2. Youth
Interview with
Born October 9th in Mexico, Guillermo Guillermo del Toro
was raised by a strict Catholic family.
“Del Toro described his Roman Catholic
upbringing as excessively "morbid,"
saying "I mercifully lapsed as a Catholic,
I say, but as Buñuel used to say, "I'm an
atheist, thank God."(Wikipedia, 2009). He was
inspired by Dick Smith’s make up and
effects in his legendary film The Exorcist. http://www.esplatter.com/profiles/toro.htm
Del Toro’s father was kidnapped for 72
days until ransom was paid.
3. Apprentice
He started out working as a makeup supervisor
and formed his own company. Guillermo had his
first big break when his film Cronos won 9
academy awards. After, he won the International
Critics Week prize at Cannes.
Some of
Guillermo’s
work
MTV, 2008 EW, 20012
4. Awards - Honors
Guillermo was nominated for 21 awards and won 44.
Categories
Best Film
Best First
Best Script
Best Feature
Best Director
Best Screenplay
Screen Writer of the Year
Best Foreign Language Film
Exposay, 2010
5. Techniques - Style
Most of Del Toro’s films use religious relics and involve
Catholicism. He uses amber as the dominant color in
movies. Insects or insect imagery is very much used in
movies of his. Also, the protagonists is usually a father
figure.
7. Quotes
“That's what I love about fairy tales; they
"It is. To me, art and storytelling serve
tell the truth, not organized politics,
primal, spiritual functions in my daily
religion or economics. Those things
life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime
destroy the soul. That is the idea from
story to my kids or trying to mount a
Pan's Labyrinth and it surfaces in
movie or write a short story or a
Hellboy and, to some degree, in all my
novel, I take it very seriously."
films.”
If you're not operating on an
instinctive level, you're not an artist....
Reason over emotion is bullshit,
absolute bullshit... We suffocate
ourselves in rules. I find fantasy
liberating.
I fabricate everything. There's not a single The horror story was birthed when we
real thing in Pan's Labyrinth, because became sedentary cavemen and started
ultimately I'm very specific about [those telling scary stories to keep the children from
details]. Context is everything in a fable, wandering off into the night. Today, there's
because every story has already been told. nothing more cathartic for a guy in a three-
So the only variations I find are the voice of piece suit, someone super wound-up and
the storyteller and the context in which it's super-tight, to get on a roller-coaster of a
told. horror film and scream like a madman.
8. Legacy - Influence
Guillermo wants to bring
horror to peoples lives. He
wants to be different. Most of
his films are original ideas. He
doesn’t want to be just
another director.
