Director’s Cut: Guillermo del Toro on running toward the fear

17:24Elvis:Full of fear. And everything that is good is either a sin or it makes you fat. So look at me. I've got to be interested on both. Oh, I hope it's sin. Conscious and...

17:39Guillermo del Toro:But, I mean, this zealotry that exists in all your works, I mean, people, I mean, you said Pan's Labyrinth. That really is running towards the scariest thing. And in all these movies, there's that running towards this thing that is, I mean, you basically still describe the tenets of Catholicism and all these things. And I wonder if for you, religion is still a scary thing.

18:06Elvis:Well, spirituality isn't. Organized religion, no matter what it is, is very scary. It's all based on fear. Well, it's all based on fear. It's all based in a vertical integration of a figure that knows everything. And I think really, if you find any wisdom in the universe, it's flow. You know? Anything that flows is good, is life. It may not be good all the time. Meaning, I tried to explain, with every blessing, cosmically it's inevitable. With every blessing comes a curse. And with every curse comes wisdom or a blessing. It's inevitable. No matter what happens, if you really don't separate in a binary way things.

18:56Elvis:The Tao says something beautiful. It says, beware of naming something beautiful because you have just created something ugly. You know? Beware of saying something's great because you have created something somewhere that is terrible. So I believe that God creates the world and the devil names it in a way. If you understand things, when somebody says, one of the words that I find incredibly self-limiting is fair. It's not fair. What is fair? Explain fair. It's completely individual. But if you say, look, out of this, this other thing will come.

19:42Elvis:You are blessed by something if you can read the letter. You have to create the dictionary of what the cosmos wrote you. So I think the scariest thing for me are ideologists, whether it's church or state. Those are the enemies in my movies, are the ideologists. The people that are absolutely certain that their way is the only way. That is truly scary to me because it is, and I'm certain of that. No, it is truly, truly, you see it is what separates everything. And there's no separation. I mean, it really is a flow.

20:27Guillermo del Toro:I mean, because as you're saying this, that obviously makes Victor kind of the apotheosis because he does have certainty, certitude. He does believe what he's saying. He is the zealot. He is running towards fear. In his way, he's just sort of this really apotheosis of every sort of thing you've talked about here in this conversation.

20:48Elvis:Well, because, I mean, most of us, if you declare something in a single direction, like Victor seems to be visually in the movie, I tried to show that obviously his quest is represented by red, which is the mother color. And namely, he's trying to serve life. And then the archangel reveals itself to be death towards the end because he says he's interested in life. He isn't. Look at the way he treats the bodies. Look at the way he treats the creature he created. It's interesting, you know, many of us freeze in a tantrum at an early age. And Victor is the type of man that froze in a tantrum at age 11.

21:39Elvis:Look at the great billionaires of our times. Most of them are frozen in tantrums that are pre-adolescent. You know, about what it is to be a man, what it is to be a citizen, what it is to be successful. So, you know, those are tantrums. And Victor is a character with a gigantic tantrum against something he cannot do anything. When people say, why does he drink milk? Well, partially because of that. You know, he froze at that age.

22:09Guillermo del Toro:These zealots, and Victor being one of them, but I can't think of somebody who doesn't serve that figure in one of these films, who they're trying to create communities around themselves, but they're not generous about it. I mean, it's that thing you're talking about, the villain who sees himself as a hero.

22:31Elvis:Well, most of us, whatever, I mean, after 55 or something, we're still realizing that you've played a villain many times.

22:42Guillermo del Toro:Well, some of us anyway. But I was thinking about this for me is the evolution from Kronos to Frankenstein, that you can actually point the finger in that way. Yeah, yeah. Because Kronos is full of victims.

22:54Elvis:It is. It is. It's absolutely. I think the first time, very conscientiously, I started to think that that was Shape of Water. Then Nightmare Alley starts something that I'm not looking for, but is present on everything I'm developing or everything I've shot, which is the antagonist is the protagonist. The worst enemy in Nightmare Alley is him. The antagonist in Frankenstein is him. you know you have to realize that and by the way you need to do both I don't think I think that in order to exist you're going to cross the line with sort of structurally needing to realize that you did it that you did it that it didn't happen to you I think the difference between declaring yourself somebody that things happened to or that you participated in some active way.

23:57Elvis:It can be 1%, 2%, I don't care. But it's the difference between being on a ship in a storm without grabbing the wheel or grabbing the wheel. That's a big difference. If you say, what did I do actively to, how do I, everything is a circuitry. There's, again, you're going to I think I read very strange manuals, but everybody engages in a role in most interactions in the day. And if you are, for example, under interrogation and they're sinking your head in the water, this is a manual, most people are engaged in a dynamic. They sink you in the water, you fight it off. If you want to break the circuit, you inhale.

24:45and the person thinking goes what what are you doing all of a sudden that person is saying what

24:51Elvis:are you doing and it's because you you do something active and I think it's it's strange but we we always find mirrors in people to say oh they're doing that to me you you you it's a circuitry and I find that interesting in drama I find it interesting to write the characters from that point of view now. You know, when I read Nightmare Alley with Kim, I said, I think it's all personification of the parts of the author in his mind. The feminine parts, the masculine parts are all inside him.

25:26Guillermo del Toro:And the parts of himself that he hates.

25:28Elvis:That he hates, yeah. I mean, 99 % of the time, whatever you don't like is something you don't like in you. 99%.

25:36Guillermo del Toro:Because, you know, this is, for me, takes me back to the discussions that we'd had about Hellboy, who was also that figure. But the thing that sort of separates him, and again, going back to Kronos and even Mimic, is that some of those guys are martyrs, and Victor is not. I mean, you don't let the audience off the hook in that way.

25:56Elvis:No, no, no. The interesting thing with that, I mean, Frankincense is the interrogation of that material was very Catholic because I always thought why did God send Jesus to be crucified? If it's consubstantial, if it's one person, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are consubstantial to each other, what is it that he's trying to find out? And I thought he's trying to find out about death and pain. So those are areas that for some reason God is not aware of or has not experienced, and he wants to understand humanity. These are things I was wondering when everybody was in the disco. I was thinking, I was deeply thinking these things in the darkness of my room, which explains my social life.

26:49Elvis:Yeah. But it is. Maybe you should dance more. Is that what you should take away from all this? I'm not a good dancer. I sing okay. But it's, gosh, because this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

27:01Guillermo del Toro:First of all, because there is, again, this takes us back to chronos. I hate to keep doing this, but there is a quest for eternal life.

27:10Elvis:Or the avoidance of it. But in all these things you've done, there's just somebody's running. Well, it's a question. Yes. It's a question because a lot of people are afraid of death. My nightmare, this is something very personal, but it's true. I now and then say, what if we don't die? What if we want to die and it doesn't happen? What if we are all, and I'm not in the gang of people that say it's a simulation, but it could be a philosophical question. I think death makes the metronome for the symphony of life. It's really great that we exist between two compasses. That's what makes it amazing to be here.

27:58Elvis:So to me, mortality is the same thing as the billionaire idea. We all get enough. Enough. Why should you want more? And that's why the billionaire character in Kronos, the millionaire character in Kronos back then, he wanted more, but he couldn't leave his room. Why does he want to leave any longer? If he cannot leave his room, it makes no sense. I mean, if you think about it, money is the same way. We occupy the same square footage, no matter how rich you are. You cannot be in a 50-room mansion at the same time. So how are you going to move? You're going to move three feet by three feet like everybody else.

28:48Elvis:Toilet, pretty much the same principle. Dining, pretty much the same principle. No, but, you know, I really think there is no measure of it that makes sense. And immortality to me as an idea is obscene. Mortality is a blessing, in my opinion. It's great. Is that why it's so recurrent in your work? Yeah, absolutely. Because it's the biggest nightmare? Absolutely. My biggest nightmare, because it comes from Catholicism. Because when I say there is timeshare, right? If your grandma says, you'll suffer in this world, but in the other world, It'll be amazing, or vice versa. You know? You will enjoy this world, and then you'll pay for hundreds of years.

29:33Elvis:Oh, dear Lord. You know? So the idea of time outsized to a human experience is very daunting to me. And I don't think I agree with those ideas. What happens? the only thing I understand is if energy is to be proven something that is not created nor destroyed, simply transformed, then thought is an energy. In some way it will exist. Maybe it will be self-aware or not. I have no idea. But everything that is in this package has been here and it will always be here and it will just mutate from one state to another. I think pretty much that's as far as we can get without mushrooms. With mushrooms, you can get into other ideas that make no sense the next day, by the way.

30:25Elvis:You write them down. That's a great idea. No, it isn't.

30:29Guillermo del Toro:I should get rid of these questions. The mushroom questions. Okay. But I think as you're saying this, I find myself thinking about this fascination with these characters who can't talk. I mean, I was thinking about That was me as a child.

30:46Elvis:Was that? Yeah. I was very, very, very, I was thin and quiet. So I've developed a few tools. But I was originally very thin and quiet and observing, observing always. So I think that the French have a saying. They say the more empty the bottle, the more noise it makes. and also I think quiet observation for decades is very advisable

31:15Guillermo del Toro:I can't go back to that figure in so many of the movies who doesn't speak and who is looked upon as being a monster for not speaking being the other for not speaking that's a very Catholic thing too this idea of ascribing these qualities on these figures who don't talk it exists in almost every mythology

31:38Elvis:And if you think about the way we apprehend the world, we declare things that are not true more often than not during the day right now. We have become a declaratory society. We say things that are almost substitutes of experience or act. We have become people that want to declare constantly what must be. in order to appear to follow those precepts. And I think silence is existing. To exist, you have to quiet the mind in a way. And even more valuable is to, I think that communication is valuable. When you are sharing something and you hope somebody catches it, then you're in a contact sport of the soul.

32:36Elvis:You have to talk. then, but to simply declare is empty. More than anything you find on social media, you find something declaring something macro important, and you see that it has been viewed zero times. And it breaks my heart, because then that person is having a dialogue with themselves about something they already believe. So silent is very valuable, because whatever dialogue is happening is continuing with you. You don't express. To express is to eject, to express. And if you express it through a media where nobody is listening, the illusion is that you did, but the communication is zero.

33:22Guillermo del Toro:But people are so often being declamatory because it's their way of trying to rise above the noise and to be heard. Again, this takes us back to the zealot. Who wants, I mean, again, it's Victor. I mean, talking about this in religious terms, he's almost preaching a sermon when he's in an operating theater. He's got an audience of believers he wants to bring. Oh, he says. Yes.

33:44Elvis:And I think the eloquence can be a blessing or a curse. Victor is very eloquent about what he thinks he's doing. And then you see what he is doing. And it's very, very different. But he has a blind side. That's the reason I wanted the forgiveness at the end, not only because it happened in my own life, but because, and it's very autobiographical, the movie, strangely enough, but because it occurs so fast in real life. When people say, well, forgiveness may come too fast in drama, that's the way it happens in life. We all want to be forgiven of something, and we all want to forgive as soon as possible.

34:34It really is a cleansing.

34:38Elvis:And when it's happened in my life, it happens really fast. The person you didn't want to see again ever tells you they're sorry and you crumble. And you never want to stop seeing them. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that wasn't me.

34:52Guillermo del Toro:I wish. You wish I'd apologized. Well, I've never apologized to you. Never. But as you're saying this, I'm thinking about that moment of need that happens in these films, these stories. And from often the silent character, the character who's incapable of expressing himself in conventional ways. And is that something you experience too? Yeah.

35:16Elvis:Well, if you think about Kronos, the girl says one word, grandfather. Yes. But she's saying to him, this is who you are. and that's why he says my name is jesus greece i mean when somebody tells you i remember uh you know just one word uh three words together can sort of cleanse you of so many things and one of the most powerful words in any language is no and the people that say it the most hear it the least but if you give it in a time where they can listen it's so beautiful and the creature and Victor connect that way when he says he hates his name and he says can you say it one more time the way you meant it when it was the world to you you know because I find both in in sort of occult ideas and hermetism and all that, naming a thing is to own it.

36:29Elvis:Or knowing the name of a thing is to apprehend it. In epistemology, they would say the limits of your language is the limit of your universe, right? Same thing. And in the name of the rose lies the rose and so forth. So I find it really powerful to say or declare your name. Or to change it. To not be Archie Leach, but be Cary Grant. Or to, you know, that's the power on even a fiction as popular as Breaking Bad. Where Walter White changes his name. You know, it really is a dramatic thing. And it's one word or two. But it's all of you.

37:16Guillermo del Toro:You've been listening to a conversation with Guillermo del Toro. the writer-director of the Oscar-nominated Netflix film Frankenstein at KCRW's Annenberg Performance Space before a live audience. More to come after this.

37:39Guillermo del Toro:KCRW's sponsors include Walt Disney Animation Studios, presenting Zootopia 2, winner of the BAFTA Award for Animated Film and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Critics rave that Zootopia 2 is one of Disney Animation's greatest achievements of the 21st century. Disney's Zootopia 2, for your consideration for Best Animated Feature. Welcome back. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment, recorded before a live audience at KCRW's Annenberg Performance Space, where on Monday of this week, I interviewed our old friend, Guillermo del Toro, writer-director of the Oscar-nominated Frankenstein.

38:18Guillermo del Toro:I can't not think about Faust, which is you know, beware the things you want for you shall have them. And Victor gets everything he wants. And so that happens a number of times. It happens to Blade. People, and there's also this guy who's doomed to live forever. I mean, this, these warring sort of ideas you've been able to place in so many different stories. I wonder as you start to work, is that something you think about, well, how do I, because it's so powerful in your work, this question of.

38:50Elvis:Well, if you think about it, the worst times in your life, the thing that is very structural is the antidote to ego is frustration. That's it. It's as simple as that. And most people don't understand frustration as a vitamin, but it is a vitamin. So what frustrates everyone? The world, right? My father is kidnapped for 72 days. The first week of the kidnapping, I was like a five-year-old. I couldn't listen to the phone calls. I ran into a closet, covered my ears. The last portion of the kidnapping, I negotiated. But day by day, during that kidnapping, I wanted to die on the beginning, and the world never ended.

39:44Elvis:I felt like I could not stay alive. And the sun rose and people went by on the street because it's simultaneous. The world has the wisdom to tell you, I will not stop for you. So I find that that is really interesting for these characters to understand who they are. The Hellboy or the creature of Frankenstein. the world will not accommodate you and that's your place

40:12Guillermo del Toro:well part of this too is the thing you start up by talking about it's the awful becoming quotidian but this is part of your everyday life then you have to make this agreement that your life is going to go on that's the thing

40:25Elvis:if you think about I say this often when I discuss Frankenstein the book I wanted to understand in the Bible more than any other and I talked to my spiritual advisors over and over again was the book of Job, which is so mysterious and so wise. And basically, he is a pious man, a virtuous man that is a wager, becomes a wager between good and evil. And God says, I'll show you. Job is a just man. He will never malign me or speak ill of me. And He deposits on Job every disgrace imaginable. And curses. And curses him. And then Job finally says, why me? And God says, why not? Why not? And I think ultimately, that's a very useful tool in everyday life.

41:17Elvis:Oh, this happened to me. And? Why not? If you went into the restaurant called The World, was it in the menu? Oh, yeah. Okay, then.

41:29Guillermo del Toro:they serve you then. Because as you're talking about this, I also think about for me, the link between you and Miyazaki. All these things we're talking about are there in Miyazaki. And it's also that pivot point where the thing we think of as being the other, the creature, isn't.

41:45Elvis:Yeah. Well, I find that really compelling and generally Eastern narrative has that, you know, when you realize, for example, when you take a genre as American, as a police procedural, and you give it to Bong Joon-ho and he makes memories of murder, and he cracks it in the way that the Korean idiosyncrasies are going to crack it. You give him a noir and he turns it into parasite. He turns it into parasite, the kaiju movie. Or Miyazaki takes an ecological fable, apparently as Mononoke, and turns it into a Zen meditation. And the villain becomes the hero, and the hero becomes the villain. And, you know, it really is, that fluctuation is really interesting to me.

42:28Elvis:And I want to play with it in the big genre language. That's why I've never done, you know, after Hellboy, many of the properties that were mainstream were offered to me. And I had no interest. I said, I don't understand that character. You were going to do it Justice League at one point. Well, yeah, but all the monsters. I like all the superheroes that are monsters. Which ones are you going to? I love Deadman. I love Demon. Demon is fantastic. I love all the weirdo swamp thing, you name it, because they represent powerful things. The straight superheroes are really, really boring to me. To tackle, to watch, I like.

43:10Elvis:I like to watch it, but I think that it's not interesting, and it's only interesting to me when it's serving an interrogation, not a declaration. Many of the superheroes are declarations of virtue. That is not interesting to me. An interrogation of the world is interesting to me. And I believe that can take the shape of any genre or any size mythology. Not just pop and not just traditional mythology. It exists on both. And I think people that don't like material in a genre, they don't know that genre well enough.

43:46Guillermo del Toro:For me, genre is always a way so often to look at death. I mean, because almost all genres sort of built around the idea that somebody has died. Yeah. Or is going to. Or is going to, yes.

44:00Elvis:I mean, it's imminent. Well, is there any other fiction? There's two fictions. You're going to be loved and you're going to die. When and how is catnip for the audience?

44:10Guillermo del Toro:Yes. When is the difference between comedy and drama? Yeah. and I think you are always interested in that question of the when and it's why you're able to cram so much stuff five questions

44:22Elvis:all of them you have to interrogate each of them with the other five think about it I'm going to tell you Romeo and Juliet when? in the future how? through a machine it's going to tell you how it happened but you're not going to see it happen think about the secret agent Clever Mendoza movie It's so beautiful because everything already happened. These are girls listening to tapes. So the how, the when, the what, the why interrogate themselves over and over again. You do that a lot too, though.

44:56Guillermo del Toro:You start us with, we're looking back. You do that every in the films. Yeah, but it's because it's my method of working.

45:04Elvis:My method of working is saying, okay, what seems the natural thing to do? And I don't do that. I say, can I do something that is not what jumps to mind? You know, if somebody in the classroom says, pick me, pick me, I go, who else? You know, you have to look at the material and try to go somewhere else. But I also think, too, that becomes a way for you to interrogate your protagonist. Yeah.

45:32Guillermo del Toro:And for the audience to basically ask the questions that we want to know about that person by starting, in effect, at the end.

45:41Elvis:it is uh it has to start in the end of something it has to or in the middle of something if you want to really push it into pure genre uh when you land when you start a movie you have to be looking at i knew i wanted to open nine morality with him dragging the body of his father and burning it because that's the way it would have ended and and i and i i think uh the american way of writing screenplays is to provide the answers that the audience may have i think that's a mixed mistake you provide the questions that the audience doesn't know the answers to and that's the power of fairy tales. Fairy tales always open with something that makes you say, and then what happens?

46:33Elvis:The Sherisada effect, if you will. You know, somebody sits down in a diner, looks to the right, and notices that the person next to them is bleeding. Okay, why? You know, and Hitchcock is a master of understanding this. Information is flow. He used to say, well, you have, the audience has to be ahead of the protagonist. Not always. And Hitchcock follows the rules of melodrama. Melodrama and suspense share one device. And that device is if for but two keys, everything will be solved, but nobody tells you. Tell him that he's your son. Don't let him humiliate you like that. That's melodrama. Tell him where the person's hidden, that suspense, or where the bomb is.

47:25Elvis:to use his example. But the withholding of information is important.

47:30Guillermo del Toro:I think it's tone because I can't... Tone is very difficult. Yes. And Hitchcock's tone is always businesslike.

47:40Elvis:Sometimes. I mean, he's... Look, if you think about Hitchcock, there are five things in Hitchcock, five that are really important. Melodrama, always. Notorious. Yes. Oh, my Lord. Notorious is a gigantic great melodrama. What would you make into that? It's like Douglas Sirk with Spice. Oh, yes. Motion with Hitchcock. Very important. Whether you're cruising north to northwest or trying to get to your car or sinking a car in the cycle or getting out of there with... Or the tennis game. Yeah, or the tennis game. Motion is really, really important on Hitchcock. I think that guilt, if you are told you're guilty you are guilty the wrong man i confess but somebody's always being

48:25Guillermo del Toro:told they're guilty whether they are or not or not somebody's always being accused of something

48:29Elvis:yeah yeah of course strangers in a train so you know then uh i believe that uh the dickensian and victorian morale is another great great uh vertebrating thing on hitchcock whether he's going to Kensington or going in Gothic romance. It's extremely important. And the last one, I think, is love. And people don't think about Hitchcock like this, but his capacity for romantic comedy. So his tone is an integration of all of that. If you think about 39 Steps, one of the great romantic comedies, two people that hate each other are handcuffed together and they have to cross a landscape, motion. You can take all these simple five things and the permutation of that gives you his entire work.

49:22Guillermo del Toro:We've got some questions from the audience for me. This one comes from Alex Candia, and it is, now that you've completed the 50-year dream of bringing your vision of how Frankenstein needs to be told on the silver screen, what are the other dark corners of literature that you feel deserve to be re-examined by yourself or the next generation of storytellers?

49:44Elvis:I would love to do Jane Eyre, but that's not going to happen. Why was that not going to happen? Well, I don't know. You mean it's been done too many times? Frankenstein was done so many times. You know if your voice is needed. And I can tell you there's plenty of Jane Eyres I adore. there's pieces of these pieces of that right or wrong that I adore so I have my genre I think that there are very mysterious pieces of literature you know what is so strange Verhoeven wants to do the life of Jesus I think that that's Robocop in many ways the strands of that are very interesting but he's been doing the resurrection story his entire time The whole time, yeah.

50:38And a black book is amazing in many ways. But to me, the reality is I'm 61.

50:46Elvis:I've written 42 screenplays or co-written and done 13 movies. So there's plenty of stuff I would like to have done that I know I'm not going to do. And that's okay. You know, there's that joke Billy Wilder said when he got the Oscar. An old man goes to the doctor and says, doctor, I can't pee. And the doctor says, how old are you? He says, 82. He says, you've peed enough. That's how I feel about my career.

51:15Guillermo del Toro:I'm sorry. That's such a touching story that you share with us there. Billy Wilder said it. Thanks for opening up like that. This question is from Liz Hawkins. How did growing up in Jalisco, which has a beautiful color palette of its own, influence the color theory of your films? In Frankenstein specifically, there's distinctively rich color palette amongst the women in the film. What influenced these choices?

51:41Elvis:Well, color, I mean, I did grow up in Jalisco, which is, there's a lot of muralists. The most famous is Orozco, you know, and I used to go to the Exconvento del Carmen, which is his magnum opus. It's basically his Sistine Chapel. And I would go every week because there was a cinema club there. And I would go and I lay under his murals. He has one called The Man on Fire, which you laid under. And it's the burning archangel of Frankenstein comes very much from that. There's other muralists, Gabriel Flores, whose ghostly children are the ghost of Devil's Backbone. So there's a lot of influence of those muralists.

52:26Elvis:I love Siqueiros, and I love all the... The ones I love the most are not the most famous or beloved ones, but you grow up in a culture that has a very careful coating of colors, and Orozco particularly. I like the way he coats the ochres and the magentas and so forth. But the three filmmakers that I find really compelling because they transition from black and white to color. Certainly Cirque, who keeps the values of black and white, but his color palette explodes. Right, Minelli, of course, those two for me are one side. Then Hitchcock and Fellini, who basically said this. Hitchcock said this, I started in silent, and when I got sound, I said, I got to make it count.

53:23Elvis:And then I went to black and white, and when I got color, I said, I gotta make it count. So what I tried to do is cipher my movies in color language, shape language, and sound language that is extremely precise, and I code it. Before I give it to the crew and everybody to play with it, I need to know what each color means, and I need to know what is the soundscape of each character. I want the captain in Pan's Labyrinth to be made of leather. So he creaks when he moves. The fascist, you know, you hear the leather when he moves. I want to make Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak made of silk. So when she's coming close, you hear the silk moving.

54:10Elvis:And so on and so forth. And the color is as precise as that. The mother is red in Frankenstein. His childhood is black, white, and red because it was simple. then is inundated by the colors of contemporary world which include green and blue that are new colors in his palette but he shares the red with the creature and with Elizabeth who's the only other character other than the mother and him that is going to have red so he thinks he found his twin soul and then the monster's language becomes pastoral and fairy tale and his moss greens and woods and sepias and so forth. So each thing has to be coded in every movie.

54:55Guillermo del Toro:You're talking about those filmmakers who transition from black, white, and color, but the two others that come to mind, I figure must have influenced you. One is Bergman, obviously. Of course. Gigantically. Yes. And with that black and white was... Very theatrical, though. Completely. Very, very theatrical. But as he moved into color, though, it became more naturalistic. I mean, you think about that great stuff with Nyquist or with Nestor Almendros and how naturalistic He went from being really heightened to being much...

55:20Elvis:You have cries and whispers, which is very heightened. And when you see a movie like Possessions, Zulavsky makes a beautiful palette of steely blues and cyans, and all of a sudden you have a guy with pink socks, and it explodes, and so on and so forth. I think, look, we discuss film in the wrong terms. We have taken the discourse of film and boiled it down to the most base dramaturgy. What is it about? It's not about the script. The movie is not about the thing that it has in common with theater. We say, well, the characters do this, and cinema exists above that in images and sounds that we cannot make words.

56:08Elvis:And that's the power of cinema to me. And we never discuss it like that. So my example, which I go back to, is, well, discuss Starry Night by Van Gogh or the Sunflowers. Oh, it's about sunflowers. Oh, is that what it is about? Oh, that doesn't sound interesting. But it is about the color, the tracery, the composition, the thickness of the paint. Why don't we discuss film like that? If it is written like that, because it is written like that.

56:38Guillermo del Toro:Because the other person I was going to say, too, what you really see is the evolution of camera technique is Renoir when he moved to Calais.

56:46Elvis:That's a huge push. And I think that it's a huge push in the visual arts in America. You know, you have a pastoral mythology of America. and then in the disillusionment of the two world wars America in an industrial age, in an urban age realizes that its spirit may not be so pure, right? So you go from the Hudson River School to Thomas R. Benton or you name it or Hopper and the same questioning of the values of America that are coming through the visual arts are coming through the cinema and the literature, the entire rhythm of noir, the entire rhythm of noir is Hemingway. You know, is the rat-tat-tat, syncopated rhythm of Hemingway.

57:38Elvis:And I think Edmund Wilson says that in one of the...

57:41Guillermo del Toro:But that's all, that's newspaper writing. Yes, of course, it's absolutely.

57:45Elvis:It's subject matter. It's chronical. Yeah, it's serious. Chronical. And when I was interviewing, you know, Clever Mendoza for The Secret Agent, I said, what influenced you? And he said, I was a reporter. And I go, that's it. Bingo. It's a rhythm. And that's what fascinates me of that post-world literature in America is rhythmic. For somebody that comes from a Romance language, the percussive nature of English in America is fascinating.

58:14Guillermo del Toro:To me, it's the corollary between, and these guys, it's Hemingway, Fitzgerald, all these guys who came were influenced by jazz. Yes. Which is the move from European and that sort of melody to count, to beat. And there's so much musicality. I mean, the short Happy Life of Francis McConver is really like basically, it's like me.

58:36Elvis:It's incredible stuff. And that's why Gatsby is syncopated and is rhythmic and so forth. But I think for me, the interesting thing about this language is I was bilingual at age six or seven. Completely bilingual. What were the English books you were reading as a kid? It was Mad Magazine and Famous Monsters. I'm sorry, I was six. You were six. That hasn't changed. I really investigate Hawthorne now. It was a little early. But it's fascinating to find the rhythm of American English for me. But Mad Magazine is a great way to find it. It is.

59:16Guillermo del Toro:It's punchy in that same way. It's all bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

59:19Elvis:It was. the transition from silent comedy to Scruble, which has a lot to do with radio. Radio comedy and the rhythms of radio drama, which could not have any silence.

59:32Guillermo del Toro:All the early radio stuff came from newspaper people who moved from doing that to that.

59:37Elvis:And all the early screenwriters. I think when I read Nabokov and he criticizes Don Quixote, I say, Mr. Navokov, Mr. Navokov, did you read it in Spanish? No, the language is the entirety of the country. That's why, for me, I was very prudish about writing in English, even although I was bilingual at a very early age. And, you know, what helped me early on in the 90s when I started writing for American Studios, you know, the rhythms of stand-up. you know they were i was i was like listening to music each of the comedians was very different and i i think to live in a language from a rhythm and music point of view is really beautiful

1:00:26Guillermo del Toro:the question from mike chivet and i hope i got that right describe compromises you make between your imagination and what's on the screen have you ever encountered circumstances where it became impossible. We sort of started with that. Yes, yes.

1:00:41Elvis:I think directing, one of the things that I really think is very useful is when you don't describe the act of directing as an exercise in control. It's fishing. You need to pull and you need to release. I think it's a hostage negotiation with reality. Reality comes out and says, I'm going to kill him. Let's talk. And you negotiate. And this is what I think you have to have the rigidity, the myth of the director. And there's two myths in early cinema that are the myth of the producer, the Thalberg of it all, and then the von Stroheim of it all. The absolute control. I find that really suffocating.

1:01:28Elvis:To me, for example, of wells, I am really interested in the more sweaty wells, like Dodge of Evil. than the full control. I really like to see the sweat and the acidity of the image a lot more because I find vulnerability, to me, is really great in art. And I think that a negotiation with reality is actually a primordial tool of directing. So, but why use the word compromise? Why use the word compromise? If you talk to a painter, the painter will always tell you, The extra brushstroke f***ed it up. It was, I was, this is so good. And then you go, oh, I should have left it like that. And reality does that for the hand of the director.

1:02:19Elvis:Reality holds you. So you can think about, do you really, really need that extra brushstroke? So I don't think about it as adversity. I think about it as yin and yang. It's a dialogue. But you must have come to that at a certain point. Oh, yeah. No, and the younger you are, the worse you experience it. I remember my biggest mistake in Chronos was I cast the main actress for all the reasons I thought she was perfect for it, and she came with a completely different set of reasons, and I completely squandered that character. Because I thought it has to be the way I see it. And if I had opened myself up, I would have not done that.

1:03:02and I think through the age,

1:03:05Elvis:it's the difference between living your life as a son or a father. You know, many of us get to be adults and fathers, and we're still experiencing life as sons that were injured. But if you become a father, you're there to nurture and to guide and to structure. So a director, when you're young, you are a son. You want to show them what you can do. But then later you go, I'm going to make them do what they can do. I'm going to make everybody bring something great to this. And they're all going to make their movie. You know, I think it's a real difference. So to answer the question, I don't think it's compromise.

1:03:48Elvis:I think it really, if you listen, the movie makes, Steven Spielberg said to me, he said, if the credits were right in the movies, it would be a film by the film. And I think he's right. I mean, the older you get, the more you understand the movie has a tectonic movement of its own. And it's going to dictate what it needs and what it doesn't need. And it's going to expel it or it's going to beckon it if you know how to listen. And then now and then you have the absolute certainty. This must be. And then you push for that. It's not like, oh, well, whatever. No, you're there to say, They know that if everything's important, nothing is important.

1:04:27Elvis:And if nothing is important, you're letting everything important die. So it's a negotiation. Fishing, pulling, reeling in, and releasing. You get the fish. First of all, let's thank him so much.

1:04:40Guillermo del Toro:He came through in a big way. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

1:04:45Elvis:Thank you.

1:04:56Guillermo del Toro:Guillermo del Toro has been doing this show since we started 30 years ago. His newest triumph is the realization of a dream, Frankenstein, which is nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. He was kind enough to come join us before a live audience at KCRW's Annenberg Performance Space, where, I'm told, we have the biggest audience ever for such an event. At the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment, find this interview and previous conversations with Oscar winners and other winners, including Guillermo del Toro. And this week at kcrw.com slash the treat, our weekly series where you can hear creators of all types on what drove them to create documentary director Matt Wolfe on a book that is itself a document of a time, a place, and a bigger-than-life person.

1:05:46Guillermo del Toro:The bigger-than-life folks I want to thank, Rebecca Mooney, who produces and edits the show, and Katie Gilchrist, who mixes it. To better days, everyone. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.

1:06:36Guillermo del Toro:KCRW sponsors include Walt Disney Animation Studios presenting Zootopia 2, winner of the BAFTA Award for Animated Film and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Disney Zootopia 2 for your consideration for Best Animated Feature. I just got my new phone, and the KCRW app is the best way to get the music and shows you love from KCRW. And it's been totally redone, to be cleaner, faster, and more reliable. And there's two new music streams, Dance24 and Vintage24, and they're only in the app. Plus, real-time now playing, so you never miss a track ID. Look up KCRW in the App Store, and be sure to make a free account to use all the new features.

1:07:21Thank you.