Guillermo del Toro, director: I only make movies for art

13:30John Wilson:When I was eight years old, my father, who had many car dealerships, he took Super 8 equipment as down payment for a car. And he said to me, you like movies. Why don't you use it and tell me how it works? At eight. At eight. And I did a couple of Super 8 movies. You took the reels to the pharmacy. And the pharmacist would return them to you like two weeks later. and I projected it and it's the happiest experience to this day I've ever had making movies because I saw the image projected on the screen and I said, I made a movie. I made that.

14:07Guillermo del Toro:What was it? What were you seeing?

14:08John Wilson:It was Planet of the Apes stop motion with my toy figures.

14:12Guillermo del Toro:Oh, so you weren't just filming your family. You actually created a story.

14:15John Wilson:No, no, I created a story. The Planet of the Apes stop motion crudely made and I then went to do a movie called The Killer Potato about a potato that wanted to take over the world and got crushed by a car trying to cross the street.

14:30Guillermo del Toro:These are the first del Toro movies.

14:32John Wilson:Yes, yes. But, you know, the thing is, at age 11, when I read the novel, I very, very earnestly say, I'm going to make that movie.

14:42Guillermo del Toro:Took you 50 years.

14:44John Wilson:It took me 50 years and I didn't go through the pharmacist this time.

14:51Guillermo del Toro:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

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16:22Guillermo del Toro:Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal investment advisory services provided by Wealthfront Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. Right from the start of our conversation, it was clear to me that Guillermo del Toro is a natural born storyteller bursting with energy as he recounted vividly detailed memories of his extraordinary Mexican childhood. A big man with a huge sense of the transformative possibilities of the imagination and the redemptive power of love, he was an absolute joy to talk to. He's an ebullient raconteur whose passion for art, literature and fantasy has fed into every frame he's ever shot.

17:01Guillermo del Toro:Okay, let's return to my conversation with Guillermo del Toro. Alfred Hitchcock.

17:07John Wilson:Another Catholic overweight man.

17:09Guillermo del Toro:Ah. Yes. I hadn't made that connection. When did you first see his films?

17:14John Wilson:Well, the first film I saw was, it was a big event when Psycho came on TV. And I saw it, I loved it. But the one that got me was I Confess with Montgomery Clift. Because it was a Catholic thriller. And the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would call it, was The Secret of Confession. It was so thrilling to me. I was on the edge of my seat. And Montgomery Clifford was such a great martyr. It was his calling to be martyred. And Hitchcock plays with that heavy weight in a way that you know he knows. I knew that moment he was Catholic. And later at age 21, I think I wrote a book on Alfred Hitchcock, 500 something pages long, and got published by the University of Guadalajara.

18:04Guillermo del Toro:That's really interesting because, I mean, your route to filmmaking wasn't a conventional one. I think you spent a decade or so working in special effects and then you set up your own effects company, but you didn't have any formal filmmaking training. Not quite. So was Hitchcock, in effect, was he your film school?

18:22John Wilson:Well, he was in many ways. I mean, what happened is I was a film director in Super 8 and 16 and all that. And I created my effects company in order to, many years later, be able to do Kronos. because no one would do the effects in Kronos. So I said, OK, I better create a company. So you knew you were going to be a filmmaker. I knew I was a filmmaker before I did effects. And I offered my services to storyboard, to do makeup effects, physical effects, stop motion animation, anything. Created the company in order to finance the effects in Kronos. And in the meantime, I studied three years of screenwriting and three years of makeup effects creation.

19:01Guillermo del Toro:We should just explain, Kronos, your debut film. It's about an antique dealer who comes across an ancient object which somehow attaches itself to him and injects him with eternal life. I was going to say special powers.

19:15John Wilson:It's vampirism. And the connections between vampirism and Catholic dogma, they were very appealing to me. So the character is called Jesus Grey. And he resurrects on the third day. And he has a stigmat on his feet. And it was about the bond between him and his granddaughter, which was an echo of me and my grandmother, you know, because I love my grandmother in spite of her imperfections. And I thought the unconditional love of the granddaughter was very appealing to me when she realized the grandfather was a vampire, but didn't care.

19:48Guillermo del Toro:What's interesting, though, is, I mean, if you watch Kronos now, there is that aspect to it of the eternal life and the sort of Catholic possibly influence. Yeah. But it doesn't look immediately like it's been influenced by Alfred Hitchcock. No, no, no, no.

20:04John Wilson:I don't think, I think that one thing is who is your formative filmmaker and a very different thing is that you're trying to be him. I don't think anyone can be Hitchcock.

20:14Guillermo del Toro:But what did he teach you, as I suggest there? You know, he was your film school. No.

20:19John Wilson:No, but I'll tell you, the discipline of storytelling is the most salient thing on him. He has very clear that an emotion is the effect of the arrangement and the composition of audiovisual elements. He used to say, what is film but a rectangle charged with emotion? And I think the way you engineer that was very clear to me. I saw, OK, he's using a close up here. He's using a wide shot here. He's hiding this piece of information for the audience to be ahead of the protagonist.

20:51Guillermo del Toro:The next significant influence, Guillermo, is an art encyclopedia that sparked a fascination with the romantic artists in particular, Goya, Blake, Casper David, Friedrich. Was this a school book or one of those that you had at home?

21:05John Wilson:You know, as part of the lottery, my father bought and built a huge library slash studio, which he never, and I mean never, used. If he was in there two times, three times, I am exaggerating.

21:19Guillermo del Toro:You say a library, he stocked it with books as well.

21:21John Wilson:Yeah, they said you should buy books because they look really good. So he bought a whole library. But never read them. Never read them. I read them all. And the three salient things that I got from it, I read an entire encyclopedia of the health and anatomy. And I was morbidly interested in medicine. I became the youngest hypochondriac. I would go to my mother and say, I think I have trichinosis in the brain. I think I have cirrhosis. I think I have an aneurysm. And you would say, why? And these are my symptoms. And that's still in Frankenstein.

21:55Guillermo del Toro:Yeah.

21:55John Wilson:This fascination with the biology and the lymphatic system and all this.

21:59Guillermo del Toro:And a fascination with anatomy. Anatomy. A fetishization of anatomy throughout 70s. Very much so.

22:05John Wilson:And that is tied to martyrdom paintings, though, in a way. But then the second biggest thing was obviously a classic library where I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hunter of Notre Dame, Portrait of Dorian Gray, Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. I read every book very rapidly. And then the most important of all was the Encyclopedia of World Art, which was many, many volumes. And I read all of them, and I received an education on the history of art at a very young age that in a strange way combined with my knowledge of the pop narrative art. I was being exposed to comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, at the same time that I was discovering Manet or Callebot or Monet or Degas, you name it.

22:57Guillermo del Toro:With the romantic painters in particular, there is an element of fantasy, isn't there? Of a widescreen narrative, if you think of, you know, Caspar David Friedrich in particular, or some of the fantasy explored by... Or de Lacroix or, you know, as they call it. Do you think that has fed into the visual aesthetic of so many of your films?

23:15John Wilson:I mean, there's a vocation for eloquence and grandeur in the romantics. They want, you know, all the poses are very eloquent. They want to be operatic. They want to move you instantly. They want to transmit a mood.

23:30Guillermo del Toro:With all these references, then, is it fair to call you a romantic filmmaker?

23:34John Wilson:Oh, yeah.

23:34Guillermo del Toro:Rather than a horror filmmaker or a fantasy filmmaker?

23:36John Wilson:I would say 100%. First of all, I'm a gothic romance addict, but I am a romantic filmmaker. I think it's a very difficult position to be in in the world as it is today.

23:48Guillermo del Toro:Let me just ask you about the technology of filmmaking. You've created so many fantastical creatures, environments, landscapes, other worlds in a way, using a combination of that physical production design and CGI. What opportunities does AI offer you as a filmmaker?

24:08John Wilson:It offers me the opportunity of never being in contact with it. I'm not interested at all. I think artificial intelligence is a very tricky subject for me. I understand it in disciplines like architecture, engineering, science, medicine, things that depend on a glossary of terms or ideas that can be cross-pollinated. I find it of no use in art.

24:31Guillermo del Toro:Even though some people would say, obviously, your films are enabled by computer-generated imagery. But is it not the next logical, technological step?

24:39John Wilson:What's the difference between a microwave and an atomic bomb? They're not the same. You know, first of all, I think that there's a tacit agreement culture has with imagery, with iconography, that tells us this is a spirituality. The silhouette of a hand in a cave in Altamira is testimonial of somebody that lived. If you do that with an airbrush and a mechanical arm, it's testimonial of what? You know, ones and zeros don't experience loss or gain or pain or bereavement. How can they speak about love and transcendental emotions if they're programmed permutations? We are biochemical machines.

25:20Guillermo del Toro:Your most recent projects, including Pinocchio and Frankenstein, have been made for Netflix. As somebody who clearly loves the cinematic spectacle that's best appreciated on the big screen, Does it not worry you that so many people will see your Netflix films, at best on a television screen, more likely a computer screen or a tablet, or at worst on their phone while they're sitting on a bus?

25:46John Wilson:Well, there's three pieces of information that is important to qualify. First, I've been trying to make both Pinocchio and Frankenstein for more than 20 years. Everybody passed. And Netflix came to me and Ted Sarandon said, what is your bucket list? I said, Pinocchio and Frankenstein at this scale. And I said, go ahead. He gave me the scale, the chance to make them. He gave me theatrical release that was considerable for me. But more importantly, complete freedom. So that is number one, because people imagine or fantasize that filmmakers choose their career. A career happens to you. I've written about 40 screenplays, done 12, 13 movies, you know.

26:33John Wilson:So by my count, any chance I have to make a movie, I take it. I think second, I find it very difficult to say that the only experience has to be theatrical

26:45Guillermo del Toro:because I witnessed Frankenstein on a little telefunken television.

26:50John Wilson:I experienced Citizen Kane. I experienced Jamie Cagney, the golden age of Mexican cinema, all through television. So it would be very hard for me, born in 64, to defend that. But what I can defend is that the best experience will be in a theatre if you can and if it's accessible to you economically or geographically. And the final piece for me is Frankenstein had hundreds of millions of people were exposed to it after only a few days.

27:19Guillermo del Toro:When you started making films in 1992 with Kronos, I know that was a struggle. From what I understand, you remortgaged your house, you underwrote a lot of the production. But is it now harder to make films from the root of your imagination, things that challenge perceptions of what is a commercial film because the expectations, the commercial demand are so high?

27:41John Wilson:Well, it's never easy. I mean, I have never made a movie I didn't believe was necessary for me or for someone in the world, whether to entertain or to connect at a spiritual level or something. has been only done for the art. And it doesn't matter if it's Pacific Rim or Devil's Backbone. I believe in both as remedies of some sort for a spiritual need or a dialogue of some kind that is very intimate. Movies have saved my life so many times. So it is always hard when you are not somebody interested in a career, when you're interested in a biography through film. I mean, every movie I've made has a biography of some sort, even Blade II, which is a sequel.

28:24John Wilson:So there's always a streak of strong biography in what I do. And as a result, I've been unemployed many years rather than take a movie that they commissioned from me. I've been offered huge franchises, and I've said I don't understand them.

28:41Guillermo del Toro:And more generally, what drives you on creatively?

28:44John Wilson:Lost causes. I really want to do things that nobody else wants to do. if it looks like nobody should make that movie that's the movie I try to make I am the truffle seeker of impossible movies to make I want to do Pinocchio, yes but I want to do it during the rise of Mussolini Jesus Christ, make your life a little easier, won't you?

29:10Guillermo del Toro:Thank you for listening to The Interview you'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts including episodes with the Ugandan human rights lawyer Nicholas Opeo, musician Patti Smith and the tennis champion Bjorn Borg. You can also hear more leading artists and creative people talking to me, John Wilson, on the BBC's This Cultural Life. Until the next time, bye for now.

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30:11John Wilson:Are you really buying a car online on Autotrader right now? Really? At a playground?

30:16Guillermo del Toro:Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers. Wow, your search can really get that specific. Really? And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget. Mom needs a second, honey. You can really have it delivered? Really. Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car. Mommy, look. Uh, I think your kid is walking up the slide. Kyle, again? Really? Autotrader, buy your car online. Really?