Guillermo Del Toro Q&A

The Mexican director discusses his brilliant new fantasy horror 'Pan's Labyrinth'.

Nov 23 2006

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's ('The Devil's Backbone', 'Hellboy') dark adult fairytale, 'Pan's Labyrinth', blends a realistic portrait of post-civil war Spain with a child's-eye view of a fantastical realm presided over by an ambiguous goat-like figure. At once playful and profound, it explores the conflict between the anarchic freedom of the imagination and the conformity of fascism.

Although 'Pan's Labyrinth' is a fairytale about childhood, it is definitely not a children’s film.

No, I have two daughters, one is ten and one is five, and I would not show it to them. It has more in common with Neil Jordan's 'The Company of Wolves'. The idea of fairytales has become sanitised. Disney movies, even though they have a lot of sickness and pathos in them, are already sanitised from the written fairytales that gave birth to them. The Grimm Brothers' stories are much harsher than people remember them. In 'Cinderella', for example, the ugly sisters have to chop off their toes in order to fit their feet into the glass slipper. So the idea was to restore this disturbing element of the fairytale, because the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens often take place in a context that is very brutal and very nasty.

Throughout the film you contrast the patriarchal world of the fascist Captain Vidal with the feminine world of his stepdaughter Ofelia and her pregnant mother, Carmen. But as the story unfolds, these two worlds are increasingly intertwined. Was that hard to pull off?

Yes, because by necessity and by design, you have to start the movie as a parallel structure, which means keeping a lot of balls in the air. What I wanted was to create a clash of two universes, one masculine, one feminine. Fascism is a very masculine concern, one that most definitely stems from a brooding psychosexual obsession with a father-figure. Whereas the feminine world of Ofelia and her mother is encompassing, creative and giving. But after about an hour, those two worlds start to weave in and out of one another, until they become enmeshed, inextricably and inexorably. And they finally come together, literally and metaphorically, at the centre of the labyrinth.

The other contrast is between the harsh reality of Vidal's military world and the fantastical beauty of the faun's world. But even the 'real' world is slightly stylised and heightened. How did you maintain that balance?

Everything in the movie was built, so in that sense everything is 'artificial'. But the trick is to ensure that the degree of stylisation is subtle and consistent. The real world has straight, angular lines and oppressive, claustrophobic spaces, whereas the magical world is rounded, almost uterine, and has a warm colour palette (red, scarlet, gold), which contrasts with the cold blues, greys and monotones of the real world.
But you can only go so far with the stylisation of these two worlds. Because if you push the real world more than one-and-a-half notches, then you have to push the magical world four or five notches, and it becomes too crazy. It won't feel as if they're integrated. So you take the real world of Vidal and you push it one-and-a- half notches. Then you push the magical world of the faun a little further, just about two notches.

This film has 300 visual effects, many of them very complex. How easy is it to control, or in any sense 'direct', those sequences?

Mathematically, 'Pan's Labyrinth' has ten times as many effects shots as 'The Devil's Backbone', and because of their complexity, it was exponentially much more difficult. We created a system where we would film the shot using a small digital camera, and I would move a small puppet of, say, the fairy around the set. So the effects team would know where the fairy would start from, where it would end up and where it would be at various points in the shot. It worked quite well, but it is tricky – especially when you're filming in Spain and the visual effects guys are in California.

Are you aware that 'Pan's Labyrinth' reduces many grown men to tears?

Of course, I am one of them. I first pitched the movie to Alfonso Cuarón [one of the film's producers] in London, while I was doing post-production on 'Hellboy' and he was preparing 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'. And as I was telling him the end of the story, I just started crying. Then he started crying, and we were both there crying like babies. There's something so primal about the ending. I don't understand it, but I know that it's true. I like making movies where I don't have all the answers, but the story seems to have them.

'Pan's Labyrinth' opens on Friday.

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