Provoking Through Fantasy
Talking with Guillermo del Toro, Director of Pan’s
Labyrinth
by Roger Durling
Pan’s Labyrinth was directed by Mexican auteur Guillermo del
Toro, who’s responsible for such fantasy/horror films as Hellboy,
Cronos, and Blade II. Imagination runs rampant in del Toro’s hand,
but underneath the special effects, there’s always a lot of heart
and a perceptive view of how we live today. It’s as if del Toro’s
mythology were a mirror in which to gaze at our current situation.
Pan’s Labyrinth, which opens in Santa Barbara theaters this
weekend, is about a young child during the Spanish Civil War who
escapes her harsh reality through fantasy. I recently spoke with
del Toro. This is your second film that takes place during
the Spanish Civil War (the first was The Devil’s Backbone). Why did
you come back to this period? When The Devil’s Backbone
was made, I was trying to talk about innocence and brutality, and
the idea of how a group of weak kids with a lot of differences
would join together to vanquish a protoplast in an orphanage. But
the movie came out and I saw it in Toronto on September 9, 2001. It
got great reviews, it was all fantastic, and I took the plane back
to Los Angeles on September 10. Of course, on September 11, the
world took a huge turn. And I just started feeling that I wanted to
talk about war and innocence and brutality and all those things.
And, now, in five years, things have completely changed. It has
really turned into something conversably different. I thought I
would love to do a movie that took place in the same place, but
five years later — the first one in the Spain of ’39 and now the
Spain of ’44, which is this one. I thought it was the perfect
sister movie — a female movie, if you would, to the male movie that
Devil’s Backbone was. Both movies deal with fascism and the
crushing of innocence. I think this movie is concretely talking
about choice and disobedience, and how imagination is a form of
disobedience, and certainly a form of choice. And how imagination
ultimately is one of the first things that goes with fascism and
how you display your choices by giving justification with a
group: “Well, that’s the way things are,” or “That’s the
way I was ordered to act,” or you know, “Somebody told me to do
it.” The girl in this movie is the only character who actually
makes decisions fully on her own. I thought fascism was the
destruction of imagination. Imagination is so dangerous.
Throughout the movie, there’s talk about pain, that in
order to fully realize life you have to go through all this
pain. I’m not into S&M or anything like that. I just
think we spend our lives carefully avoiding pain. The entire
conceit after World War II and of the modern world has become the
search of a word I find horrifying, which is “comfort.” You know,
comfort, accessibility, immediacy, all these things that seem to
supposedly make our lives better, but actually are sort of an
anesthetic to the soul, and to the need, and to the hunger.
Satisfaction is the opposite of hunger, and I feel pain is also
dulling, and the lack of pain is dulling to the soul and the
threshold for pain in our times becomes thinner and thinner and
thinner. I welcome pain. I welcome challenges and I try to decipher
them. I am a lax Catholic, but I believe everything happens for a
reason. I do think even fractal geometry has come to the conclusion
that in chaos there is order, and in order there is chaos, and it’s
just like a Chinese puzzle of things that are working, organically.
You are one cog of this machinery — if you believe that — and as
that cog you are flowing a certain way and things are going through
you for a reason. And that’s why I put that phrase in the mouth of
the priest, “God sends the letter but doesn’t send a dictionary.”
And I believe life is like that.
Talk to me about horror and the fantasy genre in which
you excel. When I was a kid and I went to a church, I
didn’t care about the saints or the virgins or any of them — I just
cared about the gargoyles. I really thought the fantastic creatures
and the fantasy literature and any other forms of art were the
highest form of creation because then metaphor becomes flesh. You
can now almost access palpable, physical, biological poetry when
you create monsters. I believe that, and I believe the fantastic
genres are one of the last refuges for spirituality, in this age
that values reason over emotion and cynicism over intelligence. I
believe fantasy has become one of the last places where we can let
ourselves go and have a spiritual experience. … It’s a genre that
still provokes.