“For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“There is beauty and humility in imperfection.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.”
― 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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“It is unnatural to deny effort, adversity, and pain.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’d love to come back as the most annoying ghost ever.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Most of the time – in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ or ‘Devil’s Backbone’ – I’m talking about my childhood.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are, all of us, agents of construction and agents of destruction.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy – none.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“’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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I started when I was eight, doing super 8 films.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else – whether they’re gay, Mexican, Jewish, black – and saying, ‘They are different than you. They’re the reason you’re in the shape you’re in. You’re not responsible.’ And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think the greatest giant insect movie ever made is ‘Them!’”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I had nightmares as a kid. As an adult, I have very prosaic dreams.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m not that interested in recreating reality. I’m interested in recreating an emotional truth.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Love is love. And it’s much better than hatred and fear.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You’re the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“There’s nothing more political than fantasy.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think looking is the essential act of loving. Brothers, fathers and sons, lovers, whatever. What you do when you love someone is look at that person as that person is.”
― 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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It’s shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Well I think effects are tools.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Mike Mignola’s ‘Hellboy’ was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft – like ‘Alien,’ which is almost an outer-space version of ‘At The Mountains Of Madness.’”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m a lapsed altar boy.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“When I was a teenager there was no video in my country. Betamax came to Mexico very slowly.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don’t see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“For Devil’s Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think that The Eye is a particularly Americanized take on horror.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“In that, Blade 2 is very much like a rock concert… if it’s too loud, you’re too old.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I was directing before I knew it was called that.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’d grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“It’s only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I think Hollywood has a habit of developing 100 times more than they actually shoot.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I hope to continue doing TV, and I think that what I’ve learned on ‘The Strain’ will come in handy.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“If you want to know how to handle a crew, it’s great to be part of a crew.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I want to live in a space that I designed, that is for me.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“In the case of ‘Shape Of Water,’ I want it to feel like a song. I wanted people to come out of the movie humming the movie.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I don’t think there is life beyond death. I don’t. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn’t do.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I have a very promiscuous relationship with all my objects.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m always very, very careful when the movies happen and where they happen.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I believe that we will elevate and differentiate the discourse of cinema the more we discuss image creation in specific terms.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’ve been going through immigration all my life, and I’ve been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I truly try to create beauty and reflection and all of that as conscientiously and judiciously and minutely as I can.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I loved when the superhero genre crosses with horror. Morbius. Those are the guys I gravitated towards. Blade. So for me, to be interested in doing a superhero movie, it would need to be on the dark side or a Jack Kirby property. Kamandi, Demon, Mr. Miracle – I love any Kirby.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“In Mexico, you’re close to death all the time.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I love to travel, anywhere in the world. Wherever it is… India… Tibet… wherever. I’ll go anywhere.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“It’s so much easier when you’re promoting a movie that you like!”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“As a craftsman, I bust my butt as much for ‘Blade 2’ as I do for ‘Devil’s Backbone.’”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.’”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I don’t think that Argentinian cinema is well-known outside Argentina the way it should be.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m very grateful of my life and my career and the movies I’ve been able to make.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I’m not directing.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“’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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I love producing other people’s work, but presenting is a very serious business. It’s a marriage.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I love what many of my contemporaries are doing, especially people like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, P. T. Anderson, and Alfonso Cuaron.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call ‘Hollywood’ movies and truly bizarre, what you would call ‘arthouse’ movies.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“It’s never hard to cast kids; it’s only ever hard to direct them.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I love the entire ‘Constantine’ mythology, the ‘Dead Man’ mythology, the Alex Holland ‘Swamp Thing’ mythology.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro
“I’m a huge David Fincher fan, and to me, ‘Zodiac’ is a masterpiece. I re-watch that movie all the time.”
― Guillermo del Toro
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