’s too late Maria has drowned”.  As in Del Toro’s own films the fables and fairy tales he admires; Frankenstein does not protect its young or innocent characters from violence, tragedy or death.

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, was a creature created purposely by man, in his pursuit of knowledge, to which distinguishes him from every other creature associated in the horror genre. As he represents man’s pursuit for immortality through science; the creature’s only sin was being brought into a world that doesn’t except him.

Del Toro’s films’ often reflects his own emotional memories of his childhood. Like being bullied by classmates, or being subjected to his grandmother’s repressive interpretation of Catholicism – she exorcised him twice by putting metal bottle caps in his shoes as a form of penance. It was also around the age of seven or eight, when he saw his first ever dead body.  It was on the side of the road, and rather than witnessing the macabre, he saw the fragile state of the human condition, and  its connection to nature, being almost symbiotic and beautifully connected.

 Guillermo Del Toro is an ever evolving artistic human being, His early career films were Spanish speaking films of Cronos, Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth, the latter won him 3 Oscars, for Cinematography, Art Direction and Make-up. And it was Pan’s Labyrinth that catapulted him to the populist Hollywood production with Blade II,  Hellboy films, Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, and most recently the 13 Oscar nominated film The Shape of Water (see next blog). If you look at Tim Burton’s humble beginnings he was an animator with Disney. To this day, Burton completes a fully comprehensive storyboard to all his film projects, Del Toro also follows suit. In Guillermo’s own words, it provides “a coding of the film before starting a project. Storyboarding serves as a running dialogue with himself and amongst his department heads, to show ideas behind a monster or a piece of wardrobe”. 

In 2017 Del Toro ran an exhibit called At Home with monster that debuted in Los Angeles in 2016  and toured in Minnesota and Toronto in 2017. It showcased his Bleak House, a Victorian Era reference to his home of personal collections. In it we learn over the span of his film making career Del Toro has collected an array of art, that includes film props and sculptures, artifacts, specimens, paintings,  drawings, literatures in novels, poems, magazines, and comics.  These are physical representative things he has systematically cultivated to inspire him.  When he begins to research or prepare a new project he tries to absorb as much as he can, from the art of the time, to its religion, history and literature of the time, and so forth. His bleak house is composed of several libraries, and each room differs in its theme. He has a Victorian Era room called the Dickens Room, filled thousands of novels of that era, with paintings and sculptures

Of that period, there you’ll find all the works of Charles Dickens; it is also the room in which Guillermo Del Toro wrote his 9^th film, Crimson Peak, his first fully realized period piece, a film that was set in a Victorian era.  Though he crafts his films with intent to not fully render what we see as CGI, he feels the need that there is an actual actor playing that ghost or each character, so we can see the imperfection and details in movement and interaction, as well as some mistakes, in his words “you can never capture those subtle nuances in a controlled world”.  

Though he understands and appreciates the incredible ease of digital technology and how it plays in today’s film making to which he does embrace.

Cronos  (1993)

Hellboy's arsenal

  Artist he admired was Jack Kirby, though his medium was comic books Del Toro felt he never held back, he was one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century; “Kirby was completely contained within his work”. He was also heavily influenced by Hitchcock and Fellini; Fellini did films in black and White and in color using a vibrant palette or neorealist tones so to have the point of having the color tell the story.  In Del Toro’s first film Cronos he patterned the movie after the colors of the alchemist process of black, red white and gold, and used elements of fire and water. “The great goal of the alchemist is to make vile matter into transcendent matter – the purist matter, that’s basically what I do with everything I love: comic books or Vinyl toys. I try to sublimate them”.   In regards to color specifically, Del Toro has stated he uses it carefully. To him Red comes with a radioactive warning, there isn’t a movie where he uses it casually, he gives it specific meaning.  In Pacific Rim blue is the color of memories, red is the color of life. In Hellboy, red was only with characters or objects associated with the Hellboy’s character, and in Crimson Peak red became the color of the past, and of sin & secrets.