Alfonso Cuarón and I, until we were in our twenties, every time we shot a piece of fiction, we would say, “I’m going to try this.” Like, I remember we were doing a TV series, and I had seen Scorcese’s Life Lessons with Nick Nolte [in the film New York Stories]. And it’s not that I had any rhyme or reason, but I said, “I’m going do a sequence with those chain dissolves he does so beautifully. I want to learn them!” That became the sole reason why I did that TV episode.
GUILLERMO AND ME
ALFONSO CUARÓN
IN THE LATE EIGHTIES, I had just directed my first gig for a television show called La Hora Marcada, a Mexican anthology series of horror stories modeled on The Twilight Zone.
I was waiting in the production office to have a meeting with the producer. I had just finished making a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King short story. Everybody had praised it, and I felt proud. I had painstakingly storyboarded it, and even though I was aware of its shortcomings, I felt it was better than the norm.
Across the waiting room there was this guy sitting on a sofa looking at me with a mix of curiosity and mischief. I immediately knew who he was, since I had heard so much about him. He was the special effects makeup artist from Guadalajara who had studied with Dick Smith; he had worked on designing corpses, mutilated hands, and bullet wounds for a couple of people I knew working in film. He loved his work and was always ready to lend a hand to a production in need. Everybody described him as smart, funny, and very, very strange.
Now he was smiling at me from across the waiting room.
“You’re Alfonso, right?”
“Yeah…? You’re Guillermo?”
“Yup. You directed that episode based on the Stephen King short story.”
“Yeah, you know it?”
“It’s a great story.”
And so we went on to praise King and embarked on one of the first of many lengthy conversations we were to have about literature, film, and art. We became excited—it was immediately clear that we shared the same eclectic taste, that we spoke the same language. Suddenly, out of the blue, he asked: “If the Stephen King story is so great, why did your episode suck so much?”
There was no malice in his statement, just an honest opinion. I burst out laughing. When I could finally speak again, I asked, “Why do you think that?” And he went on to explain, in a very eloquent and well-informed way, what he thought was wrong with my show. And he was right.
That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one which has provided insights into my work and life that have become invaluable.
Guillermo went on to direct episodes for the same TV show, and he did the prosthetics for my episodes. We were certain that we were doing amazing stuff. One day he discussed an idea he had for an episode. It was the story of a little girl living with her abusive alcoholic father and the child-eating ogre that was haunting her. He said that he wanted to design the ogre and that he would be too busy working on the prosthetics to direct, so he asked me to do so instead. I agreed, and Guillermo cast himself as the ogre, enduring his own prosthetics. We were very self-congratulatory about the end result, which everybody else also praised. We thought we’d achieved greatness.
Several years ago, Guillermo re-watched the episodes we directed for La Horn Marcada and later told me over dinner, in words that can’t be printed, how awful they all were—both his and mine. Once again, I’m sure he was right.
At that same dinner, he went on to tell me about an idea he’d had for his next film. It was a story very similar to the one he’d told me about many years before, with a little girl and a child-eating ogre. He went on to make that film, which he called Pan’s Labyrinth.
I think that when people ask me about the notebooks and why I use them, it’s because they are a record of those sorts of ideas. You can see where it started, but then it bounces to another idea, and then a third one comes up, and page by page you see an evolution.
MSZ: I came upon a note in the notebooks where you talk about the way you have to work with an actor to remove aspects of their initial performance in order to get it right. Comparatively, when you have an abundance of ideas, I imagine deciding which ones not to use is just as important as committing to some of them.
GDT: What you subtract is very important, as is what you leave in. For example, the mistake most people make when designing a monster is they literally put in everything they can think of that is scary. It’s like Homer Simpson designing a car in that Simpsons episode. “I want a giant cup holder, and I want a bubble where I can see 360!” And the car that comes out is horrible because it has everything he wants.
With an actor, it’s the same thing. You let the actor act first; you don’t give him much direction. I like the first or second take to be his. And you observe. A director is not dictating, he is observing. I think the best job you can do at directing can be achieved in ten words or less. You have to give the actor something to do—or something to not do—that’s very specific. “Don’t do that,” or “Do this.” That’s great direction.
But you always have to ask, “Why?” Always try to think about the opposite of your instinct. In between, you’ll find the direction for everything. Color, light, monsters, acting. The first instinct, and then the complete opposite instinct, and then you decide, “I’ll go with this.”
MSZ: At what point does one develop the courage to speak with one’s own voice?
GDT: Well, I think you need to be blind, a little bit. I mean, I think you need to be willfully ignorant.
For example, I had the opportunity to direct many times before Cronos. They would offer me—because they knew I shot TV—little exploitation movies to do, in the horror genre and all that. Alfonso Cuarón and I always had each other to persuade the other not to do that. Alfonso used to say, “Don’t do that. Wait. Do your own thing.” And vice versa, because Alfonso was a very famous first AD [assistant director] in Mexico and a very good director of TV. They offered him a lot of crap, and we were very good friends with an exploitation producer who was adored in Mexico.
I think it’s important that, when you make your choices, you always make them by instinct at the end of the day, and that you fuck up sometimes. I recently made a mistake, but I’ve got to go with it. Whatever happens, that’s my decision, you know?
MSZ: You don’t always succeed, but the goal is to find your truth.
GDT: That’s right; you don’t always succeed. But very often you find people that guide you. You’ve got to recognize that they are wiser in certain ways than you. They become teachers, or partners, or whatever. There are very smart people that are fiercely alone, and I admire them. But I don’t want to be them.
MSZ: There is also that interesting tension between a filmmaker and his or her audience where, to a certain extent, you have to give them what they want, but to really be an artist, you have to go beyond that in service of your vision.
GDT: I believe very much in screening for friends, really harsh friends, or screening for an audience but not asking them anything. Because you see how they react, you see what they like, you see what they don’t like. But I don’t believe in asking about their opinions afterward. You don’t have that relationship with any other art. You don’t say to Robert Louis Stevenson, “I don’t like Dr. Jekyll dying at the end. I think you should kill Hyde and go into the sunset with the girl.” I think it’s a very corrupt exercise.