Guillermo del Toro

A friend of the other two great Mexican directors of the moment – ​​Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu –, the truth is that his very personal style has little to do with that of the other two. He defines himself as the ‘Mexican freak’, referring to his passion for comics and the fantastic genre, and should be compared in any case with other ‘geek’ directors, especially with the plump and bearded Peter Jackson , too. who shares with him many characteristics. To begin with, they are not mere professionals who adapt works like The Lord of the Rings and the Hellboy comic.to the cinema, but rather they are passionate about that material, who make a great effort to respect all the details to the millimeter so as not to betray the original. It’s no coincidence that fate brought them together in the adaptation of The Hobbit , where Del Toro will direct and Jackson will serve as executive producer and co-writer.

Guillermo del Toro Gómez was born on October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara (Jalisco). The most influential person in his childhood was his mother, a fervent Catholic, who cared a lot about giving him a good education. This explains why many objects related to religion appear in his films, and that as a general rule reference is always made to Catholicism – the hero of his film HellboyHe is Catholic, despite being a demon. From a very young age, del Toro was passionate about comics, movies, myths and folktales, and dark themes related to horror and monsters. When he was 8 years old, he had his room full of plasticine monsters that he modeled himself, and he wrote little horror plays to represent them at school. He was especially impressed by the British films of the Hammer production company, and those of the ‘giallo’ of the Italian director Mario Bava .

When he was studying at the Institute of Sciences in the city of Guadalajara, he realized that he had an enormous cinematographic vocation, and he began to shoot his own shorts, in Super 8. Shortly after, he studied makeup and special effects with Dick Smith, legendary makeup artist for movies like The Exorcist . Del Toro spent 10 years working as a special effects supervisor, eventually founding his own special effects company , Necronia, in the early ‘ 80s . sleepbut in the Mexican version, Del Toro made it a condition that he be allowed to direct an episode, and finally he was in charge of making three. Since then, he decides to dedicate his life to directing, and ends up making two shorts, Doña Lupe and Geometría , which have a certain international impact. He also shot the television feature films Con todo para llevar , Caminos de ayer and Invasión .

To launch his first feature film, Cronos, del Toro had to mortgage his house. “I told my wife that we had two options, either live with a roof and no film or live with a roof but with film,” Del Toro recalls. He had obtained a grant from the Mexican Film Institute, but this entity decided not to fully finance the film, because it was a gothic vampire story. When del Toro had finished the film, it was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, but his government was still not investing much in him, so they refused to pay for his ticket to go to France, and the filmmaker was on the verge of not being able to to go. There, he won the international critics award. The film follows in the footsteps of Jesús Gris, an antiques dealer who finds an ancient contraption in the shape of a golden insect. It was starred by the great Federico Luppi , andRon Perlman , who would become a kind of fetish actor, since he would later hire him again in several films.

Cronos attracted so much attention that he soon got offers to work in Hollywood movies. Although he was about to direct the fourth part of Alien, the eighth passenger , he finally made his debut in American cinema at the hands of the brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein , who hired him to shoot Mimic , with Mira Sorvinoinvestigating the existence of some creatures, which turn out to be evolved insects after some scientific experiments, and that live in the underground of the city. Del Toro thinks that the film could have been better for him, since he made an effort to focus on the description of the characters in the first section, and towards the end the producer demanded that he increase the dose of action and the persecutions, so the result was very different from what he had thought.

Since then, del Toro has made the decision to alternate Hollywood cinema with more personal projects. He obtained financing to shoot one of the latter in Spain, where Pedro Almodóvar ‘s production company financed him El espinazo del diablo , a failed film despite such brilliant images as that of the ghostly child. And then he returns to the United States, where he is in charge of Blade II , with a script as insubstantial as that of the first part of the saga, but which Del Toro knows how to make much more interesting, with his particular visual imagination. . In Hellboy he turns to actor Ron Perlman again, to adapt the comic created by Mike Mignola to the millimeter to the cinema .

Back in Spain he shot a second film again, Pan’s Labyrinth , with points in common with the previous one, since both have children and the backdrop of the Civil War. The filmmaker shines especially with this exploration of the relationship between fantasy and reality through the story of a girl who takes refuge from her harsh existence in her own magical universe, inhabited by the magical being alluded to in the title. He obtained six Oscar nominations, and finally won three statuettes (make-up, photography and artistic direction).

Del Toro sponsored El orfanato , Juan Antonio Bayona ‘s brilliant debut , and published the novel “Nocturna”, written jointly with Chuck Hogan . After Hellboy 2. The Golden Army , del Toro has moved to New Zealand, where he is preparing the adaptation of The Hobbit , along with Peter Jackson. And it is that with his family he spends long periods of time in the various countries where he shoots. He decided to leave Mexico after a dark episode: his father was kidnapped by some guys who wanted money, and he finally managed to get him released after paying a ransom. Del Toro is married to Lorenza Newton, his girlfriend since he was in high school, with whom he has two daughters who are passionate about his father’s work and who are often on set.