Ian Nathan - Guillermo del Toro: The Iconic Filmmaker and his Work

The eyes have it when Guillermo del Toro looks upon the world with those baby blues he sees magic.

I half-expected Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poes Auguste Dupin to stroll in and shake his hand. It was like an outpost of Bleak House, the Los Angeles mansion he has transformed into a repository of all that inspires him: the books, films, paintings, comics, magazines, even medical journals, that nourish his storytelling. Including the complete Fu Manchu. Del Toro is explicit about the sources of his films, proud of them. He has an ongoing dialogue with the past. He stands on the shoulders of giants (and giant robots).

Asking him a question was like stepping into a waterfall.

I feared my allotted time would be used up by my first tentative enquiry. His mind is wildly discursive. He spans from the intricacies of Faun management to Hitchcocks neglected gems (FYI: Topaz and Family Plot) in a heartbeat. Thoughts tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be heard. He seemed to be asking and answering his own questions.

Only Quentin Tarantino comes close in terms of contextualizing and mythologizing their work. Its as if every interview is another chapter in a grand, leather-bound biography.

Del Toros approach is that of an auteur, but without pretension. Getting in ahead of the academics and critics, he deconstructs his own films: pointing out the threads that lead back to his Mexican childhood, or the desired psychological effect of a particular colour scheme, or all the allegorical furniture, which is quite often also actual furniture. How the mothers bed in Pans Labyrinth comes subtly inscribed with horned motifs.

The texture of things is so important: he builds exquisite sets and props and monsters, only reverting to CGI for the impossible.

Yet del Toro is anything but dark. He is a big-hearted, passionate, even sentimental (that Latin blood!) man. He loves to laugh, is big on pranks and one-liners, and giggles at the madness of it all, especially Hollywood and its preening absurdities. Hellboys laconic comebacks are pure del Toro.

There is no more terrifying horror than the one that is intimate, he once said. Every film in his canon is personal, no matter how much blood is splattered on a sewer wall.

There have been projects as dear to him as children that have never made it the screen. Hollywood has often struggled to decipher the riddle he presents artist or thrill seeker? Gore hound or poet? The answer is all of the above. The loss of his great H.P. Lovecraft epic At the Mountains of Madness is a wound that will never fully heal. And so be it each lost film lives on inside him. His scars, like the battle for Mimic, a third Hellboy, or his unmade Hobbits, are blueprints for the next great idea.

A horrified Ofelia looks on at her mothers decline in Pans Labyrinth. The motif of the Fauns horns is inscribed into the frame of the bed.

Del Toro stands proudly on the snowy set of Crimson Peak with the great Mexican director the lavish sets say as much as the actors.

His own backstory is full of wonder. How he grew up in relative affluence in the suburbs of Guadalajara, the product of a practical father, a magical mother, and an angry grandmother. He was raised a reluctant Catholic, with all its ceremony and guilt. Being Mexican is not just his nationality, it is his superpower. All his films, wherever he made them, and with whoevers money, are Mexican films.

Del Toro had a single-mindedness and God-or-otherwise-given talent that took him first to study film at university and he can rival Martin Scorsese in off-the-cuff cinematic knowledge. Then to the local television industry where he began making monsters (literally). To getting his first feature off the ground in contemporary vampire fable Cronos. That was our first taste of an exotic cocktail that has been poured into thirteen films.

Who else mixes Freud with Stan Lee, Buuel with Godzilla, Charlotte Bront with Satan, Goya with Fu Manchu?