When Guillermo del Toro goes to the movies, he buys three seats. The Mexican director, winner of multiple Oscars, says he likes to feel simultaneously part of a collective experience and a little alone.
"Everyone says that cinema is wonderful as a shared experience, and I agree. But I enjoy it more when the theater is not full," he says.
Del Toro is in England to receive one of the most important honors of his career: an honorary fellowship from the BFI. For him, the recognition holds special meaning, as British cinema has profoundly influenced his artistic formation, from Powell and Pressburger, to Ken Russell, Terence Fisher and the legacy of Hammer films.
But his visit to Britain has a more unusual reason: the director is looking to buy a haunted house. Ghosts have long been a part of his life and imagination.
He recalls feeling a supernatural presence for the first time at the age of 11 in his family home in Guadalajara, Mexico. According to him, it was his late uncle, who before his death had promised to give him a sign if there was anything beyond this life.
This experience would later influence his creativity, including the ghost of the boy Santi in the film “The Devil's Backbone”. Del Toro says that he has had other unusual experiences, including an incident in a hotel in New Zealand, where he heard loud noises that he describes as a scene of violence heard in “surround sound”. Although he calls himself a skeptic, he admits that some experiences are so overwhelming that they can shake the perception of oneself and the world.
He also puts in the same category a UFO he says he saw when he was 14. "When things like this happen, a rift is created. It feels like the mystery of the universe is coming towards you," he says.
For Del Toro, England is "the land of ghosts," so the idea of having a haunted house there is more to do with his collection and creative obsessions than his family life. He says he already has a house for his family and another for his collections, where he spends his days among silicone figures and various objects.
Del Toro's career has been built on a love of monsters, ghosts, and misunderstood creatures. In his world, monsters aren't just scary; they're sensitive, wounded, often more human than humans themselves. This is evident in films like "The Shape of Water," "Pan's Labyrinth," "Cronos," "The Devil's Backbone," and most recently in his adaptation of "Frankenstein."
The director says that horror and fantasy films should not be seen only as tools to scare the audience or to distance them from reality. Since his adolescence, he believed that these genres could be poetic audiovisual languages. This conviction accompanied him when he made his first film, “Cronos”, in 1992, a vampire work with a dark elegance that did not match the cinematic fashion at the time.
Despite his current critical success, Del Toro has also had his share of tough times. He bitterly recalls his experience with the Weinstein producers during the making of 1997's "Mimic," which he says "almost destroyed him." The director says he was close to quitting Hollywood, but he persevered because he has never agreed to make films he didn't fully love.
Throughout his career, he has also turned down major commercial projects, including films from the “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and “Harry Potter” universes. For him, a project must have personal necessity, not just potential for success.
After a lifetime of wanting to make “Frankenstein,” Del Toro has now put that behind him and is working on a stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “The Buried Giant.” The film will be set in a post-Arthurian Britain, where creatures and ogres roam, and according to him, it will not be for children. The director aims to take stop-motion animation further, incorporating small, imperfect gestures and natural movements that create a more realistic feel.
Today, Del Toro says he feels a kind of emptiness after finishing “Frankenstein,” but not a negative emptiness. More like a calm. He’s thinking more and more about regret, about the questions that arise when one feels a big chapter has ended.
For him, art cannot change the world with a single stroke, but it can correct people's lives in small ways. Cinema, he says, has a mystery that cannot be fully explained. It is precisely this mystery, among ghosts, monsters, memories and darkness, that continues to keep his passion for film alive. /GazetaExpress/
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