Guillermo del Toro
I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn't define you until the end... The way you end your story is important. It's important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.Collection: Morning
I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.Collection: Attitude
You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.Collection: Funny
I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.Collection: Death
For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.Collection: Movies
I would have killed to do 'Beauty And The Beast' at Warners, which went away. I would have killed to do 'The Witches' at Warners that went away. God knows there are many, many of them. All I can do is diligently do the screenplay, diligently do the design work, deliver a budget, and then await a decision.Collection: Design
There is beauty and humility in imperfection.Collection: Beauty
Ultimately, you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It's an impulse that's intrinsic to the Mexican character.Collection: Death
I truly try to create beauty and reflection and all of that as conscientiously and judiciously and minutely as I can.Collection: Beauty
There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.Collection: Art
I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.Collection: Truth
Shooting a horror story with kids, I always explain really simply. They may be scary to watch, but they're a lot of fun to shoot. You know, the kids have a great time shooting these movies. Whether you let them watch it is another matter.Collection: Movies
To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.Collection: Movies
More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.Collection: Movies
The great thing about Roald Dahl is he tackled the big questions of life without any fear of being shocking or brutal, because he knew the kids could take it.Collection: Fear
Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.Collection: War
There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.Collection: Movies
In Mexico, you're close to death all the time.Collection: Death
When I did 'Mimic,' it was such a difficult experience to try to make. Believe it or not, I did try to make a really adult giant bug movie. And then, in the course of the process, it kind of died a horrible death and gave birth to the movie that exists now, which now, in retrospect, I like. But it's not the movie I set out to do.Collection: Death
I had nightmares as a kid. As an adult, I have very prosaic dreams.Collection: Dreams
Everything I do, I do it with the hope that people will watch it more than twice. Whether it's 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Pacific Rim' or the opening of 'The Simpsons,' I do it with that hope.Collection: Hope
The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.Collection: Movies
I have a lot of artifacts - books on witchcrafts and talismans. I have a big, big collection of original occult books from the 1800s and 1700s, and some of the oldest books on apparitions and vampires. All original printings. It's not that I'm a crazy believer, I just find it to be amazing research material.
I wrote a screenplay for 'The Witches,' which Alfonso Cuaron was producing, but we couldn't get it made! The studio just wouldn't greenlight that movie. It's my favorite Roald Dahl book, 'The Witches,' because I grew up with my grandmother a lot of the time, and the relationship between the boy and the grandmother speaks volumes to me.
I'm a huge David Fincher fan, and to me, 'Zodiac' is a masterpiece. I re-watch that movie all the time.
You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
Well I think effects are tools.
In that, Blade 2 is very much like a rock concert... if it's too loud, you're too old.
I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others.
I started when I was eight, doing super 8 films.
I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.
There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which are a new breed we've created.
It's only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism.
The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.
They're getting more and more experience on what to expect, and the Hellboy audience is such a faithful and fanatic audience as I am, and you have to really be very open about what you do.
I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.
I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.
I think Hollywood has a habit of developing 100 times more than they actually shoot.
I hope to continue doing TV, and I think that what I've learned on 'The Strain' will come in handy.
I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.
A lot of Mexican Catholic dogma, the way it's taught, it's about existing in a state of grace, which I found impossible to reconcile with the much darker view of the world and myself, even as a child.
Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.
Love is love. And it's much better than hatred and fear.
Every Sunday on Channel 6 in Guadalajara, where I lived, they dedicated most every Sunday to black-and-white horror films and sci-fi. So I watched them. I watched 'Tarantula.' I watched 'The Monolith Monsters.' I watched all the Universal library.
I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books - thousands - and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements - the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists - you know, that I consult before I start every movie.
I want to live in a space that I designed, that is for me.
I have a very promiscuous relationship with all my objects.
I'm always very, very careful when the movies happen and where they happen.
The creature from the black lagoon - I drew that creature almost every day, two, three times a day, for probably my first ten years of life, you know.