Guillermo Del Toro
September 28th, 2006
Apparently if Guillermo Del Toro wasn’t keeping busy making fine films he’d be a one-man crime wave:
[On the proposition that Pan’s Labyrinth “explores the director’s dark and light view of humanity.”]
Asked where the darkness comes from, Del Toro says “I am thinking about those things. Every time I go to a bank I’m looking around to see how many cameras they have and how could I rob it, or if I am at an ATM I’m looking how I would burglarise it. But obviously I socialise it through the movies and whenever I have this type of crazy idea, I end up putting a note in my diary and I use it in a movie later.” Growing up in Mexico, Del Toro recalls the country’s violence, “and one of the first things I saw, is that we were in a street fight once and I saw a guy hitting another guy with a bottle and one of the things that impressed me the most is the bottle never broke. Unlike in the movies this bottle just kept going and going and going and then I put that in the movie.”
The rest of the interview is worth a read if you’ve enjoyed Del Toro’s films, or if your interest has been piqued by the very positive advance word on Pan’s Labyrinth. Though I’m slightly worried by this remark:
“My idea with Hellboy 2 is that it’s almost a rephrasing. You don’t re-enact the franchise you reinvent it. My favourite movies are like Evil Dead 2 which is basically reinventing Evil Dead 1, so I would hope Hellboy 2 could be taking what I learned from Hellboy 1 and reinventing it.”
I’m not sure Hellboy needed reinventing; for my money the basic concept from the comic, as transferred to the big screen in 2004, is plenty strong enough. All they need to do is bring back as many of the core cast as possible (expect Agent Myers, who I gather won’t be returning for the sequel) and spend somewhere between ninety minutes and two hours executing a suitably creepy storyline, unburdened by the need to give us Big Red’s origin story this time round. Still, Del Toro has a pretty good track record so as long as he and Ron Perlman are on board I’m confident the results will worth the wait.