Guillermo del Toro Gómez is a film director, scriptwriter, producer and author, born in
1964 in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the traditional State of Jalisco.
Even as a kid, his imagination was limitless.
He was branded for life by an extraordinary experience: a lucid dream where he saw a faun
coming out from behind his clock, and monsters crawling beneath his green carpet.
Terrified, but urgently needing to pee, Del Toro offered them a deal: if they let him
go to the toilet, he would be his friend forever.
They kept their end of the deal, so Guillermo dedicated his career to portraying his friends
under a new, kinder light.
Educated under her grandma’s strict Catholicism, Del Toro was into the fantastic genre since
childhood.
His father, an unimaginative automobile entrepreneur, didn’t understand his son’s fascination
with films like James Whale’s Frankenstein and monster comics.
Despite the limitations of his family, Del Toro managed to enjoy Japanese films and manga
series from the time, like Astroboy, Princess Knight, Godzilla, and also the classic magazine
by Forrest Ackerman, Famous Monsters of Filmland, which he loved so much, he learnt English
in order to understand it.
In it, he read about a substance name nitrocellulose, a chemical that contracts and stretches the
skin.
This discovery led to his first approach to make-up, which consisted in painting scars
on himself to scare his nanny.
Del Toro also got into drawing, inspired by an anatomy book his father had gathering dust
on a bookshelf.
His first short-films were shot with the family’s Super 8 camera and his Planet of the Apes
toys.
Del Toro made around eight shorts during his teenage years, the most famous one being about
a potato trying to dominate the world.
That first experience behind the camera encouraged him to study at the Guadalajara’s investigation
and film studies center, where he got his degree in 1983.
His time at university only made his passion for films grow, especially films from the
forties and fifties.
He was fascinated by the Universal classic monsters, like the creature from the Black
Lagoon, and Ingmar Bergman’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s creations.
He even published a book about Hitch, where he analyses his work.
His Hispanic heroes were Luis Buñuel, whose surreal and dream-like style made quite an
impression on Del Toro, and the pretty much unknown Víctor Erice, whose film The Spirit
of the Beehive would become an inspiration for his most iconic movies.
The Spirit of the Beehive tells the story of two girls after the Spanish civil war.
They watch Frankenstein at a mobile cinema and end up convincing themselves the monster
lives near their town.
With this film, Del Toro leant about neorealism, a style which focuses on a few characters
living in a depressing and sordid environment, uses non-professional actors and usually has
a granulated effect.
Del Toro became interested in the Spanish postwar period, in stories told from kids’
points of views and imagination, in the influence of the past over the present, and he fell
in love with classic horror and Spanish literary tradition.
From his studies of Hitchcock’s work, Del Toro learnt the importance of meticulousness,
especially in the preproduction.
As the British master, Del Toro doesn’t start shooting unless he has a storyboard
of each shot.
He is known for carrying around notebooks with sketches of designs for the characters
or notes about them.
Based on these sketches, he decides on color palettes, costume designs and make-up to bring
the characters to life.
If something is not working, he stops the shooting process to redo his storyboards.
He’d rather lose some time than collect material that won’t make the cut.
“Paper is the editing software of poor people,” he even said once.
All this thorough preparation also has its origin in his experience as special effects
and make-up artist, which taught him to spend more time than usual working on preproduction
and design of the sets.
His mentor in the professional make-up world was the legendary Dick Smith, a pioneer in
the field.
He’s known for films like The Godfather, where he made Marlon Brando look several years
older; The Exorcist, where he took Reagan from sweet girl to vomit-projecting head-
spinning Monster; and the final shooting scene in Taxi Driver.
He was one of the first ones to use several pieces over the skin and face of actors.
Many of Dick Smith’s techniques became the standard in the industry, and Guillermo del
Toro for sure had his fair practice, since he worked in the make-up field for ten years.
He even founded his own brand, Necropia, in 1985.
That year was a new beginning for the Mexican filmmaker: he shot his ninth short film, Doña
Lupe, which was about a widow who finds herself forced to rent a room to two policemen.
As with any short made by a student, Del Toro now laughs at the poor production it had,
but he still likes the dialogues.
Even though he can write scripts in English and Spanish, he feels prouder of those in
Spanish, since they come to him more naturally and fluently.
His next short film, Geometría, shot in 1987, is more similar in theme to his later work:
monsters, black humor and magic rituals.
Its esthetics were inspired by the work of directors like Mario Bava and Darío Argento.
Geometría, based on a short story by Fredric Brown, starts with a widow receiving a letter
from his son’s school telling her he is about to fail geometry for the third time.
After being told off and sent to his room, the desperate kid decides to make a pact with
the devil to pass geometry and bring back his father from the dead.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I can tell you that in this early work, we can
already see the delicate balance between humor and horror that would later characterize all
his films.
The next step in his career was thanks to a classic in Mexican television: La hora marcada,
an anthology series presenting horror, science fiction and the fantastic genre, in the vein
of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror.
It was originally aired in the late eighties by El Canal de las Estrellas, part of the
Televisa group.
It wasn’t really talked about outside of Mexico, but it was key for the Mexican audiovisual
industry, which until then had been dominated by soap operas.
It was also the meeting point for Guillermo and Alfonso Cuarón.
Cuarón started out in the show as the assisting director, and Del Toro was in charge of make-up
and special effects.
Actually, Cuarón and Del Toro met on set, when Guillermo threw in Cuarón’s face that
the episode he directed was a copy of a Stephen King’s story.
Cuarón took the blame, and justified it saying King’s was a great story, to which Del Toro
said, “If it was such a great story, why is your episode so bad?”
It would have been a blow to any director’s ego, but Cuarón took it humbly, and that’s
how a long and productive friendship began.
With time, even Del Toro wrote and directed his own episodes: “Caminos de ayer,” a
story about time-travelling; “Con todo para llevar,” an episode about zombies in a fast-food
restaurant, and three others.
The most important one, though, was “El Ogro,” where a girl mistreated by his father
is rescued by an ogre that lives in a sewer and ends up eating her.
La hora marcada didn’t last long, and when it was over, there was no more place on TV
for horror or fantasy.
Dying for the opportunity to tell new stories, Cuarón and Del Toro decided to turn to filmmaking.
Through his company Necropia, Guillermo met Bertha and Guillermo Navarro, two siblings
that have worked with him ever since.
They were the first ones to support him when he decided to direct his first full-length
film, Cronos.
This film tells the story of an antique dealer who finds a strange scarab-shaped device inside
an archangel statue.
While inspecting it, a needle comes out from the machine and injects him with an unidentified
substance.
Jesús Gris is terrified, but he soon finds out his health and vigor are returning, along
with a strange thirst for blood.
Followed by a rich businessman and his nephew, called Ángel de la Guardia, Jesús will try
by all means to keep the device falling into the wrong hands, while fighting to keep his
humanity.
Starred by Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman, who would become some of his favorite actors,
the film perfectly captures how the everyday routine can coexist with fantasy, something
which Del Toro says he got from his Mexican culture, where the sublime can turn into terrible
in the blink of an eye.
Still, Cronos was a risky project, and Del Toro knew it perfectly.
The Mexican Film Institute didn’t trust genre films.
Besides, at the time, Cronos was one of the most expensive films ever made in Mexico.
Del Toro had to mortgage his house to make the film how he wanted, and he got into a
debt he could only pay off four years later thanks to Mimic, his following project.
To make things worse, Cronos didn’t do too well at the box-office, and the Mexican critics
didn’t enjoy it.
Salvation came in the form of international festivals and foreign critics, who were fascinated
by this weird mixture of religious symbolism, a spin on vampirism, the clock machinery,
and Del Toro’s trademark: showing how monsters can have human traits, and human beings become
monsters.
It was also an amazing cover letter to get into Hollywood, where he’s had a spot ever
since.
Directing a Hollywood film is the dream for many, but for Guillermo del Toro, it was one
of the hardest experiences of his life.
His project, a script named Mimic, told the story about genetically engineered insects
that start to imitate and hunt people.
The piece became a battle between Del Toro and the then Weinstein brothers’ entertainment
company, Miramax.
They didn’t have patience for Del Toro’s meticulousness, and they kept clogging up
his work: they wanted him to change the monsters, the film esthetics, and they even hired a
second crew behind his back to shoot cheap jump scares.
For someone like Del Toro, who dedicated his life to every project and was obsessed with
his work, seeing how his film was manipulated and he couldn’t do anything about it was
extremely frustrating.
The defining battle was over the final cut of the film: Guillermo wanted to have the
final word, but the company refused.
His director’s cut version was only released in 2011.
Despite the setbacks, Guillermo was pleased with some aspects of the film, especially
the esthetics.
The theme also allowed him to show some of his other qualities: his talent working in
dark and claustrophobic sets, his fascination for insects, and the ability to create a dormant
horror that looms over the characters at all times.
The tough experience also helped him make a decision: he would never again work on a
project he wasn’t passionate about, and where he couldn’t be in control.
Mimic didn’t drive the critics crazy, but they did appreciate the original way in which
such a conventional plot unfolded.
In 1998, while Del Toro was in the US, his father was kidnapped in Guadalajara.
After an ordeal that went on for ten weeks, and a ransom that ended up being twice the
original amount, his father was released.
The police never found the kidnappers, even though they kept threatening the director
and his family.
Guillermo then made the tough decision of leaving Mexico with his family, and he has
lived abroad ever since, much to his regret.
Away from his homeland, where he couldn’t go back to, and disappointed by Hollywood,
Del Toro spent a few years without producing anything.
However, it wasn’t all bad.
During that time, he met someone who’d become a great friend: Alejandro González Iñárritu.
He was acquainted with Alfonso Cuarón, who suggested asking Del Toro advice to edit his
film, Amores perros.
Iñárritu sent a first version of the film, and as a response he got ten long phone calls
with advice, which ended up in Del Toro going to his house for the final cut.
Eventually, the relationship between the three directors led to several joint projects and
their own production company, Cha Cha Cha Films.
Nowadays, they are known as “the three friends” of Hollywood, where they are the best-known
Mexican film representatives.
Thanks to them, Del Toro found the way to get back into filmmaking.
After his terrible experience in the US, and Mexico out of the table, his friend Bertha
Navarro suggested getting funding in Spain, the other big Spanish-speaking industry.
Together, they knocked on the door of the famous director and producer Pedro Almodóvar,
and brought and idea called Canícula en Tilma.
Set in the last period of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War, the story would take
place in the State of Jalisco, which was battered by those conflicts.
However, Almodóvar wasn’t sold on the idea, since people in the West weren’t too familiar
with these historical episodes, so the film wouldn’t be appealing to the international
market.
That’s how the story was modified and adapted to the Spanish Civil War.
The name was changed to The Devil’s Backbone, and the film tells the story of an orphan
kid, Carlos, who is taken to an orphanage where he is haunted by a ghost that eventually
tells him all the secrets the building holds.
The feeling of a creeping danger, the horror mixed with tenderness, and the idea of such
a terrible reality seen from the point of view of a child captivated the audience, which
to this date follows and enjoys the works of this world master of filmmaking.
From Del Toro, we can learn the importance of preproduction, of taking each step of the
job with energy and dedication, of having friends supporting us in the toughest times,
and, most importantly, the passion to create parallel worlds full of stories worth telling.
Thanks, Guillermo, for so many films, and let’s hope you never get tired of showing
us life through the eyes of monsters!