I like to say that we make only one movie in our lifetime—a movie made of all the images of all our movies. I believe this is true of Hitchcock, for instance. Hitchcock made a single, giant, symphonic movie. You can see Hitchcock trying a thing in one movie and cannibalizing it later. I think this is true of many great filmmakers that I admire. But I also think it’s true of guys that are consistent with themselves. Not that they’re good or bad; they’re just consistent.
I think these books are important to me because they narrate the story of that single movie I’m trying to make. So the composition in them, the colors, everything is important to me in the same way that Bleak House is. The house is in all of my movies—not only the ones I’ve done, but the ones I want to do if I’m lucky enough to survive a few years.
MSZ: Looking at Bleak House, your notebooks, and your films is like walking through your head.
GDT: Exactly. When you see a photo of Francis Bacon’s studio, for instance, the floor is thick with colors. You see not just the color, but the vigor of the brushstrokes. You go, “This is a single, forceful, incredibly precise beautiful brushstroke, or a passionate brushstroke.” In the case of Bacon, I think they should exhibit the studio and the paintings because you’re going to see just how much paint ended up on the floor. Or when you see a Van Gogh in person, the reason they are impressive is how thick with paint they are. You can imagine the guy almost unable to stop himself to get there with the next brushstroke full of paint.
MSZ: To get back to the notion of the single film: I really love the juxtaposition of projects in your notebooks, where you migrate inspiration from one project into another, or you’ll find a motif for one that doesn’t show up in that movie, but then you use it later.
GDT: Before I start shooting a movie, I read all the notebooks. They travel with me. I consider the notebooks a catalog, and that’s why I try to explain to people that these are not necessarily the organized notes of a linear thinker. They’re the opposite. The notebooks are a catalog—like a mail-order catalog of ideas that I turn to when I’m low on ideas.
I’ve always got five projects because, statistically, if you have a number of projects, one eventually happens. When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked creatively. The mental promiscuity of having four or five things going at once in the notebooks makes them feed off one another. So I go, “That idea is great for Mountains of Madness! That idea is great for—” And I can keep the ideas and the projects alive that way.
NOTEBOOKS
CRONOS
WATCHING A FILM in a theater holds a unique power. Guillermo del Toro works and has worked in many media, but he prefers movies because in the theater the image is vast, all-encompassing, inescapable—forming the totality of the viewer’s experience in that moment. In a theater, the audience is propelled along a time frame that the director dictates. Unlike at home or in other contexts, viewers can’t pause the story, step away for a few minutes, read a paper, call a friend, and then return at their convenience. Guillermo is a maestro who insists on full attention and immersion, and this is what the movie theater provides. In addition, film allows Guillermo to unite all his artistic proclivities in one singular vision, and so movies became his medium of choice.
Cronos (1993) was Guillermo’s first foray into feature film. For many novice filmmakers, their first film is an embarrassment they want to put behind them. Commenting on Fear and Desire, his first feature, Stanley Kubrick once said that he didn’t want the film to be remembered or shown again because it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise… a completely inept oddity—boring and pretentious.”
Not so with Guillermo and Cronos. This astonishing film reveals an already-mature visionary. It is a personal, profound philosophical rumination on the choices unconditional love demands when faced with the facets of our nature we cannot control—sexual obsession, hunger, mortality. It forces us to ask where we draw the line on our actions.
A vampire film where the word vampire is never used, Cronos presents a merciless world where mercy survives in the face of uncontrollable appetite but only at a grave cost. The characters face hard choices and are pushed to ever more extreme actions. All of it unfolds in a fantasy realm that blends the Jalisco of Guillermo’s youth with the Grand Guignol world he soaked up from books and films.
In the film, it’s initially easy for Aurora (Tamara Shanath), like any granddaughter, to love her gentle grandfather, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), who stays reassuringly the same. But what do you do when your grandfather inexplicably gets younger, more vigorous—and then, astonishingly, returns from the dead, growing ever more horrific looking? In Aurora’s case, you see the soul within and cherish it, regardless of outside appearances. You tuck him into your toy chest with your plush bear; you shield him from the light and witness his final moments of existence. As for Jesús Gris, who is transformed by the exquisite, monstrous Cronos device into a deathless addict, he chooses to destroy both himself and the device rather than sacrifice his granddaughter on the altar of his need.
With these characters, their monstrous circumstances, and their difficult choices, Guillermo confronts his audience with an inescapable truth of life: that those we love, and we ourselves, will ultimately be made horrible by either accident or illness, and certainly by death. Constancy and devotion are possible only by virtue of love, which alone endures.
In his first film, Guillermo announced his singular aesthetic: his desire to utilize classic horror tropes to strip away artifice and show us clear reality—albeit his reality, his world. With Cronos, Guillermo gave voice to the world inside himself.
Guillermo took ten years building the makeup and special effects infrastructure (through his company Necropia) that would allow him to make this film, and its production was fraught with trouble. At one point, financing collapsed during shooting, and Guillermo had to tell star Ron Perlman, whose agent advised him to quit, “I can’t pay you now, but I promise you will get paid.” The time and attention to detail paid off. In Cronos, many of Guillermo’s major themes are on display, particularly child/parent and especially child/grandparent relationships, the fragility of innocence and its inevitable dance with corruption, and the sociopathic impulse that spoils for an excuse to let loose unbridled violence.