Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro was born on October 9, 1964 and raised a devout Roman Catholic. Del Toro started making movies when he was eight years old. When he was 21, he created and produced his first short film by the name of Doña Lupe. Afterward, he dedicated his life to learning about and designing special effects and costuming for eight years. When he was done with this, Del Toro helped to co-found the Mexican Film Festival and he started his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

His movies draw on a wide variety of genres and topics, ranging from being something like the fantasy movies that he is well known for, such as El Labertino del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), to the movies that are based on comic books, such as Hellboy and Blade II.

Guillermo Del Toro is best known in recent years in the United States for his work on Pan’s Labyrinth, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2006 Academy Awards (losing to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others). Pan’s Labyrinth received this kind of attention due to the amazing cinematography, costume designs, and imaginative story telling that Del Toro made as the movie’s director and producer. It’s hard to imagine viewers not thinking of the image of the faun, or of “the Pale Man” who holds his eyes in the palms of his hands, when they remember Pan’s Labyrinth. But every image in the film is a stunning visual treat, like a Tim Burton movie but with gravitas.

Del Toro’s love of costume design and special effects is also apparent in some of the earlier movies in his career, such as Hellboy (2004). While much of the imagery comes from Mike Mignola’s original comic book, Del Toro gave Hellboy a darker edge to its surrealistic fantasy, a trait shared by Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s clear that Del Toro is fascinated by fantasy, comfortable with disturbing but beautiful visions. What’s interesting is that he can find these common elements in both action-oriented super-hero stories and thought-provoking historical fantasies.

Perhaps because of his distinctive vision, since the creation and release of Pan’s Labyrinth Guillermo Del Toro has received many offers to work costuming or directing a variety of films but has turned many of them down. The ones that he turned down ranged from the serious, such as One Missed Call, to family movies like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and even some in between, like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I am Legend. The reason that he turned all of these offers down was so that he could focus on writing and directing his newest release, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), a film that has been almost as financially successful as the original Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth combined. (He has agreed to direct the upcoming film version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit.) As disturbing as Del Toro’s visions may be, they definitely are finding their audience.

Jackson Smith
Film Club Co-President