The portly director Guillermo del Toro is sitting at a table in a San Francisco hotel suite and talking about roughage. Thankfully, it being only nine in the morning, there isn’t too much detail. The Mexican is using it as a metaphor to explain why he is obsessed with fantasy films — from his breakthrough hit, the arty “Pan’s Labyrinth”, to his latest blockbuster, “Pacific Rim” — but, given his recent stomach surgery to control his weight, it seems particularly apropos.
“For me, art is like food,” he grins. “I believe that I can make comfort food like ‘Pacific Rim’ or I can make a little gourmet meal like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. But I don’t have to give you roughage just because it’s good for you!” An effusive teddy bear of a man with thick lenses and a greying beard, del Toro is in high spirits. It has been five years since he last directed a film and he is clearly delighted to be back in the chair.
But his fans might not be quite so pleased with the results. “Pacific Rim” is a $190 million (Dh697 million) CGI extravaganza and, while del Toro has made “comfort food” before — his “Hellboy” series, about a comical, blue-collar demon, is a similar visual spectacle, due soon for its third instalment — the director is best known for his smaller plates. First there were the quirky horrors from about a decade ago, such as “Cronos”, “Mimic” and “The Devil’s Backbone”, and then his masterpiece of 2006, “Pan’s Labyrinth”, an astonishing, almost perfect fantasy film that sprang entirely from del Toro’s imagination and won three Oscars, announcing the arrival of a great new auteur.
So isn’t a simple, noisy blockbuster such as Pacific Rim somewhat limiting? “When I go to a party, it’s a party,” he says, cheerfully. “And when I go to a symposium, I don’t bring a drink. These are two completely different rooms in my house and I am comfortable in both. You don’t go to a party and question everyone about their values!”
Del Toro’s house, growing up, was in Guadalajara, Mexico, and by all accounts, his childhood was very far from a party. “I grew up Catholic and the anxiety that generated in me was enormous,” he says, seriously. His father was a car salesman and his mother an artist, but much of his upbringing was spent with his grandmother, whom del Toro likens to “the Piper Laurie character in ‘Carrie’”. She didn’t just torment him with the threat of purgatory, she tried to exorcise him and made him mortify himself by placing metal bottle caps in his shoes so his soles bled on the walk to school.
As a boy, he had a string of gruesome encounters — he saw a decapitated teenage boy by a barbed wire fence, a crashed motorist burning inside a VW Beetle and a man with a split skull walking down the street. Guadalajara was a rough town. But it was a visit to a morgue that really engraved itself on the young del Toro’s memory. Near a window, in bright sunlight, he saw a “pile” of aborted foetuses. He rubs his beard; the jovial smile has gone. “What was horrible was the casualness of it. And something snapped — I just knew that, OK, there is no benevolent being overlooking everything.”
The tag line for “Pacific Rim” — To fight monsters, we made monsters — may apply in an oblique psychological way to the young del Toro, because he started making monsters at an early age. First he would sketch them in a book that he carried around with him, something he does to this day. He started experimenting with make-up, applying scars and melting eyes to scare his parents. Then, after graduating from film school, he set up a special effects company that created monsters for the Mexican film industry. Soon he was directing features of his own.
Del Toro was one of three A-list Mexican directors to ascend to Hollywood in the early 2000s — Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”, “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) and Alejandro Inarritu (“Babel”, “21 Grams”) were the other two — and del Toro says he would gladly move back to his home country if it wasn’t so dangerous. One of the most dramatic periods of his life was in 1997 when his father, Federico, was kidnapped for 72 days. Del Toro and his two brothers helped to pay two ransoms and bring him to safety in America.
He describes it as a “healing experience”. “I highly recommend you save your father’s life once,” he says. “It transforms you, that’s all I know. You learn that your father is a man. A vulnerable man.”
For now, del Toro lives with his wife and two daughters in the sleepy suburb of Thousand Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley. And it’s here that he has created his greatest monument to his love for fable and fantasy — his very own house of curiosities called Bleak House.
“When I was a kid I read about Fonthill Abbey,” he says, “where the author William Beckford had the largest cabinet of curiosities in the world. And I dreamt of one day driving myself broke creating a strange place of my own.” His collection started as four rooms in his house, but then expanded to an entire house, about three minutes from his family home. Recently, it has expanded again to two houses, side by side (he persuaded his neighbours to sell), which are packed with books, paintings, rubber monsters, skeletons, skulls and real-life specimens of “strange birds” and “malformed children”. It is a horror fan’s paradise and this is where he works; where the robots for “Pacific Rim” were designed and all his ghost stories take shape.
“The last ghost I heard was when I was scouting for ‘The Hobbit’ in New Zealand,” he says. (Del Toro worked on the film for two years before “creative differences” with the producer Peter Jackson forced him to leave the project.) “When I travel I have a little list of haunted hotels, so I try to stay in them whenever I can. And in this hotel, I heard this woman screaming horribly through a vent in the bathroom. And then a man, sobbing in remorse.”
But he lost his religion years ago — isn’t he a sceptic? He smiles. “I am! I believe that we’ll have a perfectly reasonable explanation for that 75 years from now. But we are, for want of a better analogy, in the Middle Ages — we just don’t know it. The people in the Middle Ages thought they were thoroughly modern and so do we. In fact, all you and I are doing today is conversing about my latest tapestry!” he chuckles. “‘Pacific Rim’ is just Agincourt with robots and monsters!”
There are many more tapestries to come. Del Toro is so prolific that he typically works on seven or eight huge projects at a time, either as a writer, producer or director. After the disappointment of “The Hobbit”, he was even hungrier to get something off the ground, so at this moment, he is immersed in all kinds of things. Two are confirmed: a vampire series for TV called “The Strain”, which he is writing; and a horror film, “Crimson Peak”, starring Jessica Chastain and Benedict Cumberbatch, which he is due to direct in 2014.
But the “Maybe” list is even more tantalising. He is looking for funding for “The Mountains of Madness”, a classic H.P. Lovecraft horror story about aliens in the Antarctic — “I’ll show you the art and your heart will break,” he says. He is also raising money for a new version of “Pinocchio” and he is hoping to direct Cumberbatch again in a new film version of “Frankenstein”. And then there’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, a much talked about collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. “Charlie and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book,” he says excitedly. “I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians [the aliens of “Slaughterhouse Five”] — to be ‘unstuck in time’, where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do. It’s just a catch-22. The studio will make it when it’s my next movie, but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there’s a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer!” He shrugs. “I’ll work it out.” One lesson of “The Hobbit”, however, is that plans sometimes go awry, and all that energy and enthusiasm which del Toro has can come to naught.
Have his feelings changed about “The Hobbit” now that the film is out? “I haven’t seen it!” he says. “I didn’t want to see it on a BluRay and I’ve been so busy I’ve only been to the theatre three or four times in the last year. And my daughters dominate that decision. So we go to see “Les Mis”, which I would never see!” But surely “No, of course. Peter sent me an e-mail and offered to screen it any time I wanted. So when I have time, I’m going to take him up on the offer and do it properly.”
Would it be painful? He thinks a minute. “I’m not sure. But in the road of my life, I’ve been blessed with a very tiny rear-view mirror. Without it I wouldn’t have survived the kidnapping of my father and the impossibility of making genre movies in Mexico in the Seventies and Eighties. I have a geological perspective on life — we concentrate so much on the small things but when we are a stratum of chalk between two layers of granite a million years from now, your supermarket to-do list and the entire canon of Shakespeare are going to have the exact same importance.”
He smiles broadly. “So enjoy your life as it is now and stay in the process. Don’t think of the outcome. Just do something.”
–The Telegraph Group Ltd, London, 2013
