At the movies with Guillermo del Toro

I was born in 1964, at the start of the golden era of television. I’d watch Mexican melodramas, mostly those directed by Ismael Rodríguez starring Pedro Infante. At the same time I was discovering the Universal monster movies [such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954]. They mixed strongly in my mind. So I often feel like I am making Ismael Rodríguez movies with monsters. 

On Sundays back then we’d go to a matinee. And during the week if you had to go to a big movie opening, you’d go in a family outing. Things like Tarzan and His Mate [1934], or old Abbott and Costello movies. The first time I went to a theatre was with my mother to see William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights [1939]. A very odd choice. I must have been no older than five and it made a huge impact on me. 

In a strange way, those three influences – Infante, Wuthering Heights and Universal monsters – sum up pretty much most of my filmography. If you add Japanese kaiju movies you’ve got everything.

Because Sundays were movie days, you went to two cathedrals – the church and the theatre. 

Universal movies represented my own intimate church. Frankenstein’s creature was for me identical with and indistinguishable from Jesus. The moment I saw Boris Karloff [in Frankenstein, 1931] I was distraught. He was an ecstatic martyr; he looked like a Bernini sculpture, a religious painting or icon, suffused by spiritual, transcendental grace. 

My whole family went to the opening nights of Jaws [1975] and Star Wars [1977]. Both made you feel like you’d gone through an experience, a [collective] one. With Star Wars I would come out, go around the block and get in line again as if it was a ride. I probably rewatched it 30 times. And as a Catholic boy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977] felt like a religious film, like St Paul on the road to Damascus – an ordinary man being quite literally struck by the light of God, abandoning everything to follow. 

My father won the lottery in 1969 and my parents started travelling a lot, and they’d leave my brother and me with my great-aunt. She was extremely Catholic and found me really funny. But she raised me with a huge amount of fear, of the Purgatory, and the original sin. 

And though I am conscientiously lapsed, the Catholic streak is in all my movies, from Cronos to Frankenstein. I crucified Wesley Snipes in Blade II [2002], and Pinocchio and the creature of Frankenstein; there’s even a crucifixion in Pacific Rim [2013]. Hellboy [2004] gets saved by a rosary, and the same goes for Mira Sorvino in Mimic [1997]. 

But Pinocchio, Frankenstein and Cronos are definitely the most religious of my films. There’s a creator and a creature being there to take the sins of the world, and to clean the sins of his father, so to speak.

I didn’t go to university. I finished high school and took two years of make-up effects and three years of scriptwriting [courses]. Then an editorial house asked me to write a book on Alfred Hitchcock. But my editor edited heavily – he thought it was more about me than Hitchcock. Later I republished it and removed some of his edits, but I would like to write it again at age 61. Because the two filmmakers I studied the most carefully were Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel. 

The first Hitchcock movie I saw was, curiously enough, I Confess [1953], which I found incredibly compelling because of my Catholic upbringing, so the secret of confession was even more interesting to me than the secret of a crime, or legal questions. It was a spiritual conflict. Hitchcock at his most diaphanous sometimes reminds me of Robert Bresson, as with The Wrong Man [1956]; even the way he uses the absence of sound in The Birds [1963] can be quite Bressonian and transcendental. 

Buñuel is certainly a lapsed Catholic filmmaker. His meditations on charity are profound. He hated superficial virtue and that resonated with me. Viridiana [1961] and Nazarín [1959] were fundamental. The first Buñuel movie I saw was Los Olvidados [1950]. I thought, “This is as good as any movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s set in my country.” There was a time in Mexico when people were concerned with a bucolic cinema that celebrated the beauty of the Mexican fields and landscapes and the noble nature of simple life; it was almost like propaganda. And Buñuel was very much against that. Buñuel was saying: “No, Mexico is an urban, savage, brutal place that devours its innocence.” That was so shocking to me.

Federico Fellini is the third most formative filmmaker in my life with Hitchcock and Buñuel. Everything I know about production design and art direction comes from Fellini. A little bit from Hitchcock too: the way he codifies colour is extremely important for me, and how he used large-scale symbols as juxtaposition: the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Egyptian hand at the British Museum. And so does Fellini. The head surging from the water in Fellini’s Casanova [1976]; the way he uses the ship in Amarcord [1973]. What I found vital with Fellini, along with Buñuel, is how the strange can erupt into regular life uninvited and unannounced. 

Fellini stands as an incredibly regimented sensualist – a rare combination of a formalist who is able to evoke sensuality. His movies have a sensuality that seems to ooze from the experience, but you know it’s regimented by [costume and production designer] Danilo Donaty and Fellini, and the way the sets and the costumes are one. In Fellini I found the pageantry that I had missed since Catholic church. 

I am an OK self-taught illustrator. Hitchcock was an illustrator too. The painterly education of Fellini or Kurosawa are very useful to me. For me, the expressive gestures of the camera, the colour, the shape, the painterly movement aspect, the audiovisual symphony, are 80 per cent of a movie. That’s why in a movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon – not the greatest screenplay on earth – the way the creature moves and the camera lingers in the water, that distant, almost fairytale ballet of the creature floating underneath Julie Adams, is the movie. It’s not about a species in the Amazon, or the river. 

King Kong [1933] is the perfect example, with its fairytale poetry from a pulp-adventure screenplay. The same can be said about Ray Harryhausen. Most genre films, before they were decoded by a generation of filmgoers who wanted to expand on their virtues, were instinctively poetic. Mario Bava, some of Terrence Fisher, certainly pre-genre ones like Nosferatu [1922] and Vampyr [1932], are transcendental, and there’s a lot of that in Universal movies and so forth. 

Buñuel was formally very different. I think the only time he approaches the formality of Hitchcock is with Él [1953]. And the time Hitchcock most approximated the savage, undomesticated, thorny nature of Buñuel is maybe with Marnie [1964]. Buñuel was not a formalist, but he was very aware of the form, he was not worried about making pleasing compositions, he wanted the image to become a little rawer. [Mexican cinematographer] Gabriel Figueroa, whom I became friends with in my youth, used to tell me: “Buñuel found that making a pleasing image removed a point of contact with the audience.” He told me, “Buñuel wanted it to be raw. I would have to fight him for a nice composition, and he resisted.” But to me, the formal/symphonic audiovisual aspects of film became clear with those three giant pillars, Fellini, Hitchcock and Buñuel.

When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], I was too young to appreciate it, and I saw A Clockwork Orange [1971] alongside the other teenagers. But I became enamoured of Kubrick with Barry Lyndon [1975]. And it is precisely because it is the perfect movie to say, not what it is about but how it is about, the how referring to its formal aspects. The funeral-march rhythm of Barry Lyndon, which he repeats in Eyes Wide Shut [1999], which has the same feeling of a march towards death, is completely immersed and drowned in the beauty of a painting. But it is not about beauty, it is about the fact that all of it, and everyone, is mortal and brief. And that is transcendental to me in Kubrick, in the same way that Eyes Wide Shut is not about sex, it’s about power. 

That came to me later in life. So did Ridley Scott and George Miller, curiously enough. You acquire more tools as a filmmaker and have your own pantheon. But the monumental scale of Barry Lyndon for the tale of a small man, that’s what I try to do with the way I situate my stories in a historical context that is much larger. You are telling a story of a man who is not in the history books. There is no passage in the entire history of Spain about a lost fascist captain in a little battle, but that is Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s not a big battle, but it’s a big landscape of war. Same in The Devil’s Backbone [2001], Frankenstein and Pinocchio: they are important tales in an important background that all came to me as a young adult when I saw Barry Lyndon. 

That’s why I found it remarkable that he cast Ryan O’Neal [left]. The same with Eyes Wide Shut: Tom Cruise cannot get laid. How funny is that? That is brilliant of Kubrick. And Ryan O’Neal is in over his head; he is a dope. He’s like Forrest Gump: a guy who interacts with the highest hierarchies of the world and remains unsophisticated through fame, fortune and downfall. I think that’s the way we should all read film. We should read a film about how it is done and what it is telling, and most of the time those two things are pursuing different ends. 

When I was a child, I was very taken with movies with children as the protagonists, like The Window [1949] with Bobby Driscoll, or Los Olvidados. [These films] seemed to me a lot more interesting than those with adult protagonists. 

The same goes for old people. Whenever I saw a movie like Umberto D. [1952], or a Mexican movie called Simitrio [Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1960], where the protagonists are an old professor and a child, that was like catnip. Because I find midlife a little dull. I like old age and childhood because in both stages of life you become invisible. People write you off, like a thing, an idea – and therefore you become an invisible observer. This leads right back to Hitchcock because he was raised Catholic and was also an observer. So, whether Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates in Psycho [1960], Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak in Vertigo [1958] or Joseph Cotton’s Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt [1943], his best characters are observers.