Mythical underworld beasts clash with the real-life monsters of fascism in
Guillermo del Toro’s new film. Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, a lonely
young girl caught up in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s
Labyrinth is the most ambitious work yet by the Mexican writer- director
of Cronos and Hellboy. Fusing historical drama with horror
film, magical realism with political allegory, Del Toro’s eighth film is
that rarest of hybrids: a fairytale for adults.
“A fable is a good way to address issues as opposed to addressing them purely
as a war movie in a big, selfimportant way,” says the 42-year-old director.
“To me, fascism is the moment when all your choices are removed. You are
given one single choice to align to, but the idea of the fable is that
choice is what makes you free. That’s a very simple parable for me, and the
best way to do that was a fairytale. There was something incredibly
attractive in creating a world full of creatures and monsters, but making
the human characters much more monstrous than them.”
This is not the first time Del Toro has used the Spanish Civil War as a
backdrop for a supernatural tale of childhood innocence. His 2001 ghost
story, The Devil’s Backbone, drew on the same historical
hinterland. Now a part-time resident of Madrid, the director grew up
besotted with Spanish literature, cinema and comics. The civil war brought
“a fascism that was agreed to be overlooked by the world”. This struck a
personal chord in Mexico, where exiled film-makers such as Luis Buñuel fled
Franco.
“Mexico is one of the few countries that, during the civil war period, was
politically supportive of the Republican side,” Del Toro says. “Many people
exiled from Spain to Mexico were extremely influential in the arts — actors,
directors, production designers. Many became good friends of mine growing
up. I heard things about the war that I didn’t read in For Whom the
Bell Tolls, heh heh! It was not a grand adventure of macho bravado. It
was a much more human, compelling, brutal and small drama.”
Most of the brutality in Pan’s Labyrinth is embodied in Captain
Vidal, played by Sergi López, who evolves from obsessively neat army officer
to bloodthirsty ogre. Some of his sadistic acts may border on pantomime
villainy, especially a graphic attack on two innocent hunters. But Del Toro
insists that this scene was based on verbatim accounts of incidents in the
civil war. “Fascism was not subtle in that era,” he says. “Now it’s subtle,
heh heh! But I don’t think Vidal is a cartoon. When he makes his speech of
what he believes in — a cleaner, younger, new Spain for his son to be born
in — I have seen people like that, who believe they are doing the right
thing. He is the darkest monster in the movie but I didn’t feel like shading
him with fake positive traits.”
Del Toro is admired for his rich visual style, drawing on a range of
influences from Symbolist painters and Victorian illustrators to pulp comic
books. But Pan’s Labyrinth is his most painterly composition
yet, its stylised studio setting at times recalling the work of Goya, Bosch
and even Picasso’s Guernica.
“The world in the movie is 100 per cent created,” he nods. “There is not a
single real location except the woods. All the rest was designed and created
in a matter for 12 weeks. I find myself, with each movie, more and more
inspired by paintings.”
As usual with Del Toro, the creature designs in Pan’s Labyrinth
took shape in the sketchbook he always carries with him. He brings it to our
interview, fingering its leather covers as we talk, bashfully awaiting an
invitation to show off his work. Inside are page upon page of beautifully
rendered beauties and beasts, part of a 300-page archive that spans his
entire film career. “Four hundred pages if I had the Cronos
one, which I gave away in a drunken stupor,” he sighs.
Besides its impressive visuals, Pan’s Labyrinth is also a highly
personal story for Del Toro. Like The Devil’s Backbone, it is
laced with autobiographical vignettes from his own childhood. This is no
sentimental journey but an emotionally charged Freudian frightfest.
“I made the movie about a child, but I always thought of it as an adult movie
in terms of both the reality and the fantasy being pretty dark,” Del Toro
says. “Because my imagination, growing up, was not all nice fairies and
unicorns and castles in the clouds. It was very dark imagination, and the
character of the girl is very much like I was as a kid. She has another
world but it is not necessarily very benign. She is not escaping, just
learning to cope the best she can.”
The roots of Del Toro’s macabre imagination lie in his own unhappy childhood.
He was born to an artist mother and car salesman father in 1964 and much of
his lonely childhood was spent in the care of a grandmother so
conservatively Catholic, Del Toro says, she “made Carrie’s
mother look like a liberal hippie”.
At Jesuit school he took beatings in the playground and picked bitter fights
with the priests over Catholic dogma. “It wasn’t a nice childhood. It was
not Dickensian by any means, but emotionally it was not the best time of my
life.”
Even as a wealthy and acclaimed film-maker, Del Toro’s adulthood has not been
free of horrors. In 1997 his father was abducted and held for 72 days, until
a ransom was paid. Fearing for his own safety, the director left Mexico soon
afterwards. He still has a house in Mexico, but mainly lives between Madrid
and Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.
“I’ve been in exile my entire life,” he laughs. “If I had my choice I would
live in Mexico, but I don’t have that choice because of security. We still
get threats. It’s not nice.”
All the same, Del Toro can afford to joke about these grim events. His first
bruising brush with a Hollywood studio on the 1997 thriller Mimic
was, he quips, even more painful than his father’s abduction. What went
wrong? He laughs. “Everything. When you start a movie, and the studio is
shooting another movie, that’s what went wrong. I was doing Mimic
and they were doing Alien 3½.”
Since then, Del Toro has maintained an arm’s-length relationship with
Hollywood, which he calls “the land of the slow no”. He directed the
comic-book blockbusters Blade II and Hellboy for major
studios, but brings more depth and emotional investment to his independent,
Spanishlanguage productions.
The forces that shaped Del Toro’s talent are clearly the same that scarred him
for life. He says he is haunted by “growing up in a Catholic, macho-oriented
culture when you want to read and write and paint”.
All of which may help to explain why Pan’s Labyrinth leaves such
a melancholy aftertaste, with a Gothic tone and solemn ending that would be
“unthinkable” in a mainstream Hollywood film. But of course, as Del Toro
well knows, not every fairytale has a happy ending.
Pan’s Labyrinth is on general release
