Part of me dreams of what would have been if I had become an illustrator. There is a saying, “Those who can’t draw, render.” And I can’t draw. I really am a self-taught guy, so my drawings are very deficient, and the way you mask a deficiency in a drawing is by overrendering, so what you see in the notebooks are not very good drawings.
MSZ: You’re really skilled, though. Did you ever take classes as a kid?
GDT: Well, the ones at school. But I was always drawing the wrong things, so I never got good grades on that, because they always found the subjects objectionable. For example, they would say, “Choose a moment in the life of this president and make it in clay.” And I would do the president when he was shot in the head, with blood on the table.
When some people saw my drawings and my paintings, they told my mother, “You’ve got to take this kid to a psychologist.” And she took me to a psychologist, and the guy gave me some clay and he said, “Do whatever you want.” And I did a skeleton. And then I asked the psychologist, “What does ‘bastard’ mean?” That didn’t help my case.
But I was truly—I mean, I knew stuff when I was a kid that I just don’t know how I knew. There are proclivities in my life that I just don’t try to understand.
Drawings by del Toro from his early twenties.
GUILLERMO’S
MUSINGS ON SYMBOLIST ART
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN partial to the symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite artists, because they go against the avant-garde. To them, the past was a source of awe and mystery. But unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, the symbolists also cast their gaze inward to find the root of the stain on the human soul: lust, violence, corruption. They connect our human impulses—good and bad—with the mystical, mythical, and supernatural elements that represent them in art (for example, satyrs, skulls, centaurs, demons) and in that they are, in my opinion, truly modern and timeless.
There are a few key words to understand the symbolist movement: paganism, mysticism, Romanticism, and decadence. Not all artists in the movement share these in equal measure. Félicien Rops fits decadence perfectly, Carlos Schwabe embodies paganism quite well, Redon tended toward mysticism, and Arnold Böcklin ascribed, without a doubt, to Romanticism.
I first became aware of the symbolist movement through a Mexican artist who was not exactly a contemporary of Rops, but rather a spiritual twin: Julio Ruelas (1870–1907), a multitalented artist obsessed with two of the symbolists’ staple themes: sex and death. In the late 1970s, while walking through a flea market in Puebla, Mexico, an art book with a startling cover caught my eye: a forensically detailed oil painting of a drowned satyr being pulled out of a river. Its body was purplish and bloated and its tongue hung loosely to the side. The book was Teresa del Conde’s monograph on Ruelas, which to this day is the best, if not the only, authoritative source of Ruelas lore.
Although he is not formally considered part of the school, Ruelas is a bona fide symbolist and his work seems heavily influenced by Rops, to the point that they share some shockingly similar vignettes and tend to gravitate toward a consistent array of imagery and themes: blind faith, Circe, satyrs, Socrates.
The Supreme Vice (1883) by Félicien Rops.
FÉLICIEN ROPS (1833–1898)
I was first exposed to Rops when in Cannes promoting Cronos in 1993. A young French critic urged me to seek him out so, while staying in a crappy hotel in Paris, I bought a book or two on Rops and was blown away by his sensibility.
The similarities between Rops and Ruelas made it all click for me. The nineteenth century was a period of enormous moral contrast. Nobility, honor, and good manners, all of which were supported by the “academic” art of the age, started to be sabotaged by a wild and perverse notion: that life was full of pagan pleasures and savage impulses. Our flesh made us weaker, yes, but it also made us human.
Sex for these artists is a savage, almost demonic, task. And none of them is more accurate in portraying the hopelessness of male desire than Rops. In his paintings are abundant, detailed, and deformed genitalia that stand side by side with images of death, evil, and decay. Like his century, Rops was a prisoner of dread and desire.
It is a fact that sex and politics go hand in hand, and Rops was also blessed with a sharp satirical eye that yielded some of the best political cartoons of the time—all of them mordant portrayals of the changing social climate. Incessantly drawing, etching, and painting, Rops strived to capture a “tainted” century where the entitlements of royalty and the excuses of nobility were about to be supplanted by more mundane rights and ambitions.
Savage and sensuous as his themes may be, Rops’s line work is supremely elegant—even exquisite. His use of drypoint is testament to the precision of his draftsmanship.
ARNOLD BÖCKLIN (1827–1901)
Bocklin’s treatment of light has always fascinated me. The way he captures the soft, dying sunlight and uses it to cast deep, ominous shadows in his forests and rocky outcrops is exquisite. The jewel-like quality that his overcast skies confer to the green ocean waves is mesmerizing.
Isle of the Dead (1880) by Arnold Böcklin.
Böcklin’s superb technique makes his creatures and landscapes seem absolutely real. Hooves, roots, glazed eyes, and fur all appear to be accurate depiction of actual, living things. Look at any of his beasts and you will see that their eyes are wild and stunned by instinct, their bodies sensual but animalistic, their mouths agape and lubricated. They all have the strength and savagery that I associate with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and—in the case of Böcklin’s sea creatures—with H. P. Lovecraft.
If Rops excelled at portraying the human form, then Böcklin is the single most gifted landscape artist of the symbolist movement and the best at creating a sense of atmosphere. Böcklin’s landscapes are characters themselves—full of dramatic gloom, trees, rocks, and seas that reek of antiquity. In his most famous painting, Isle of the Dead (1880), for example, the darkness in his woods lurks like a sentient creature and the majestic vertical rocks and cypresses form a perfect mausoleum. It’s no wonder his painting was “paraphrased” by another Swiss artist almost a century later: H. R. Giger.
To me, Böcklin is perfect proof that art does not reproduce the world; it creates a new one.
ODILON REDON (1840–1916)
Most art movements are comprised of such a variety of artists and techniques that it becomes difficult to define the borders that separate one from the next, or the qualities that fuse them into a movement in the first place. If you think of Schwabe, Böcklin, or most of the other painters associated with the symbolist movement, you’ll evoke a sense of realism. By way of contrast, Redon’s diffuse pastels and line work seem weightless and luminous—sometimes almost abstract. Both his technique and concerns remain unique amongst his peers. He is the sublime anomaly.
Even so, Redon was part of a more general movement amongst painters working at the end of the nineteenth century to turn away from technical realism and to begin to value the strength of a brushstroke, the immediacy of an emotion. But these new values were typically developed with respect to the outside world, whereas only Redon looks to the inside.
Distinctive motifs in Redon’s work are: the feather, the eye, prisons and bars, botanical shapes, feathery line work reminiscent of animal fur, and spidery forms with human faces—every one of these comes straight from the id and a sense of pagan frenzy. If one needs any persuasion to find a strong connection between the Surrealists, the Dadaists, and the symbolists, one doesn’t need to look any further than Redon. Most of his images go beyond the pagan contemplation of Böcklin or Schwabe and become iconic, striving to capture not only the essence of a symbol but its direct link to the human psyche. Jungian and Freudian images populate his work and remain elusive, slippery, and hellish, but then his color work has a nimble, vital energy that captures mystic rapture and the true light of paradise.
After I die, if there is life beyond this one and I go anywhere—either up or down—I am pretty sure that both places wi
ll be art directed by Redon.
CARLOS SCHWABE (1866–1926)
The two artists who inspired me most while working on Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army were Schwabe and Arthur Rackham. Their interpretations of the fairy world are not at all similar, but both men seem to approach it as explorers attempting to document a world only revealed to their eyes.
Schwabe did splendid graphic work based on texts by Zola, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, but his drawings, etchings, and paintings should not be regarded as mere illustrations for these works. Each one of them is suffused with a mystical energy and with pantheistic conviction.
In this day and age, we confuse hip smartness that does not fully endorse any idea with intelligence, and consider callousness the product of an experienced point of view of the world. Naturally, this attitude leads us to value artists who seem to know it all. But Schwabe and the rest of the symbolists were the exact opposite: They celebrated not knowing, the twilight of our knowledge. To them, the supernatural was absolutely real, and mystery was the supreme goal of art.
According to del Toro, one of the great mysteries of cinema is its ability to reverse time, a technique he employs at the beginning of Pan’s Labyrinth, depicted here in storyboards by Raúl Monge.
ANALYZING FILM
MSZ: One very distinctive quality about your film work is that it’s enormously tactile, textural, lyrical. There’s a sense that every moment, every image, is handmade, as if you’re sculpting every shot. Viewers can revisit your films over and over again.
GDT: Well, if they want to. I do put a lot in the audiovisual coding of a movie. Some is rational, but then another 50 percent is instinctive—the way you arrange things. I think a director is an arranger. Alien is the perfect example. It’s an absolutely mind-boggling feat of filmmaking. People can say, “Oh, well, it’s Giger.” No, it’s not Giger because Giger was a painter before Ridley Scott called him up to sculpt and design.
And lest we forget, Scott grouped him with Moebius [Jean Giraud], Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, and Roger Christian. Each of those men brought a syntax, but Scott created the context. I think that’s what directing is—saying, “I’m going to use this photographer, and I’m going to use this musician.” It’s a fantastic feat. Directing is the orchestration and the arrangement of images and sounds and also of people and talents.
Del Toro on the set of Hellboy II with Hellboy’s gun, The Good Samaritan.
MSZ: When you see films that come out well, behind them is a process in which ideas have become better and better, whereas with bad films it’s the exact opposite—they just get worse and worse, progressively.
GDT: Well, but you never know. You never know. You have no idea. If we knew what our destiny is, we would be great. Everybody would be great. What I do think is that there is a myth—the myth of the director as this inflexible creature that has it all figured out from the get-go, as if they are a mechanical master who arranges everything perfectly.
Some people can point to Stanley Kubrick, and I’ll tell you this: The more I read about him and the more I talk to people who worked with him, it’s only mostly true. He had 80 percent of it figured out. But the 20 percent that he didn’t have figured out, he found—through the same process that every director uses, which is finding perfection in compromise. Because you compromise with the weather, you compromise with the schedule, you compromise with the budget, you compromise with the fact that an actor is sick. You’re figuring it out. You are reorganizing. You don’t necessarily say, “I cannot take this out because the movie will be compromised.” At some point you might have to, but not always.
I remember very clearly an anecdote about Kirk Douglas having an accident during one of Kubrick’s movies. I think it was Paths of Glory, but it could have been Spartacus. The anecdote I read was that he was out of commission for over a week, and he got a letter from Kubrick, or a phone call, and Kubrick said, “Could you claim that you’re still not able to work so I can get a few more days? Because I’m just figuring the movie out.” Or take James Cameron, who is arguably one of the most precise filmmakers in the world and the smartest, most disciplined artist I have ever met. The myth is that he is an inhumanly precise filmmaking machine. But the beauty of Jim is that he is all too human. I’ve seen him toil and sweat and, in the middle of the night, ask himself, “What do I do here? What do I do there?” That’s the beauty and power of it: Jim is human but he demands more of himself than anyone else.
Why enthrone the myth of the perfect, infallible superhuman if it’s always more beautiful to know that the humanity that creates beauty is the same fallible species that can create horror or misery? Bach, when explaining his genius, used to modestly say that he just worked harder and that all you have to do is press the pedals on the keyboard and the notes play themselves. Here you have one of the greatest geniuses ever and yet this was a guy that had personal flaws of one kind or another and who created in the face of self-doubt and adversity.
I always say it’s more interesting to think that the pyramids were built not by aliens but by people. People go, “Oh, they’re extraordinary things. They were built by aliens.” No, the extraordinary thing is that they were built by people. Normal people.
When people say that cinema is life, I say, “Impossible.” Any cinema that strives to be realistic, in my opinion, is going to be confused with a theater play. But any cinema that attempts to be truthful is not afraid of assuming that it is not life. It’s an impossible endeavor.
For del Toro, the notebooks are a place where he can record and develop ideas to use in his filmmaking endeavors. Frequently, they change over time.
Like René Magritte used to say, “The vocation of art is mystery.” That’s why one of the quintessential beauties of cinema is the spilled cup coming back to the hand by running film in reverse. I don’t care how many years go by, that’s pure magic. Why? Why is it so great?
MSZ: Because it’s impossible.
GDT: Because it’s impossible. In the same way, what the eye of the camera can see is so much more powerful than what the human eye can see. Think about this: We have such a fascination with slow motion. It’s primal. It doesn’t matter—it never goes out of style if you use it right. There are programs on the Discovery Channel that are dedicated to making you drool at a balloon being perforated by a bullet. Because you’re trying to stop time; you are trying to stop life.
I think cinema resonates with a piece of our brain that is way, way in the back. Because the way you watch a movie is not the way we watch life. When you go to a mall, yes, you’re absorbing, subliminally, Drink Coke, and Buy this, and Buy that. But cinema is different because when you go to a theater, it’s like you are going to church. You sit in a pew, and you look at an altar, and the reception is completely different.
Here, an image of a man shaving with a straight razor first drafted for the unmade Meat Market was realized in different ways in both Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II.
MSZ: You often present screenings of movies and give talks on the nature of film. Does participating in these events help nurture you as an artist?
GDT: Oh, yes. If you dedicate yourself only to the business of film, your soul dies. I have come to the tragic conclusion that you have to be a mediocre businessman in order to be a good artist. I’d rather not make as much money and be at peace with my decisions and be free and not dependent on a big apparatus.
I think it’s really important to do things that make you no money, that give you no apparent benefit except they renew your little love affair with cinema. Seeing those movies with an audience is great. I mean, I introduced one of the movies I produced at the LA Film Festival, and I said, “This is as close as it gets to me taking you out for cookies and milk like Andy Kaufman.”
MSZ: What about producing? I’ve noticed you’ve taken a lot of young filmmakers under your wing. What do you look for?
GDT: When I look at short films, and I look at a lot of them, I don’t bother with the originality
. Originality is one virtue that, without context, means nothing to me. Originality in context is valuable, but I think that, when you’re learning to write, you always follow an example. Like learning to write cursive. All the short films by kids, or young adults, whatever, I think they are like cursive. They need to imitate somebody.
Alfonso Cuarón and I, until we were in our twenties, every time we shot a piece of fiction, we would say, “I’m going to try this.” Like, I remember we were doing a TV series, and I had seen Scorcese’s Life Lessons with Nick Nolte [in the film New York Stories]. And it’s not that I had any rhyme or reason, but I said, “I’m going do a sequence with those chain dissolves he does so beautifully. I want to learn them!” That became the sole reason why I did that TV episode.
* * *
GUILLERMO AND ME
ALFONSO CUARÓN
IN THE LATE EIGHTIES, I had just directed my first gig for a television show called La Hora Marcada, a Mexican anthology series of horror stories modeled on The Twilight Zone.
I was waiting in the production office to have a meeting with the producer. I had just finished making a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King short story. Everybody had praised it, and I felt proud. I had painstakingly storyboarded it, and even though I was aware of its shortcomings, I felt it was better than the norm.
Across the waiting room there was this guy sitting on a sofa looking at me with a mix of curiosity and mischief. I immediately knew who he was, since I had heard so much about him. He was the special effects makeup artist from Guadalajara who had studied with Dick Smith; he had worked on designing corpses, mutilated hands, and bullet wounds for a couple of people I knew working in film. He loved his work and was always ready to lend a hand to a production in need. Everybody described him as smart, funny, and very, very strange.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Page 6