According to Guillermo Del Toro, the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir told his son – Jean Renoir, the film-maker – that a truly gifted artist should try to paint the same tree over and over again. “He said that the artist should never move on; he should just go back obsessively,” Del Toro says. “I really believe that you finish your life and no matter what you did or didn’t do, you ended up painting the same tree over and over again. I don’t think it’s a conscious decision; it’s a proclivity, a compulsion.”

This compulsion has shaped the 43-year-old film-maker’s career. He has followed two distinct paths: he’s earned numerous critical plaudits with his independent Spanish-language films, and he’s also battered the box office with a string of English-language studio pictures. Yet all Del Toro’s films stand as intensely personal stories, littered with recurring themes and symbols.

For his next project he’ll spend four years in New Zealand, where he embarks on an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkein’s classic The Hobbit, which will be produced by the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson. To many fans they form a dream pairing.

Whether it’s a comic-book action picture, such as Blade II or his pair of Hellboy movies, or one of his native-language films, such as The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth, the Mexican director invariably delves into alienation, displacement, and the divisive nature of ideology. All his characters inhabit a universe that is structured but uncaring.

“That’s what I love about fairytales; they tell the truth, not organised politics, religion or economics. Those things destroy the soul. That is the idea from Pan’s Labyrinth and it surfaces in Hellboy and, to some degree, in all my films.”

The 2006 Oscar-winning fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth melded the director’s passion for fairytale with a brutal, real-life scenario set in the Spanish Civil War, while in his latest film, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, he introduces folklore to his comic-book franchise. Here the demonic hero Hellboy must save the world from an underworld invasion, as the elf prince Nuada (played by the former Bros singer Luke Goss) summons his otherworldly minions and declares war on humankind.

The character of Hellboy first appeared in the early 1990s when the comic-book writer-artist Mike Mignola crafted a character that was born from a demon – hence his thick red skin and forked tail – and yet blessed with infinite goodness. Del Toro worked with Mignola to create the first Hellboy film in 2004 and the pair hope to complete a trilogy.

“Just as I constructed Pan’s out of the oldest forms of fairytale narrative, I think our new Hellboy film has the feeling of an old Celtic myth,” Del Toro explains. With characters such as King Balor and Prince Nuada, one can see the connection. “I am a real collector of mythology. It all started when I was young, with Hans Christian Andersen and The Arabian Nights.”

Like his Mexican film-making friends Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón, Del Toro was born to a middle-class family, and he says his overriding memory of childhood was his parents’ creaking bookshelves. He read avidly, digesting everything from Homer to Dumas. “By the time I was 7 I had read everything and started to buy my own books.”

His family were devout Roman Catholics – “I stopped believing in that in my early teens,” he smiles, “when I discovered masturbation and realised that it couldn’t be a sin!” – and while he railed against the strict doctrine, his creative pursuits continued unhindered. By the age of 21 he’d produced his first short film, Dona Lupa. He then worked as a make-up special effects designer before releasing his first full feature in 1993, Cronos, which won the Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and scooped nine Mexican Academy Awards.

His success, however, brought its own problems. In 1997 Del Toro’s father was kidnapped and held for ransom; he was recovered unharmed but the young director left Mexico and moved to LA, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. “I don’t even want to go back to film in Mexico,” he sighs. “My father’s kidnapping was very traumatic and one of the guys who kidnapped him is still at large. Sadly and selfishly, I would like my daughters to have a father.”

Of his Hobbit project, he says: “I’m trying to be faithful to what I read when I was young. That’s The Hobbit I’m serving. I cannot serve a Peter Jackson film. We also hope to bridge the trilogy. We will create an expansion of what lies in the four books and in a number of appendices. I’m not going to New Zealand for two years to do one movie. I’m going there for four years.” Despite the different trappings, he will still be painting the same tree. “Of course I will,’ he smiles. “It’s a proclivity, a compulsion.”

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is released on August 20 2008

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette