But I also think that critics are a genuine part of the art. As long as there has been art, there have been critics in some form or another. What I think is not genuine is to make the creation of art an open process.
MSZ: There’s a great line you wrote in the notebooks: “A critic is a man of whom you ask guidance, who instead offers you an opinion.”
GDT: In the process of creation, the one thing you’ve got to remember always is that if you ask for an opinion, no matter from whom, you’ll get one. So you’ve got to be very careful to be inclusive, but not to be so inclusive that you start listening to seventy-five versions of the same story. There’s always a different way of telling a story.
So, as a storyteller, one thing you want to say is, “I’m locking into this track until I’m proven wrong.” Or, “Life is a labyrinth and death is the only way out: the solution.” A labyrinth is a transit. You turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, but you will reach the center. In a maze, you get lost. A labyrinth is an instrument of meditation, and it is supposed to be a spiritual journey.
MSZ: And then you also write, “Criticism gives one the illusion of participating in the act of creation by way of an autopsy. The act is there and it exists and moves and challenges you while criticism fights to approve and validate.”
GDT: I feel that way. I was a critic for many years in Mexico and Guadalajara. Amateur, but I was on TV and radio. I think that the only times I felt really useful were when I was helping people understand a work of art.
It’s very easy to feel oneself smarter than the work you’re analyzing, as if that made you better than the work. But the moments where you’re really, really helping are so much more rewarding. The way we were raised in film school, they said, “A critic needs to show you where the work is, what the work’s intentions are, how the work fails to deliver on those intentions; to put it in context.” It’s not an opinion; it’s a construction. And when you read, really, the pillars of criticism, you see real analysis.
I mean, I think some critics are very happy to be critics. And blogs should, in theory, give people the freedom to review only stuff they like or that they want to talk about. So, ideally, today critics could claim a smaller stake and say, “We want to talk only about movies we feel passionate about, one way or the other, and take the time to analyze them.”
Reflections on the nature of ancient Greek drama in one of del Toro’s early notebooks. Del Toro often writes in his notebooks using a mixture of Spanish and English. Translations of the Spanish-language text and transpositions of the English-language text have been rendered in the margins of the notebook pages reproduced throughout this book.
* A monster that kills with a hull’s horn.
* S/M when they manifest their powers, use effect with wind tunnel MERCEDES.
* We shut ourselves down, we face the best & the worst alone, how to react? Our needs are emotional not social. The Greeks were the opposite. The Greeks thought passion to he a dangerous thing.
Agamemnon returns to Argos (from Troy)
he sacrificed his daughter
Clytemnestra will kill him because of it
“In every FAMILY there is a struggle.”
Need to liberate—Need to belong. (to identify)
Greek drama: “It wasn’t personal or artistic, it was ethical, religious.”
Tragedy shows the conditions necessary for catastrophe.
Clash of differing systems of thought: the raw material of tragedy.
The actors didn’t matter—MASKS.
It provides the rational response to drama.
Tragedy is tolerated only by a cohesive society.
This not just as a genre hut as an event. With the Greeks, the state didn’t guarantee citizenship hut rather one’s status as a human being.
SHOCK doesn’t matter, only its consequences.
STORYTELLING
MSZ: Let’s talk about your screenwriting teacher.
GDT: Two teachers were important for my love of cinema: Daniel Varela in high school, who was my film teacher and a dear friend—a very visual and sophisticated guy. And Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, who was a very literary, script-minded director. In America he became famous for a really brilliant gay comedy called Doña Herlinda and Her Son, which I produced for five thousand dollars. It starred my mother, which led to some very interesting and fun speculation in my homeland.
The decision to cast my mother came from jaime Humberto when he saw my short films and said, “Your mother is a pretty good actress.” He also saw what I was doing with my short films for very little money, and he said, “Would you like to be the line producer?” So one of my best friends and I were the producers, and they gave us five thousand dollars. I didn’t know anything about anything. I had never seen that much money at once. I was twenty-something, nineteen, I don’t remember.
I said to the producer, the guy who gave out the money, “What if I give you change?” And he said, “Well, if you give me change, I’ll give you a bonus of five hundred dollars.” So, in order to give him change, I ended up driving the grip truck and the electric truck on my own, back and forth, between Mexico City and Guadalajara, and then taking the bus back. I was like a thousand dollars under. So the guy gave me five hundred dollars, which I immediately put into my next short film.
MSZ: That’s great. Your screenwriting teacher, from what you say in some of your audio commentaries, sounds like he was really smart and didn’t say, “Well, you have to hit plot point one,” and all that nonsense.
GDT: Right. Let me make a good point about why people who say things like that are full of it. I won’t name any names, but I have read their books, so I’m not talking blindly. Some of them, they take a published screenplay and they say, “As you can see, character so-and-so does this, and plot point one, etc.” And then you realize, they are actually talking about the movie, the finished movie. They are not talking about the actual document that is the screenplay. With 90 percent of the movies that are made, 20 percent of the stuff that was written ends up on the cutting-room floor. Twenty-five percent of what was shot ends up living in a different place than it was written. And that is why, I always say, analyzing the movie is not analyzing the screenplay.