Guiller­mo del Toro: ​‘I like the Kubrick films that nobody likes’

At the cli­max of Guiller­mo del Toro’s Hell­boy II: The Gold­en Army, the direc­tor con­ducts a pro­longed fight scene atop a sys­tem of giant gold­en cogs. He is fas­ci­nat­ed by cogs. And machin­ery. He says so in inter­views. So, from this we can infer an attrac­tion to the ratio­nal, a guy who is becalmed by mechan­i­cal log­ic. And yet, his movies are packed full of mon­sters, ghouls, appari­tions and crea­tures of unspec­i­fied origin.

From this we can also infer an attrac­tion to the irra­tional, a man who sees a world that exists beyond the phys­i­cal realm. This ide­o­log­i­cal con­flict is what earns del Toro his sta­tus as one of the greats. His lat­est film, Crim­son Peak, again com­bines his abid­ing obses­sions, a sto­ry about a macabre clash between the past and the future, moder­ni­ty and archaism, the realm of the liv­ing and that of the dear­ly departed.

Crim­son Peak sees young, bespec­ta­cled damsel, Edith (played by Mia Wasikows­ka), roman­ti­cal­ly drawn to the Eng­lish bound­er and upstart min­ing mag­nate, Baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hid­dle­ston), who is nev­er seen with­out his unsmil­ing sis­ter, Lucille (Jes­si­ca Chas­tain), by his side. The three depart from the beat­ing heart of the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion in Boston to the fog­gy hills of Cum­bria, Eng­land and a dilap­i­dat­ed coun­try house known by the locals as ʻCrim­son Peak’ on account of the blood-red clay upon which it sits and into which it is slow­ly subsiding.

Del Toro has namechecked a num­ber of Goth­ic lit­er­ary mas­ter­works as his touch­stones: ​‘Jane Eyre’, ​‘Wuther­ing Heights’ and ​‘Rebec­ca’. It also com­pletes an unof­fi­cial tril­o­gy of movies which began with 2001’s The Devil’s Back­bone and con­tin­ued with 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth. LWLies chat­ted with del Toro back in August when he was putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on Crim­son Peak.

LWLies: You are over in LA now. Are you fin­ish­ing up the film, or is it all done?

Del Toro: No, no, I fin­ished the movie lit­er­al­ly last week. It’s a movie that I have been fin­ish­ing more than any oth­er movie I’ve ever done.

Do you have a finite amount of time where you can actu­al­ly pol­ish a movie?

Well, nor­mal­ly I’m deliv­er­ing the movie in the nick of time, like a few weeks before it opens. But in this instance, because I fin­ished shoot­ing in Octo­ber 2014, I’ve had almost a year to tweak it and I spent more time in the edit suite cor­rect­ing the colour of the movie and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and doing the final touch­es. So I became quite obsessed with the movie. It became almost unhealthy.

Were we to see the unadorned footage that you shot com­pared to the fin­ished prod­uct, would there be any­thing recog­nis­able there?

Oh yes, yes. Lis­ten, the fact is the raw footage looked gor­geous because I always say, the look of a movie is a table of four legs. One is of course cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but the oth­er three are wardrobe, set pro­duc­tion design and direc­tion. And I think they are indi­vis­i­ble. You can­not have great cin­e­matog­ra­phy with a bad set. Or ter­ri­ble cos­tumes. We designed the sets and we specif­i­cal­ly designed where the win­dows were going to be, what the light sources were going to be, and the colour palette of the walls. So the raw footage looks very beau­ti­ful, but then we go through months and months of tweak­ing because I worked with two colours that are very elu­sive: one is gold, and the oth­er one is cyan. And you know, if you missed the mark a lit­tle on cyan, you’ve gone to com­plete blue or com­plete green. If you miss the mark with gold, you end up with red­dish orange, or you end up with green­ish yel­low. I don’t know why my life has been like this, but I always work in those two colours and it takes months to get them to the place I want them to be.

Are there dig­i­tal cam­eras that cap­ture those colours to your satisfaction?

Yes. But what I find is that if you’re aim­ing for, say, the look of a more con­ven­tion­al his­tor­i­cal peri­od movie, it would be much bet­ter to do it with film, because it tends to be soft­er and it lends itself real­ly beau­ti­ful­ly to sort of pas­tel hue, the desat­u­ra­tion and stuff like that. I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing a lot with over sat­u­ra­tion in the colours. Pacif­ic Rim was all about that I want­ed to make the colours in this movie very sat­u­rat­ed. In some instances, my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and I jok­ing­ly said, ​‘Let’s try to get Tech­ni­col­or on cam­era’. We were using lights that were very magen­ta on the set and oth­er were very pur­ple, and I want­ed to make a movie that didn’t feel desat­u­rat­ed or pas­tel like most peri­od movies. And there­fore, dig­i­tal was the way to go with this.

I’m not quite sure how I would describe this form of cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but the inte­ri­or scenes recalled those in Kubrick’s Bar­ry Lyndon.

Yes, you’re absolute­ly right in the sense that I talked about what is called one source light­ing, which means that most of the light in an inte­ri­or scene came from a large win­dow. And you get this full, almost painter­ly effect.

It looks stunning.

We also did a lot of shots by can­dle­light, but with the advan­tage of hav­ing to force the opti­cal, or not hav­ing to force depth of field like they did with Bar­ry Lyn­don. For exam­ple, one scene that cre­ates a beau­ti­ful atmos­phere is in the ball­room, the waltz scene. We did it most­ly with the exist­ing lights, we worked with a light fix­ture that was very large and mount­ed above the eye-line of the cam­era. And that was it. It was almost like the con­di­tions of cre­at­ing a painting.

Get LWLies 61: the Crim­son Peak issue

The waltz sequence, which involves a can­dle not being blown out, even maybe a direct ref­er­ence to Bar­ry Lyndon.

It was, it was. Curi­ous­ly, it’s one of my favourite Kubrick films. I like the Kubrick that nobody likes. I love Eyes Wide Shut and Bar­ry Lyndon.

I think it’s cool to like Eyes Wide Shut now.

Oh, that’s very good. I feel like the guy who wore bell bot­tom pants long enough that they came back around. But I love them because I think the sense of space and time that Bar­ry Lyn­don exhibits is unique, and I did a detailed study the fab­rics and the colour. Crim­son Peak tries to tell the sto­ry of a girl who is born at the edge of moder­ni­ty. Boston is the most elec­tri­fied city in the world. They have light­bulbs, they have steam trains, they have every­thing that is mod­ern. That feel­ing of moder­ni­ty is cre­at­ed by the first part of the movie being colour cod­ed into gold, sepia and tobac­co. And it’s real­ly sat­u­rat­ed, rich and gold­en. She trav­els to the Old World, which is all this very creepy cyan and green­ish gold. That jour­ney is told, for me, as much through the visu­als as it is through the writing.

When you’re watch­ing movies by oth­er direc­tors, do you find that they are as attuned to the impor­tance of some­thing like colour as you seem to be?

A lot of peo­ple are! There is a thing that I jok­ing­ly call ​‘eye pro­tein’, which is not to cre­ate eye can­dy but to cre­ate some­thing with a lit­tle sub­stance to it that helps tell the sto­ry. I was watch­ing a movie with one of my daugh­ters and I start­ed to tell her, ​‘Pay atten­tion to how the straight lines and the colour blue’, because I knew the movie a lit­tle bit and she start­ed see­ing it and she said, ​‘Oh my god’, that’s red and now it’s, she start­ed read­ing it as a paint­ing and enjoy it on anoth­er lev­el. You know, my two kids are very good illus­tra­tors and we have huge dis­cus­sions about colour and com­po­si­tion when we watch the movies. Some peo­ple are very con­scious of that colour, how they’ve used it to tell the sto­ry, and how they use it to advance the sto­ry dra­mat­i­cal­ly. But what is very beau­ti­ful is to tell them, ​‘Look, sto­ry­telling can be done in a pure­ly visu­al fash­ion’. One colour that I am very par­tic­u­lar about is obvi­ous­ly the red, because the only thing that, all the reds in the movie, which are very very few, all lead to the same past, to the ghosts, to the crime and the pas­sion and the secrets of Crim­son Peak.

How did you decide on the shade of red in Crim­son Peak? To me it looked to me like ​‘Ham­mer red’.

That’s a great way of nam­ing it, because Ham­mer did use a par­tic­u­lar colour of blood that has a lot of pho­to flu­id liq­uid in it. It was one of the nicest bloods ever put on film. And because of Ham­mer being what they were, they used it lib­er­al­ly. I would loved to have called it that, but we did have 30 swatch­es of colour, and we made sure that we could repli­cate the colour dig­i­tal­ly, phys­i­cal­ly and using dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als. Some of the floor need­ed to be paint­ed with wax­es and some of the liq­uids need­ed to ooze, so we found a way to repli­cate it every­where, and red is a real­ly bru­tal colour because its very vora­cious. Even the most sub­tle red burns and oblit­er­ate every­thing else. I mean, I did a movie, two movies, where the pro­tag­o­nist was a red demon. I do know how vora­cious this colour is.

It’s weird actu­al­ly, watch­ing this, I was think­ing that it’s so rare to see red in a movie that’s not in a sym­bol­ic fashion.

It need­ed to be in the right com­bi­na­tion, because red, as you know is nev­er pure­ly red. You can have a bluish red, orange red, red that is more rust colour, and we made many mix­es and test­ed it under every light. When you put red under a blue light, it’s going to become sort of brown­ish. And we need­ed to find ways to light the ghosts so the red would remain. It was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment. I was try­ing to make that red the past. To have that past seep through the floor, seep through the snow and reveal its true nature. Crime nev­er stays hid­den in clas­sic romance.

Do you see this as the first part of a tril­o­gy that start­ed with The Devil’s Back­bone and con­tin­ued with Pan’s Labyrinth?

It is very much of a piece with them. I want­ed to try and do an adult movie in Eng­lish, because after doing Mim­ic, I decid­ed I would do my pulp, youngish, light movies in Eng­lish and do adult stuff in Span­ish. Because I had such a bad expe­ri­ence doing that movie. I hon­est to god was hop­ing to make a great, giant insect movie and it was very dis­ap­point­ing to find out that the stu­dio had oth­er plans. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for me with Leg­endary and Uni­ver­sal, they gave me cre­ative free­dom and they just said, ​‘look we got to stay on a bud­get because we don’t want you to make it incred­i­bly expen­sive.’ So we were very smart and very fru­gal with how we made the movie look big­ger than it real­ly is.

Talk­ing of Mim­ic, on the cred­its it says that this was co-writ­ten by Matthew Rob­bins. Is this the first time you guys have col­lab­o­rat­ed since that movie?

No, we actu­al­ly have co-writ­ten about 10 screen­plays or so. And we’ve been col­lab­o­rat­ing on things have not got­ten made, or we co-wrote a movie we pro­duced called Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. I love Matthew and he’s a dear friend. And we wrote this in 2006, and very much did is for our­selves. And you know, I just want­ed to embrace Goth­ic romance which is a side of film­mak­ing that I don’t see enough any­more. I real­ly miss that genre. It’s a very cagey genre because if you go expect­ing pure romance, there’s a lot of human and emo­tion­al dark­ness in it. But if you go expect­ing a straight hor­ror movie, it’s more atmos­pher­ic than it is pure­ly scary. It’s a genre that is hard­er to market.

I found to be an over­whelm­ing­ly sad and melan­cholic film. Is it maybe too sad to be a hor­ror movie? And do you feel hor­ror movies can be sad?

Most of the sto­ries that I have direct­ed or pro­duced, be it The Devil’s Back­bone or Pan’s Labyrinth or The Orphan­age or many, many oth­ers, for me, the beau­ty of hor­ror is that the movies talk about loss. And they are poet­ic about that loss. The end­ing of The Orphan­age or the end­ing of Pan’s Labyrinth make it sort of beau­ti­ful. But with Crim­son Peak, the end­ing is very sad and beau­ti­ful, but is not at all a hap­py end­ing. I was real­ly affect­ed when I was young by a phrase by Hen­ry James, where he said that, you know, ghosts are ulti­mate­ly the past. And a Goth­ic romance is about how you are paral­ysed and you can­not move into the future unless you can solve the past. And I thought it was a very smart analy­sis, and of course the past is about things that you have lost. It’s not things that are with you, real­ly. And I want­ed to make the movie a very melan­cholic movie where even if you make the vil­lains ter­ri­fy­ing and you real­ly make them do hor­ri­ble things, you almost – if I’ve done my job right – love them, you almost feel for them.

I think this is your most trag­ic movie.

Yeah, because the movie is about love. I mean, I know this sounds sil­ly to ver­balise, but for me the movie is about many types of love. The love of a father, which is very pos­ses­sive, even if it’s well inten­tioned. I think that the love of the moth­er and the father of Thomas and Lucille, which is hor­ri­fy­ing, and is encap­su­lat­ed by that scene where Lucille has the mono­logue about her moth­er feed­ing the por­ridge to Edith. Or the love of Lucille for Thomas, which is suf­fo­cat­ing and then the love of Edith, which is almost all-for­giv­ing and ulti­mate­ly beautiful.

It’s blind.

It is blind. In most Goth­ic romances, the dark brood­ing hero is proven inno­cent of all the charges. And I want­ed very much to make a movie where he is guilty, he’s com­plic­it. And yet, the love is still there. You can still love that per­son. And for me the idea of the movie is what Lucille says: ​‘Love makes mon­sters of us all’.

Pacif­ic Rim is very affir­ma­tive about love and the union of souls. This is almost the oppo­site side of the coin. It’s very pessimistic.

It’s curi­ous because what I want­ed to do, and you can see me quot­ed on pre-pro­duc­tion inter­views say­ing this, I want­ed to make an anti-roman­tic romance. I want­ed to make a movie about a girl becom­ing her own per­son. I want­ed to show that she doesn’t need a dash­ing hero and that she doesn’t need to depend on love to be strong. And it’s very much a movie where I try to take the damsel in dis­tress through all the dis­tress I can until she becomes a damsel no more and starts kick­ing ass. I want­ed to make a movie about but­ter­flies and moths, where the but­ter­fly is seen as a beau­ti­ful, use­less lit­tle object, but frag­ile lit­tle but­ter­fly turns out to be made of steel.

I can’t recall ever see­ing a char­ac­ter like Lucille in your films before.

Well, I nev­er loved a bad guy as much as I love Lucille. That’s the real­i­ty. I adore Lucille. She is my favourite char­ac­ter of the movie in many ways. Because I under­stand her point of view. I know she’s hor­ri­bly wrong, but I can see her being a char­ac­ter that thought she was doing right. When Jes­si­ca and I, we always came to her through great sym­pa­thy and great love. There is a pas­sage in a Thomas Har­ris nov­el, I think it was ​‘Red Drag­on’, where he was talk­ing about a ser­i­al killer and he said, the rea­son that he kills her is because he is too shy to talk to his vic­tims. I thought that was real­ly inter­est­ing, because you always get a ser­i­al killer pre­sent­ed as super pow­er­ful, and I thought, isn’t it inter­est­ing that she is a shy girl. She’s actu­al­ly a dam­aged, a dog that has been whipped too many times. My heart goes to her and my heart goes out to Thomas. And I think a good Goth­ic romance needs you to fall in love with the bad guys, even more than the good guys. If you remem­ber Du Maurier’s ​‘Rebec­ca’, the pro­tag­o­nist doesn’t even have a name, and the most salient char­ac­ter that you remem­ber is Mrs Dan­vers, the house keeper.

I have nev­er read the nov­el of ​‘Rebec­ca’, but it’s prob­a­bly my least favourite Hitchcock.

It was the one Hitch­cock where the Selznick tam­pered with him, you know. Selznick real­ly got in the way of Hitch­cock doing a pure­ly Hitch­cock­ian film. But it has, I think, a strange attrac­tion for me. Now I think Hitch­cock does sort of an Amer­i­can Goth­ic, if you will. You think of Shad­ow of a Doubt you remem­ber Uncle Char­lie as the most salient char­ac­ter. In the same way, in Hitch­cock, the vil­lain is the key. You remem­ber Bruno in Strangers on a Train. I think that Hitch­cock was very influ­enced by the Goth­ic romance sen­si­bil­i­ty, beyond Rebec­ca and beyond Jamaica Inn. I think his love of Goth­ic romance was at work in his silent films too.

Even in Psy­cho and Noto­ri­ous, there are Goth­ic elements.

One hun­dred per cent. I mean the poi­son­ing of Ingrid Bergman, the whole crum­bling house in Psy­cho, and the fact that all Goth­ic romance needs to be tied to a build­ing. It’s key to rein­ter­pret Psy­cho as a piece of Goth­ic. And I think that’s what was fas­ci­nat­ing about his Amer­i­can career, that he was able to bring this very old world pulse to the telling of very mod­ern, Amer­i­can stories.

One of the things I don’t like about Rebec­ca is where it moves away from Joan Fontaine’s per­spec­tive about two-thirds in, and then you see the rest of the sto­ry from var­i­ous per­spec­tives. I like the fact that in Crim­son Peak it is all told from Edith’s perspective.

Yeah, I think that we cut away from Edith only two times, real­ly. But oth­er than that, it’s not a mys­tery where you’re going to find a post­mod­ern twist. Oh, they’re all dead! Or she was dead, and she’s a ghost! None of that. It’s a mys­tery in a very quaint, very clas­sic way. She’s going to need to deci­pher the clues and, dur­ing the course of the movie, the char­ac­ter of the ghosts, the way you see them, changes. Like they did in The Devil’s Backbone.

This film is more in the vein of Jean Cocteau, James Whale, Eyes With­out A Face, and all these more melan­choly fairy tale hor­ror films rather than some­thing that’s out-and-out bru­tal like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I’m more attract­ed to the visu­als of hor­ror than I am attract­ed to the trap­pings of hor­ror. I real­ly want to make movies where, hope­ful­ly, you under­stand that the dark­est and the bright­est thing we have is human­i­ty, and I feel that the only dif­fer­ence between a fairy­tale and a Goth­ic romance is that in a fairy tale you need to work with more extremes. Like the Cap­tain in Pan’s Labyrinth. He relates a lit­tle to Lucille, but he’s a much dark­er char­ac­ter, he’s much more vil­lain­ous. He takes pride in his brutality.

Do you think it’s because Lucille is a woman that you couldn’t make her as vile as the Captain?

Very much so. I think that fas­cism is very much a mas­cu­line expres­sion. Fas­cists are basi­cal­ly enam­oured with daddy’s dick, they are all so tak­en with being male. And it’s all about the strength of the many and uni­ty before a father­land. It’s real­ly quite creepy. And the soul of Lucille is ulti­mate­ly a soul I under­stand more. Lucille is self­less, where as I think fas­cism is an incred­i­bly ego­tis­tic cult. It is the cult of every­one being the supreme male. And fas­cists are not very nuanced, I find.

I can’t imag­ine the term sac­ri­fice would come up in fas­cism, unless it was some kind of blood sac­ri­fice of some­one else.

Most­ly involv­ing the sac­ri­fice of others.

Who doesn’t want to be sacrificed.

I come from a coun­try where that machis­mo is enact­ed in so many bru­tal ways everyday.

Dis­ney have late­ly been very suc­cess­ful with live action remakes of clas­sic Dis­ney movies. Things like Cin­derel­la and Alice in Won­der­land. Will you make one of these?

Well, I wrote and designed Beau­ty and the Beast for Warn­er Broth­ers, and it pains me that we are not able to do it, because it’s one of the few times I have been typ­ing and weep­ing at the same time. But, I’m also pur­su­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doing a stop-ani­ma­tion Pinoc­chio set dur­ing the rise of Fas­cism in Italy. I am active­ly pur­su­ing these things. But you know, the fact is, peo­ple ask, ​‘Why do you choose to do this over this?’ You don’t choose. A career most­ly is the clash between what you want to do and what you can finance. It was not easy to finance this movie. The mar­ket is by def­i­n­i­tion very con­ser­v­a­tive and it’s very hard to get them made. For exam­ple, for Crim­son Peak, I have to give off about 30 per cent of my salary, and change entire­ly the way that we approach the deal and make the movie. They gave me a hard line – they said this is the cut­off point of the bud­get and if you go beyond, it comes out of your pock­et. And I have to accept these terms. Where­as if we were mak­ing a super­hero movie, the terms would be much more relaxed. Or if we were mak­ing Crim­son Peak as a PG-13, they would have giv­en me more mon­ey. But I refused it. I felt the movie need­ed to be an adult movie.

What do you mean by ​‘adult movie’?

That it doesn’t deliv­er the gig­gle-gig­gle elbow nudg­ing thrills of a movie where you roar and you’re throw­ing pop­corn and grab­bing each other’s arms. It’s a movie that has a very beau­ti­ful but very dark soul. And I think it need­ed to be adult in its con­cerns. It is about adult emo­tions. Love has a dark side that needs to exist. And you need to accept it.

Have you ever found a sat­is­fy­ing def­i­n­i­tion of the term ​‘ghost’ in art, lit­er­a­ture or film? Some­thing that you find meaningful?

Well, I must say I’m very proud of the def­i­n­i­tion I cre­at­ed in The Devil’s Back­bone, where they say that ghost is an insect in amber, a thing left pend­ing, an awful sealed thing, you know. Like a pho­to­graph, like the loop of a movie. I also love very much the Nigel Kneale idea in that BBC movie The Stone Tape, where he says that basi­cal­ly they can be a loop record­ed by the house. And it’s very much Nigel’s the­o­ry where he says, whether it’s the min­er­als in the stone or the earth under­neath, a house can record some­thing and repeat it. And I think that’s a very inter­est­ing the­o­ry. I have expe­ri­enced two ghost encoun­ters in my life and con­trary to what peo­ple might believe, I’m real­ly a skep­tic. I don’t want to believe, and yet two times I have heard ghost­ly, dis­em­bod­ied voic­es, very, very clear­ly. And they were very scary at the time.

Can I ask when that was?

The most ter­ri­fy­ing one was in New Zealand. We were scout­ing loca­tions for The Hob­bit, and we came to a hotel in a place called Wait­o­mo, and I had read that there was an old hotel which had a haunt­ed room. It was off-sea­son, and the hotel was closed and they opened it just for me and my group of scouts. It was just eight peo­ple. And I fool­ish­ly said, ​‘Can I get the haunt­ed room?’ I got the haunt­ed room. And in the mid­dle of the night I heard a mur­der being com­mit­ted in the room. A woman shriek­ing for about five min­utes, hor­ri­ble blood cur­dling shrieks. And then a man sob­bing and sigh­ing with great regret. And I was not in the mid­dle of séance, and it wasn’t a stormy night. It was a very nice night and I was watch­ing The Wire on DVD. It was com­plete­ly inaus­pi­cious con­di­tions for a ghost apparition.

And it def­i­nite­ly wasn’t a ruse by the hotel owners?

Oh, no, the hotel own­ers were actu­al­ly very dis­in­ter­est­ed in us. Actu­al­ly, they were real­ly pissed off that we made them open the hotel.

As some­one who is inter­est­ed in this lit­er­ary world of ghosts and as some­one whose job it is to invent how peo­ple would react to a sit­u­a­tion like that, what was your reaction?

Well it last­ed for about a good five to 10 min­utes, and the cry­ing last­ed for anoth­er 10 min­utes. And I was able to actu­al­ly track the sounds to the bath­room. I tracked them to a vent above the toi­let which went down into he cel­lar. And when I heard it was com­ing from there, I very cow­ard­ly pro­ceed­ed to put my ear­phones and lis­ten to The Wire on DVD. I didn’t sleep at all that night.