Guillermo del Toro
I think that evil is a spiritual engine in our world, our lives, our universe, that functions in order to create good.
I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.
I have said no to many, many Day of the Dead projects in the past, about 10 or 15, because every time I heard a take it was from someone who didn't know the celebration.
I think we live in a culture that is actually hedging all of it towards comfort and immediacy, things that scare me. All the things that they sell us as a way of life scare me.
It is unnatural to deny effort, adversity, and pain.
I believe that we will elevate and differentiate the discourse of cinema the more we discuss image creation in specific terms.
As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don't.
I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.
'Crimson' is written in a very particular style, and it's very precise in the way it graduates into a gothic romance. The souls that will connect with it will connect deeply.
I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.
I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.
Any actor I admire and enjoy working with - Sergi Lopez as the bad guy in 'Pan's Labyrinth,' or the little girl who played young Mako in 'Pacific Rim,' it makes no difference - I like actors with a very strong centre.
Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.
I'm having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.
I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it's a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.
I was very attracted to doing 'The Wolverine' in Japan because that's my favorite chapter in the story of Wolverine. But I'm not a superhero guy.
I'd love to come back as the most annoying ghost ever.
I love to travel, anywhere in the world. Wherever it is... India... Tibet... wherever. I'll go anywhere.
The problem with 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark' was that it was designed to be a PG-13 movie. It was literally a horror movie for a younger generation. I was trying to do the film equivalent of teenage, young adult readers, and when they gave it an R rating, the movie couldn't sustain an R.
I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.
It's so much easier when you're promoting a movie that you like!
I have a schizophrenic career. I have 'Cronos' and 'The Devil's Backbone' on one hand, and then I have 'Blade 2' and 'Mimic' on the other.
As a craftsman, I bust my butt as much for 'Blade 2' as I do for 'Devil's Backbone.'
The movie has to have some essence where you connect with it. The reason I'm doing 'Blade 2' and not 'Alien 4' is because I connect with the universe of 'Blade.' I don't connect with the universe of 'Alien.' Besides, I already did 'Alien 4': It's called 'Mimic.'
What is scary to me is silly to somebody else. CG isn't scary to me. It's like comedy - comedy and horror are quite similar, in that there'll always be somebody who'll say, 'I don't think that was funny.' And it's the same with things that are meant to be scary.
I'm very grateful of my life and my career and the movies I've been able to make.
As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I'm not directing.
The reason there's a 'Hellboy 2' is not because the studios were passionate about the first one; it's because the numbers made sense.
'Hellboy 1' was such a huge, huge overperformer on Blu-ray and ancillary markets. It was one of the first movies on Blu-ray; it has multiple editions. All the ancillary markets overperformed everywhere. And the second one did good on all ancillary markets, which now do not exist.
I love producing other people's work, but presenting is a very serious business. It's a marriage.
I love what many of my contemporaries are doing, especially people like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, P. T. Anderson, and Alfonso Cuaron.
I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don't think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.
If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call 'Hollywood' movies and truly bizarre, what you would call 'arthouse' movies.
It's never hard to cast kids; it's only ever hard to direct them.
I love the entire 'Constantine' mythology, the 'Dead Man' mythology, the Alex Holland 'Swamp Thing' mythology.
When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.
Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.
I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It's shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.
When I was a child, I was raised Catholic. Somewhere, I didn't fit with the saints and holy men. I discovered the monsters - in Boris Karloff, I saw a beautiful, innocent creature in a state of grace, sacrificed by sins he did not commit.
If you give an actor a green screen, the shot may work, but that green screen will not inspire you on the set as a director or as an actor.
I'm fortunate enough that my personal life falls into whack with my professional life. My kids love visiting the sets; they love the monsters.
Making a film is like raising a child. You cannot raise a child to be liked by everyone. You raise a child to excel, and you teach the child to be true to his own nature. There will be people who'll dislike your child because he or she is who they are, and there will be people who'll love your child immensely for the very same reason.
I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
I was directing before I knew it was called that.
To me, the thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are. That's the greatest act of love because you wash away imperfections.
If you want to know how to handle a crew, it's great to be part of a crew.
TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.
I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.