Guillermo del Toro Quotes

Guillermo del Toro Quotes

• "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 in 2002
• "My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein. I’m going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, “I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear.” As a child that was disenfranchised from everything, and that was in a world that was the wrong size, run by the wrong people, the wrong morale and the wrong rules, I felt completely outside of that, and I wanted some measure of control, and the measure of control I found was through fear. The reality is that I feel that fear is a very spiritual emotion. In a world where we are so pragmatic and materialistic, fear is the only emotion that allows even a sophisticated person to believe in something beyond. We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that. It’s also a boundary, and there’s nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary." - On his fascination with fear 2010
• "I gave back my entire salary in order to get the film made the way I wanted it. I probably should have abandoned it the moment the funding fell through the first time, but I stuck with it for almost two-and-a-half years and refused to back down. It's the first time in the six movies I've directed where I've said: I'm doing this one my way, no matter what." - On Pan's Labyrinth 2006
• "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." - On Pan's Labyrinth 2006
• "I think green screen photography is exactly like CGI, it is a tool, I don’t think it should be overused. Things like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ are incredibly dependent on location, we shot on location for more than half the time. Those locations can be enhanced by technology however, both digital and physical. What I would like to avoid is the recreation of the natural environments in CG, I don’t like doing that. The movie is essentially a journey movie, I think you need to use locations as much as possible." - On filming 'The Hobbit' in New Zealend 2008
• "I call it ‘Hollywood the way God intended it’. New Zealand has all the technical advantages when doing a big movie and you are shooting it in paradise, both in terms of artistic freedom and commitment." - On "The Hobbit" 2008
• "Producing is great because you learn. Troy made choices in the movie that would be completely against my instinct and that were entirely different than what I would do, and they worked. That taught me the same way that Juan Antonio Bayona made his own proposal of what a horror movie was with The Orphanage. I never would have thought it would work. And now, I just produced a movie in Spain, called Los Ojos de Julia, or Julia’s Eyes, and Guillem Morales, the director, came back and I was like, “Why this? Why that?” But then, I saw the movie and was like, “Oh, that’s why.” I’m learning. You learn a lot, as a producer." - On producing 'Don't be afraid of the dark" 2010
• "I think that we're going to go both ways. So you will have both those vibes in the piece." - On how Frankenstein will be portrayed in his adaption, to be released 2012.
• "I can ascribe two concrete meanings of the labyrinth in the movie. One is the transit of the girl towards her own center, and towards her own, inside reality, which is real. I think that Western cultures make a difference about inner and outer reality, with one having more weight than the other. I don’t. I come from an absolutely crazy upbringing. I had a f**ked up childhood. And I have found that [the inner] reality is as important as the one that I’m looking at right now. The other transit I can say is the transit that Spain goes through, from a princess that forgot who she was and where see came from, to a generation that will never know the name of the fascist. And, the other one is the Captain being dropped in his own historical labyrinth. Those are things I put in. But then, as I said, the labyrinth is something else. Each culture will ascribe a different weight to it.” - On The Labyrinth in "Pan's Labyrinth"
• "The labyrinth is a very, very powerful sign,” explained del Toro. “It’s a primordial, almost iconic symbol. It can mean so many things, culturally, depending on where you do it. But the main thing for me is that, unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way. That was very important for me. It is a place where you do sharp turns and you can have the illusion of being lost, but you are always doing a constant transit to an inevitable center. That’s the difference. A maze is full of dead ends, and a labyrinth may have the illusion of having a dead end, but it always continues." - On The Labyrinth in "Pan's Labyrinth"
• “We have been designing the creature, sculpting it… Bernie Wrightson designed the creature. That’s the man, the go-to guy for Frankenstein. My idea is to try to shoot that movie exactly as… Almost like an illustration [in] black & white. It would be done very differently than the other Frankenstein movies. But it’s in the future; we’re doing tests in a couple weeks.” - On the look of "The Monster" in Frankenstein, in 2012.
• “In the time of spiritual formation, for me, both fairy tales and the Bible had the exact same weight. I was as enthralled by a parable in the Bible about the grain of mustard, as I could be about three brothers on their quest to marry a princess. I found equal spiritual illumination in both. Even when I was a kid, funny enough, I used to be able to find those fairy tales that felt preachy and pro-establishment, and I hated them. I hated the ones that were about, ‘Don’t go out at night.’ There are fairy tales that are created to instill fear in children, and there are fairy tales that are created to instill hope and magic in children. I like those. I like the anarchic ones. I like the crazy ones. And, I think that all of them have a huge quotient of darkness because the one thing that alchemy understands, and fairy tale lore understands, is that you need the vile matter for magic to flourish. You need lead to turn it into gold. You need the two things for the process. So when people sanitize fairy tales and homogenize them, they become completely uninteresting for me.” - On fairy tales and the inspiration for Pan's Labyrinth.
• "What you have to be careful is not to try to be distinctive just to be distinctive, but Smog has certain characteristics that make him unique already. I cannot. I am bursting at the seams about spilling the beans but I won't because I would be shot." - On "Smog", the Dragon from the hobbit, before he left the project.
• One of the things I love about Frankenstein is that the incarnations can vary so greatly, The greatest soulless monster of Frankenstein has always been Christopher Lee because when he stares at you, there's really nobody home. It's literally one of the scariest moments I remember as a kid. I thought, 'Oh my God, this thing is not human.' And the opposite, the complete polar opposite is Boris Karloff who is more human than humans." - On Frankenstein in 2008
• "When I was a very young child, about 2 years old, I woke up one night after watching an Outer Limits episode called 'The Mutant'. I was so scared by it that I started to see green ants on the wall and monsters in my closet. That's exactly the moment when I made a pact with the monsters. I told them "If you're nice to me and let me go to the bathroom, I'll devote my life to you" That's the reason I started to do horror films." - On his fascination with Monsters
• "Vincenzo had very clear [Idea] that he did not want to just go Puppet and Makeup with the creature and not just CG for most of the time on screen. Having the creature have an actress, have a performer, gives it humanity and gives it depth. And I personally am a big advocate of combining physical effects and digital effects and I think Splice does it brilliantly. Never just as a technical feat, always supporting a performer , an actress, never taking away from that and that is an artistic choice as well as a technical one" - On "The Creature", Dren, in Splice.
• History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.
• 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 Pan's Labyrinth and it surfaces in Hellboy and, to some degree, in all my films.