Hey folks, Harry here. Here you'll find an interview that Anton Sirius did with a guy I've heard of a couple of times... Guillermo Del Toro. This March we'll be seeing his BLADE 2 hit theaters, but this was the young Del Toro at his balletic best... during Toronto. Enjoy his interview

Ola, starkinder. Anton Sirius here, zooming through the dark vastness of space on my way back home. There was some kind of family emergency (something about a war of succession- bloody planet can't manage itself for twenty minutes without me) so I had to zip off without finishing my Toronto Film Fest coverage. I'll get it all done along the way, though, and pop things in the pneumatic chute as I transcribe them (I had the interior redone in this cool Jules Verne/Gilliam's Brazil sort of motif) to be sent back to Harry. Due to the relativistic time dilation of FTL travel I'm not sure exactly when all this will get back to you on Earth- maybe some time around Hallowe'en, but math isn't my strong suit so who knows. Anyway, Harry wanted the Guillermo interview first, so here it is. Enjoy!

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Guillermo del Toro interview

Conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival 2001, in September. Mr. del Toro was in town with his film the Devil's Backbone.

Anton: My first question for you... what's Tom Sawyer in Spanish?

Guillermo: (chuckling) Yes, Tom Sawyer. No, I agree with you, there's a little bit of To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer or that kind of kid adventure story in the film. The cemetery excursion in Tom Sawyer, or the cave adventure with Injun Joe, it has that feeling. And I always loved those stories- Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped...

AS: You've got the Count of Monte Cristo in the movie.

GdT: Yes, the Count of Monte Cristo, and the idea was to make it, I think, not so much a ghost story as a story with a ghost. Because I think that to say it's a ghost story would be misleading for people expecting say the Haunting or a classic ghost story, expecting the movie to be just about the ghost and the haunting of the place. It's the life of everybody in that place, it's a little microcosm of the war in Spain, and amidst all those stories is the story of the ghost.

AS: About those stories... what about the bomb? What did that represent for you?

GdT: What I loved about it is, well, first of all, if I was making this place to represent Spain in the Thirties, to be the microcosm, then just like Spain, it was left alone in the middle of nowhere with no one to help it, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. So it was perfectly metaphorical. But I needed almost a totem, that symbolized that no matter how far you go away from the war, the war would still be there. And the bomb was a perfect representation of that. Since the war in Spain, to me, was never fully resolved, that's why the bomb remains unexploded in the movie. And at the same time I wanted very much to have the bomb be a character for the children, that they associate with the apparition of the ghost, and that they talk about and talk to. So you see them talking to the bomb, you see them talking about the bomb, you see them interacting with it, and ultimately as the movie ends you realize that is one of the things that remained unsolved, that it never exploded.

AS: I thought that whole element of the script was fantastic, just the kids' reaction to the bomb was so perfect. That they instantly incorporate it into their worldview, and it's like the bomb has always been there.

GdT: It's a very natural approach to it. That's what surprises me, that some people expect just a regular ghost story, to have all the things pay off. The movies that pay off, I do for the industry. The movies that I want to do, I don't necessarily want to pay off elements as much as introduce elements to be part of the drama. For example the kid ghost in the movie never gets liberated. The last image of him at the end is him still there, hovering over the water-

AS: The professor too.

GdT: Yes! Exactly. Both ghosts remain. And essentially I think that it's a much more free, much more artistic approach to the ghost story than genre fans would normally want.

AS: Well, I don't know. There have been so many so-called ghost stories in the last few years, that the boundaries of the genre have really been pushed. Even something like the Sixth Sense, which was hugely successful. Just calling it a 'ghost story' any more doesn't really tell you much about where the story could go.

GdT: That is true. This movie I've been trying to do for sixteen years. It was always this ghost story, seen through the eyes of a child, against the background of a war. But what I think changed in the last few years, is that it became for me as much a story about war as it is the story of a ghost. It also talks about violence, and growing up, and all of those things together. I started writing it when I was twenty, and now that I'm thirty-six it's a very different movie.

AS: It just took that long to mature in your head.

GdT: It took that long, and funny enough, unsatisfied as I am with Mimic, I'm very happy I did Mimic first because it allowed me to do this movie, both in terms of narrative and so forth and in terms of financing.

AS: I was actually just telling somebody the other day that I thought I could point to the exact frame in Mimic where the studio took it away from you.

GdT: (laughing) I can! It's the system, of making movies in the States, makes them a different product than films you make in Mexico or Europe. I love making movies like Blade 2, and ultimately the movie that Mimic could have been, I would have loved to have done. If you want to download the screenplay we were going to do, just type on Yahoo! or Google 'greenberg del toro mimic screenplay' and there's a site where someone uploaded the script, and it's a very different script than the movie. And I'll always be curious about what the fate of the movie would have been had that been the script we shot.

A ghost is something that haunts you. It can be a war, it can be a love that is not responded to, it can be a future that went away, it can be a past that was destroyed. In that sense Mimic is my own little ghost because what Mimic could have been is what haunts me. I know it could have been an amazingly beautiful, disturbing, giant bug movie.

AS: Speaking of fates of movies... has the MPAA taken a look at this yet?

GdT: Not yet, but we're not expecting anything but a hard 'R'. I would love for them to give it a PG-13, but no.

AS: I could even see it with an 'AA', honestly.

GdT: That would be fantastic. Although the subject is really hard- you cannot mix children and war and not make some hard-to-watch scenes. But I find it a moving, almost nostalgic kind of film.

AS: I can see that. The line I used in my review- keeping in mind I was a very strange child- was that if I were nine years old again, this would be the greatest movie ever made. It's exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to see- no punches pulled, no talking down to me, if bad stuff happens, it happens.

GdT: I was the same child as you. I saw at the age of around ten, Kuroneko, the black and white Japanese ghost story. It was so freaky, and to this day it's one of my favorite films. And I mean, it was really disturbing. But I find if children watch movies like this they would get a better grasp of real-life violence than if they watched Jurassic Park or any escapist movie. Children are, for good or bad, mortal creatures. They are capable of dying, as has been proven in many wars, and they are capable of being quite brutal themselves, as has been proven in many schoolyards. Sometimes I wonder when I see stories about children that kill, on the campuses, and people point their fingers at the movies. But nobody points their fingers at the fact that maybe these children didn't have dialogue at home. My daughter and I watch all these movies, the Universal horror movies, Ray Harryhausen...

AS: How old is she?

GdT: She's five. And we keep a dialogue. She says "I like this, I don't like this, I think this is too scary, is it real, what is the legend behind it", and we talk. And I think that's what is lacking. People point their fingers at the Playstation, or the movies, no no no. Let me tell you something. What's sad is that children have those, but they don't have someone at home to talk to about it.

AS: Exactly. They see something and it just bounces around in their own head with no context.

GdT: And then they go to their parents and they turn out to be morons, who don't want to talk about it or say "That's ugly" and censor it, and then they don't deal with it.

AS: Yeah. "It makes me uncomfortable to talk about it, so we just won't."

GdT: I was watching on PBS a documentary about a young kid who went and killed his parents and then killed twenty people at school with rifles. And through the whole documentary what you find is that the kid just cannot talk to his family. And that's the real problem. Not some kid watching the Matrix.

AS: Or listening to Marilyn Manson.

GdT: Yes. When you'd rather listen to Marilyn Manson than your dad, that doesn't mean Marilyn Manson is a philosopher, what it means is maybe your dad isn't a guy who is open to talking a lot about the things that really happen in your life and in your head.

AS: Speaking of children... The kid playing Carlos (Fernando Tielve), was that his first role? Because he was fabulous.

GdT: He came in to read for another part, and I saw him read and I liked his energy. One of the main things I look for in kid's I put in the movies I do is for them to be able to take instructions. Most kids, they hear the instructions, and then they forget it. Take after take you go and do the same thing. I gave him an instruction, we did the take and he obeyed the instruction. He memorized a long monologue in ten minutes. And I said "You know what? You got the lead." He couldn't believe it.

AS: So that was his first role at all, or first big role?

GdT: First role at all.

AS: Excellent. Good find! Because he was in there with some heavyweights, acting-wise.

GdT: It was great that he was totally non-conscious about it. He was essentially- seriously, he was in front of the best, in my opinion, the best Spanish language actor in the world, Federico Luppi. And in the presence of one of the best Spanish language actresses, Marisa Paredes. And he was completely unaware of it! Not at all self-conscious about it.

AS: Cool. And Pedro Almodovar was the producer? How did that relationship come about?

GdT: What happened was Almodovar saw Cronos, and loved it, and said "I want to produce your next movie if I can, or co-produce it." I formed my own company after Mimic, called Tequila Gang, to do my own kind of movies. I sent him the screenplay, and he loved it. I thought, and I was right, that as a director he would be an ideal producer. It was all heaven. He said to me essentially, "As a producer I'll be there if you need me. And you will not see me if you don't need me." Which was great because I have seen in the past producers who are too present on the set or in post-production. I think that it's very healthy to have a partner that you trust, who doesn't want to suffocate you.

AS: Here's a question I wanted to ask, or I guess just an observation- you've been working on this for 16 years, but you end up bringing it out, what, seven months after Spy Kids hits the screens, which is just an odd kind of coincidence. How you talked to Robert (Rodriguez) at all, about that sort of synchronicity?

GdT: When Robert was talking to me about Spy Kids and showing me some of his designs for the movie and so forth I told him that, to me, that was the movie he was born to make. For those of you that know his work, for me his best work before Spy Kids was Bedhead, the short. And then after that his second-best was the short in Four Rooms. So I said, "God darnit, this is the perfect movie for this guy." I know Robert is himself a child, he's like a kid with toys, he built his own house in the shape of a castle with secret passages behind bookshelves and all that. And I'm very happy I was right, because in my book some people were a little too tough on the Faculty, so I was very happy to see him bounce back so strongly. I personally love the Faculty, I thought it was a really good romp.

AS: I thought it was pretty good too. I enjoyed myself watching it in the theater, which is all I really expected from it.

GdT: And he did it in order to gain enough freedom to go and do Spy Kids, so it was well worth the effort, I guess.

AS: You yourself are working on Blade 2 right now- still shooting?

GdT: Wesley had a muscle pull behind one of his knees, so two of the fights are still pending. So we're rebuilding those sets from Prague in LA, and shooting them next week. But we already have a cut that's an hour forty. We're thinking the movie will be released March 22, 2002. And I'm really really happy with it.

AS: And after that?

GdT: Well of course I really really wish I could do Hellboy. We're in talks with different studios and so forth. But I tell you, I'd rather not do Hellboy if the circumstances are not absolutely right, and not screw it up. Because that movie, if you screw it up by like 5 degrees, you will really fuck it up. It's a movie that has a very small margin of error. And it's a big movie, so the margin for studio interference is high. So it's a delicate situation. But if I feel the circumstances are right then I'll do it. And if not then I'll do a small movie I've been trying to do for nine years called Mephisto's Bridge, a deal with the devil movie, based on a British novel called Spanky by Christopher Fowler, who I think is a really great English writer.

AS: And Vin Diesel? I saw something floating around about him being attached to Hellboy.

GdT: Yes, he is officially attached to the project. And we're continuing talks with him and the studio, and if everybody sees eye to eye on the creative- because obviously there's no way in hell Hellboy is not going to be under a ton of make-up.

Note from Harry: It looks like Diesel's attachment may have been premature.