Guillermo del Toro
9 October 1964
Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
5' 10" (1,78 m)
del Toro got his first big break when Cronos (1993) won nine academy awards in Mexico, then went on to win the International Critics Week prize at Cannes. Following this success, del Toro made his first Hollywood film, Mimic (1997), starring Mira Sorvino.
del Toro had some unfortunate experiences working with a demanding Hollywood studio on Mimic (1997), and returned to Mexico to form his own production company, The Tequila Gang.
Next for del Toro, was El espinazo del diablo (2001), a Spanish Civil War ghost story. The film was hailed by critics and audiences alike, and del Toro decided to give Hollywood another try. In 2002, he directed the Wesley Snipes vampire sequel, Blade II (2002).
On a roll, Del Toro followed up Blade II (2002) with another successful comic-book inspired film, Hellboy (2004), starring one of Del Toro's favorite actors, Ron Perlman.
Married with children, del Toro lives in Los Angeles.
He was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother. - IMDb Mini Biography By: www.deltorofilms.com
Trade Mark
Often uses insects or insect imagery
Uses a lot of religious relics and artifacts. Always mentions Catholicism
Archangels, symbols and other religious items
Many of his films have major scenes based in underground areas such as subways systems (Mimic (1997), Hellboy (2004)), sewers (Blade II (2002)), or large basements (El espinazo del diablo (2001)).
Likes to use amber as a dominant color in his movies. This is especially noticeable in Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004).
Clockwork designs and motifs (for example, Kroenen's lair in Hellboy (2004) and the captain's obsession with his father's watch in El laberinto del fauno (2006) ).
Often casts Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, and Federico Luppi
Frequently works with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro
One or more of his protagonists are often strongly and pivotally influenced by their father figures.
Beard
His films frequently show an autopsy or have a scene set in a morge. The autopsy is often performed over a non-human character.
Films often feature a portal that leads to different worlds
Often uses insects or insect imagery
Uses a lot of religious relics and artifacts. Always mentions Catholicism
Archangels, symbols and other religious items
Many of his films have major scenes based in underground areas such as subways systems (Mimic (1997), Hellboy (2004)), sewers (Blade II (2002)), or large basements (El espinazo del diablo (2001)).
Likes to use amber as a dominant color in his movies. This is especially noticeable in Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004).
Clockwork designs and motifs (for example, Kroenen's lair in Hellboy (2004) and the captain's obsession with his father's watch in El laberinto del fauno (2006) ).
Often casts Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, and Federico Luppi
Frequently works with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro
One or more of his protagonists are often strongly and pivotally influenced by their father figures.
Beard
His films frequently show an autopsy or have a scene set in a morge. The autopsy is often performed over a non-human character.
Films often feature a portal that leads to different worlds
Trivia
Became a vegetarian after seeing La matanza de Texas (1974) but only for four years. Currently, he's no longer a vegetarian.
Turned down a chance to direct Blade: Trinity (2004), Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban (2004) to work on his dream project: Hellboy (2004).
Fought the film studios for almost seven years to get Ron Perlman for the title role in Hellboy (2004). The studio wanted a bigger name to ensure the success of the movie, but del Toro thought that Perlman was the perfect choice and wouldn't make the movie if he wasn't cast.
He is friends with fellow successful Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Has a photographic memory.
1997: His father was kidnapped in Mexico and held for seventy-two days until his ransom was paid.
In a January 2007 interview on the radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," said that his strictly Catholic grandmother was a "Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976)" figure in his childhood. He told Gross that his grandmother would require him to mortify himself in self-punishment, in one case placing metal bottle caps into his shoes so that the soles of his feet were bloodied while walking to school. She also tried to exorcise him twice because of his persistent interest in fantasy and drawing monsters from his imagination.
His favorite movie monsters are Frankenstein's Monster and the Creature of the Black Lagoon.
In 2007, he was one of 10 Mexican Oscar-nominees. The others were Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Adriana Barraza, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Navarro, Emmanuel Lubezki, Eugenio Caballero, Pilar Revuelta and Fernando Cámara.
Lost 45 lbs. while making El laberinto del fauno (2006), which he admitted in the DVD's video prologue.
Turned down a chance to direct Soy leyenda (2007), Llamada perdida (2008), Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe (2009) and Halo to work on Hellboy II. El ejército dorado(2008).
Turned down the chance to direct Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996).
States Mimic (1997) as the worst of his films and has disowned it, blaming constant interference from the producers as the reason for the poor result.
Dec. 2007 - Ranked #37 on EW's The 50 Smartest People in Hollywood.
Was asked to direct El fin de los días (1999), but he turned it down.
His movie and comic book collection is so huge that he had to buy an extra home to accommodate it.
Is good friends with director Robert Rodriguez.
States La novia de Frankenstein (1935) as his favorite movie.
His favorite albums are "The Wall" by Pink Floyd and "Security" by Peter Gabriel.
In an article in USA Today (August 22, 2011), del Toro listed his 6 favorite fright flicks: La parada de los monstruos (1932), Los intrusos (1944), Suspense (1961), Tiburón (1975), Alien, el octavo pasajero (1979), and The Shining (1980)_.
Children with Lorenza Newton: Mariana Del Toro and Marisa Del Toro.
Became a vegetarian after seeing La matanza de Texas (1974) but only for four years. Currently, he's no longer a vegetarian.
Turned down a chance to direct Blade: Trinity (2004), Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban (2004) to work on his dream project: Hellboy (2004).
Fought the film studios for almost seven years to get Ron Perlman for the title role in Hellboy (2004). The studio wanted a bigger name to ensure the success of the movie, but del Toro thought that Perlman was the perfect choice and wouldn't make the movie if he wasn't cast.
He is friends with fellow successful Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Has a photographic memory.
1997: His father was kidnapped in Mexico and held for seventy-two days until his ransom was paid.
In a January 2007 interview on the radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," said that his strictly Catholic grandmother was a "Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976)" figure in his childhood. He told Gross that his grandmother would require him to mortify himself in self-punishment, in one case placing metal bottle caps into his shoes so that the soles of his feet were bloodied while walking to school. She also tried to exorcise him twice because of his persistent interest in fantasy and drawing monsters from his imagination.
His favorite movie monsters are Frankenstein's Monster and the Creature of the Black Lagoon.
In 2007, he was one of 10 Mexican Oscar-nominees. The others were Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Adriana Barraza, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Navarro, Emmanuel Lubezki, Eugenio Caballero, Pilar Revuelta and Fernando Cámara.
Lost 45 lbs. while making El laberinto del fauno (2006), which he admitted in the DVD's video prologue.
Turned down a chance to direct Soy leyenda (2007), Llamada perdida (2008), Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe (2009) and Halo to work on Hellboy II. El ejército dorado(2008).
Turned down the chance to direct Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996).
States Mimic (1997) as the worst of his films and has disowned it, blaming constant interference from the producers as the reason for the poor result.
Dec. 2007 - Ranked #37 on EW's The 50 Smartest People in Hollywood.
Was asked to direct El fin de los días (1999), but he turned it down.
His movie and comic book collection is so huge that he had to buy an extra home to accommodate it.
Is good friends with director Robert Rodriguez.
States La novia de Frankenstein (1935) as his favorite movie.
His favorite albums are "The Wall" by Pink Floyd and "Security" by Peter Gabriel.
In an article in USA Today (August 22, 2011), del Toro listed his 6 favorite fright flicks: La parada de los monstruos (1932), Los intrusos (1944), Suspense (1961), Tiburón (1975), Alien, el octavo pasajero (1979), and The Shining (1980)_.
Children with Lorenza Newton: Mariana Del Toro and Marisa Del Toro.
Personal Quotes
When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.
Aside from being a perfect Hellboy, he is a gentleman, a friend to die for, a great actor and - for the ladies - he has the sexiest male voice this side of Barry White. What more can one ask for? - On Ron Perlman, 2002.
I remember the worst experience of my life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic (1997) [del Toro's first Hollywood feature, in 1997, which was severely compromised by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at least there are rules. Now when I look at Mimic, what I see is the pain of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful.
It would be a cliché to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I've seen people being shot; I've had guns put to my head; I've seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated ... because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.
The sign of a true friendship is when you can forgive success.
These shots are not eye-candy, they are, to me, eye-protein. - regarding El laberinto del fauno (2006).
My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.
That's what I love about fairy tales; they tell the truth, not organized politics, religion or economics. Those things destroy the soul. That is the idea from El laberinto del fauno(2006) and it surfaces in Hellboy (2004) and, to some degree, in all my films.
[on Stanley Kubrick] I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don't agree. I think that Barry Lyndon (1975) or La naranja mecánica (1971) are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, La chaqueta metálica (1987) is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me, a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes, like the induction with R. Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots, had a particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D'Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking.
I think that 50 percent of the narrative is in the audio/visual storytelling. I happened to think the screenplay is the basis of it all, but definitely doesn't tell the movie. It tells the story, but doesn't tell the whole movie. A lot of the narrative is in the details.
History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.
If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.
Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is filmmaking to me...Success is fucking up on your own terms.
[at San Diego Comic-Con]: I fabricate everything. There's not a single real thing in El laberinto del fauno (2006), because ultimately I'm very specific about [those details]. Context is everything in a fable, because every story has already been told. So the only variations I find are the voice of the storyteller and the context in which it's told.
Stanley Kubrick's absolute control over the medium turns his rock-solid framing and tense timing into real weapons pointed directly at the unsuspecting audience of El resplandor(1980). No one has ever used the Steadicam as perfectly as he did in the tracking shots behind Torrance, Danny's tricycle. He uses the soundtrack brilliantly, fusing concrete music with sound effects and score to unsettle and position the uber-mannered, hyper-real performances of his actors. And, refreshingly, Kubrick is not above moments of Grand Guignol: the elevator doors spilling blood, the axe on the chest, the Grady twins bathed in blood or the old undead crone festering in the bathtub. He proves that great horror can be both shocking and a highly artistic endeavor.
[on what scares him] (jokingly) Politicians -- a lot. They are so deranged, especially these days. And human pettiness. Oh my God that's scary. It's so horrifying. I've seen a UFO, and I've heard ghosts twice -- once in New Zealand and once in Mexico, but those are not the scariest things. The scary things are real things like every day.
[on celebrating Halloween] I've been making myself up as a nasty zombie and playing the character really straight, never breaking and not giving out candy. I wander my neighbourhood with an eye socket gone, moaning and groaning, and the kids all freak out. But this year my wife and daughter begged me to go as a pirate, so that's what I'm doing. But I recommend everybody who has the option, to scare trick-or-treaters and freak out as many people as they can.
The horror story was birthed when we became sedentary cavemen and started telling scary stories to keep the children from wandering off into the night. Today, there's nothing more cathartic for a guy in a three-piece suit, someone super wound-up and super-tight, to get on a roller-coaster of a horror film and scream like a madman.
I like pictures that are perverse and intelligent, something that you actually take home with you. Las tres caras del miedo (1963) might not make you jump every minute but Mario Bava makes indefatigable images and Jack Clayton's Suspense (1961) is so creepy and powerful, he's going to outlive the filmmakers going for short-term scares.
[on what attracts him to genre films] The beauty and the horror. These directors have made great works of art in a genre that most people just throw in the garbage bin, that they don't think is important. But Suspense (1961) is as powerful a film as you'll see in any genre. It towers above other films.
I hate Hollywood movies with children as happy, brainless creatures that spout one-liners. What I tried to put in El espinazo del diablo (2001) is how unsafe it is to be a child. Many times in my life I saw children almost kill each other.
[on whether he was thinking of directing a Star Wars sequel] It's like thinking if I want to date a supermodel. I don't think about these things.
Kaiju [monster] movies, by definition, bring a completely escapist fun. When you're a kid and you're watching Godzilla stomp a bunch of tanks or jets or through a city, the proportions of these things are so enormous that you cannot correlate them to anything real. What I do is I then bring in visually a very different sense of style from reality. I have these super-colored lights illuminating the rain, so it looks like a living comic-book or a living anime, you know? And the things that I do very, very consciously is I vacated all the streets so they would be empty of people. So you're never thinking 'Oh, the kaiju just crushed 600 people'. Because the streets are vacated and everybody's in a refuge, all they can destroy is buildings and vehicles when nobody's there.
You cannot aspire to do a movie that is as quirky as El laberinto del fauno (2006) in the Hollywood machinery. It would get tested and noted by executives to death, and end up having a happy ending and all that bullshit, you know? And at the same time, you cannot end up with with a movie that is as spectacular and magnificent in showmanship as Pacific Rim (2013) if you do it in Mexico or Spain.
[on what's the scariest thing he's ever seen on a television show] When I was a kid, it's not a metaphor, but I actually soiled myself when I was a child watching Night Gallery(1969). There was an episode called The Doll. I remember when the doll smiles, I literally lost control of my sphincter.
The natural state of a movie is 'not-getting-made.'
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(Gifs and photos: source_Tumblr)
birthdays_OFFmag
When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.
Aside from being a perfect Hellboy, he is a gentleman, a friend to die for, a great actor and - for the ladies - he has the sexiest male voice this side of Barry White. What more can one ask for? - On Ron Perlman, 2002.
I remember the worst experience of my life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic (1997) [del Toro's first Hollywood feature, in 1997, which was severely compromised by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at least there are rules. Now when I look at Mimic, what I see is the pain of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful.
It would be a cliché to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I've seen people being shot; I've had guns put to my head; I've seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated ... because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.
The sign of a true friendship is when you can forgive success.
These shots are not eye-candy, they are, to me, eye-protein. - regarding El laberinto del fauno (2006).
My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.
That's what I love about fairy tales; they tell the truth, not organized politics, religion or economics. Those things destroy the soul. That is the idea from El laberinto del fauno(2006) and it surfaces in Hellboy (2004) and, to some degree, in all my films.
[on Stanley Kubrick] I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don't agree. I think that Barry Lyndon (1975) or La naranja mecánica (1971) are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, La chaqueta metálica (1987) is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me, a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes, like the induction with R. Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots, had a particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D'Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking.
I think that 50 percent of the narrative is in the audio/visual storytelling. I happened to think the screenplay is the basis of it all, but definitely doesn't tell the movie. It tells the story, but doesn't tell the whole movie. A lot of the narrative is in the details.
History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.
If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.
Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is filmmaking to me...Success is fucking up on your own terms.
[at San Diego Comic-Con]: I fabricate everything. There's not a single real thing in El laberinto del fauno (2006), because ultimately I'm very specific about [those details]. Context is everything in a fable, because every story has already been told. So the only variations I find are the voice of the storyteller and the context in which it's told.
Stanley Kubrick's absolute control over the medium turns his rock-solid framing and tense timing into real weapons pointed directly at the unsuspecting audience of El resplandor(1980). No one has ever used the Steadicam as perfectly as he did in the tracking shots behind Torrance, Danny's tricycle. He uses the soundtrack brilliantly, fusing concrete music with sound effects and score to unsettle and position the uber-mannered, hyper-real performances of his actors. And, refreshingly, Kubrick is not above moments of Grand Guignol: the elevator doors spilling blood, the axe on the chest, the Grady twins bathed in blood or the old undead crone festering in the bathtub. He proves that great horror can be both shocking and a highly artistic endeavor.
[on what scares him] (jokingly) Politicians -- a lot. They are so deranged, especially these days. And human pettiness. Oh my God that's scary. It's so horrifying. I've seen a UFO, and I've heard ghosts twice -- once in New Zealand and once in Mexico, but those are not the scariest things. The scary things are real things like every day.
[on celebrating Halloween] I've been making myself up as a nasty zombie and playing the character really straight, never breaking and not giving out candy. I wander my neighbourhood with an eye socket gone, moaning and groaning, and the kids all freak out. But this year my wife and daughter begged me to go as a pirate, so that's what I'm doing. But I recommend everybody who has the option, to scare trick-or-treaters and freak out as many people as they can.
The horror story was birthed when we became sedentary cavemen and started telling scary stories to keep the children from wandering off into the night. Today, there's nothing more cathartic for a guy in a three-piece suit, someone super wound-up and super-tight, to get on a roller-coaster of a horror film and scream like a madman.
I like pictures that are perverse and intelligent, something that you actually take home with you. Las tres caras del miedo (1963) might not make you jump every minute but Mario Bava makes indefatigable images and Jack Clayton's Suspense (1961) is so creepy and powerful, he's going to outlive the filmmakers going for short-term scares.
[on what attracts him to genre films] The beauty and the horror. These directors have made great works of art in a genre that most people just throw in the garbage bin, that they don't think is important. But Suspense (1961) is as powerful a film as you'll see in any genre. It towers above other films.
I hate Hollywood movies with children as happy, brainless creatures that spout one-liners. What I tried to put in El espinazo del diablo (2001) is how unsafe it is to be a child. Many times in my life I saw children almost kill each other.
[on whether he was thinking of directing a Star Wars sequel] It's like thinking if I want to date a supermodel. I don't think about these things.
Kaiju [monster] movies, by definition, bring a completely escapist fun. When you're a kid and you're watching Godzilla stomp a bunch of tanks or jets or through a city, the proportions of these things are so enormous that you cannot correlate them to anything real. What I do is I then bring in visually a very different sense of style from reality. I have these super-colored lights illuminating the rain, so it looks like a living comic-book or a living anime, you know? And the things that I do very, very consciously is I vacated all the streets so they would be empty of people. So you're never thinking 'Oh, the kaiju just crushed 600 people'. Because the streets are vacated and everybody's in a refuge, all they can destroy is buildings and vehicles when nobody's there.
You cannot aspire to do a movie that is as quirky as El laberinto del fauno (2006) in the Hollywood machinery. It would get tested and noted by executives to death, and end up having a happy ending and all that bullshit, you know? And at the same time, you cannot end up with with a movie that is as spectacular and magnificent in showmanship as Pacific Rim (2013) if you do it in Mexico or Spain.
[on what's the scariest thing he's ever seen on a television show] When I was a kid, it's not a metaphor, but I actually soiled myself when I was a child watching Night Gallery(1969). There was an episode called The Doll. I remember when the doll smiles, I literally lost control of my sphincter.
The natural state of a movie is 'not-getting-made.'
(Gifs and photos: source_Tumblr)
birthdays_OFFmag
