Guillermo del Toro

John Bankston

Description

Guillermo del Toro began experimenting with film and horror movie makeup as a boy growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico. He founded his own special effects company, Necropia, in 1985 and made his first movie, Cronos, in 1993 before going on to make The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, Pacific Rim, award winner The Shape of Water, and other beloved horror, fantasy, and science fiction films. Guillermo del Toro tells the story of this filmmaker's life and career, from the violence he witnessed as a child in Guadalajara to the crimson peak of his success.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Film director
• Mexican
• Contemporary history
• Screenwriter
• Producer
• Author
• Contemporary
• Oscar

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438195520
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Guillermo del Toro
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Contents Chapters A Titanic Rescue Childhood Shadows Finding a Voice Del Toro s Backbone Transformations Blockbuster! Taking the Reins The Water Takes Shape Support Materials Timeline Bibliography Further Resources About the Author Learn More About The Rise and Fall of Miramax Literary Influences Artists Influenced by the Spanish Civil War The del Toro Museum
Chapters
A Titanic Rescue
Guillermo del Toro needed one million dollars. He didn’t have it. 
After over ten years of hard work, he was realizing his dream. He had been a special-effects makeup designer and a TV director. In Mexico City, he started Necropia, a special effects company. “Producers would call me on Friday and say, ‘We need a monster on Tuesday,’” he explained to The New Yorker in 2011. 
In 1993, using effects from his company, he directed Cronos . The story of an elderly man who becomes a vampire and the granddaughter who still cares for him, the movie won the Grand Prize during Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival. It won nine Ariel Awards (considered Mexico’s Academy Awards). It also left him deeply in debt. 
Cronos ’s success led to his next job. An American film company hired him to direct a $30 million movie about killer bugs. 

Cronos , directed by del Toro, 1993.
Source: Newscom: PRIME FILMS / Album
Mimic was very different from del Toro’s first film. At $2 million, Cronos had the highest budget for a Mexican movie. Mimic ’s budget was 15 times greater. While his first film had several well-known actors, Mimic ’s lead was recent Academy Award winner, Mira Sorvino. Yet as he directed the movie thousands of miles from home in Toronto, Canada, del Toro’s greatest challenge was working with a man other directors had nicknamed “Harvey Scissorhands.”

Del Toro promoting his first feature film, Cronos , which was released in 1993.
Source: Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara
As a film studio, Miramax had a reputation for producing movies that won awards and made a lot of money. Few movies do both. As Miramax’s head, Harvey Weinstein had a reputation for interfering. Top directors get “final cut.” This lets them edit their movie the way they want. Besides not getting final cut, del Toro endured visits to the set from Harvey’s brother, Bob, who told him over and over that the movie wasn’t scary. He hired someone else to direct the scenes he wanted.
“I often say that working on Mimic taught me one of the few words that the English and the Spanish languages have in common, which is ‘no,’” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2007. “I came in being a little too open because I came from a filmmaking background where you are open to suggestions and candid about things. I was shocked to find out that it was not that way (in Hollywood).”
Only Sorvino and her boyfriend, Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, kept del Toro from getting fired. Over twenty years later, he still considered it his worst experience directing a movie. When Mimic was released in 1998, he was enduring a real-life drama.
His father Federico del Toro was kidnapped in Guadalajara, Mexico. “My older brother called me and said, ‘They took him,’ and he didn’t need to explain. I knew what he meant,” Del Toro told the Reporter . “We received the phone call right away and were instructed not to contact the police.”
Kidnappers in Mexico often targeted the rich and the famous. Because of Crono ’s success, Del Toro was well known. He wasn’t rich. The money he’d earned directing Mimic went to paying off Cronos ’ debt.
In 2015, he admitted on Twitter that while in Guadalajara he was offered another option. “During the captivity of my father—a time of enormous pain—two policemen came to see us. They had two proposals. The first was: For $5,000, they would give us a room with the kidnappers, tied to a chair. They would provide a lead pipe and 15 minutes alone. The second one: For $10,00 they would make sure that—when the raid happened—all the kidnappers would get killed and we’d get [photos of it]. We said no. Absolutely no to both. We felt hatred and pain but could not be a part of the cycle of violence.” 
Instead, he got in touch with a good friend he'd first met at a Fourth of July party in 1992. His name was James Cameron.  
Cameron Comes Through
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Terminator movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger helped make their director James Cameron a household name. After meeting del Toro in 1992, he was one of the first people to watch Cronos . “He’s helped with every one of my movies, except Mimic …” he told Uproxx in 2014. “I’ve been with him in the editing room for True Lies , Titanic , Avatar , all of them....He’s a great friend and an even more extraordinary filmmaker.”
Del Toro had even spent a few months in Cameron’s California guest house. He was the first person the director called after learning about the kidnapping. Cameron was in Mexico working on The Titanic , which would be come his most successful movie to date—earning over two billion dollars worldwide.
Cameron didn’t hesitate. He hired a professional negotiator to help ensure Federico del Toro’s safe return. Later, Cameron went to the bank with Guillermo and withdrew one million dollars. The ransom was paid. Just over two months after being kidnapped. Federico del Toro was released. 
Despite the positive outcome, the director doubted he would ever move back to his birthplace. It was just too dangerous, not just for him but for his loved ones. “I cannot go back to Mexico as a director because of the kidnapping of my father. A film is a highly visible venture, and I can't risk it,” he told Time magazine in 2011. “Every day, every week, something happens that reminds me that I am in involuntary exile... As a man, the kidnapping defined my life.” 
The tragedy changed Guillermo del Toro’s point of view. So did the experience working on Mimic . Life was uncertain. It just wasn’t worth it directing a movie for a company that didn't agree with his vision. Instead, he developed his next movie, The Devil's Backbone , from an idea he’d had in film school. It would cost less than $5 million. He would have creative control. Like most of his movies, it was inspired by the nightmares of his childhood. 
Childhood Shadows
When Guillermo del Toro was twelve years old, he thought he heard a ghost. His favorite uncle had died. Not long before, he’d made his nephew a promise. “He said to me, ‘When I die, I’ll come back and let you know if there's something out there,’” Guillermo told Cineaste magazine in the spring of 2002. “While I was in his room, watching TV,  I started hearing him sigh, really sadly... it was an honest-to-goodness disembodied voice floating about half a foot from my face...I left, and I never came back to that room. But to this day, I’m absolutely certain I investigated everything with enough calm to tell you that was a ghost. That was a voice. It was not an air draft.”
The darker side of life and death already fascinated the future director. Before he turned five, he’d visited Disneyland and seen a dead body. Both deeply affected him. 
“I can still remember the red car passing us on the highway,” Guillermo remembered in an October 2010 interview with the Times . “Twenty minutes later we hit some traffic ... then we saw the upturned car and a guy crying by the road. My father said, ‘Look somewhere else.’ But I didn’t do that....The corpse was neck down..its head was somewhere else, tangled up in a barbed-wire fence...I worried a lot about death.”
Named after his favorite uncle, Guillermo del Toro Gómez was born on October 9, 1964 in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. It was plagued by violence. In 1968, his father, Federico del Toro Torres, won the lottery. He used his winnings to buy a car dealership, moving his family into a stark white, modern mansion. The larger house meant more dark corners to explore. His great aunt helped him make a stuffed werewolf toy. He collected live snakes and rats. He dug through his father's gentlemen’s library of books, drawing inspiration from a medical textbook. Although he described his father in a New Yorker interview as “the most unimaginative person on earth,” his mother, Guadalupe Gómez, wrote poetry. She also used tarot cards to predict the future. 
“She allowed things to exist in the house that made me more creative and stimulated,” he admitted to the The Orange County Register in 1997. “When I was about eight-years old, she bought me an encyclopedia of film. She allowed me to keep all my horror magazines; it wasn’t like a house where they said, ‘Oh, what are you reading? Throw it in the trash!’ She was very permissive.”
His parents were often gone. His grandmother took care of him. A strict Catholic, she believed in evil spirits. She also thought Guillermo’s growing obsessions were a sign he was possessed by them. “My grandmother exorcised me twice herself,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2007, describing the ritual to rid someone evil spirits. “The second time she did it, she was throwing holy water at me, and I was laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. She thought I was laughing at the holy water, so she got even more scared. She started yelling, ‘Don't laugh at the holy water!’” 
Still, he enjoyed more freedom at home than at school. “I was sent to [Catholic] Jesuit school…” he told the Times in 2010. “The teacher had the right to cane you.” By then he was already escaping the real