When jotting these notes, Guillermo continually reminded himself to take courage, to stand for exactly what he wanted in all things. This included selecting American actor Doug Jones, previously Abe Sapien in Hellboy, as “the only guy to play the Faun” (Jones also played the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth with equal brilliance). Only their collaboration could have created the Faun, but that decision meant paying more than a Spanish actor would have cost and dubbing all Jones’s lines in Spanish with another performer’s voice. When Jones was offered and turned down films in the X-Men and Men in Black franchises, choosing instead to complete Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo triumphantly wrote: “2007… It’s my year: Guillermo del Toro.”
Even the briefest notations in these pages lends a deeper insight into the finished work, as in the passage, “Faun has a flute made from a thigh bone.” Again, here is the beautiful and the grotesque in a danse macabre, blurring together, becoming one and the same. Elsewhere he jotted one of his finest epigrams: “I believe in two things: God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind.”
Guillermo’s obsessions and grand themes are rendered in his notebook with masterful control and consideration. As in Cronos and later in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, clockwork mechanisms figure prominently, in this case the workings of a pocket watch mirrored in the oversize gears of a mill. “We ended up using them in the mill to represent the captain being trapped in his father’s watch,” Guillermo observes of this man obsessed with remembrance. “But I find gears really fascinating,” he adds. “They represent, I think, the mechanism of the universe, cyclical nature, the inexorable.”
In Pan’s Labyrinth, as everywhere in his oeuvre, Guillermo’s villains appear in vivid detail—evil, real, dreadful. No detail is too small to escape his scrutiny, including a description of what the villainous captain wears: “coat on his shoulders, gloves, glasses… hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes.” Finally, the watch, the glass of which he shatters to preserve his time of death so that he can be remembered by his son—an action that ultimately proves futile. Taking pains to show us his villains’ longings and their scars, both emotional and physical, Guillermo does not mean to excuse their terrible actions, but rather to reveal the human in the monster and the monstrous in the human.
Disrupting expectations, juxtaposing opposites, contrasting the fantastical with taken-for-granted reality: This effort to illuminate both what we refuse to see and what we blindly look past drives Guillermo’s work. The most profound juxtaposition in Pan’s Labyrinth is between the very notions of fantasy and reality. Guillermo took great pains to design visual metaphors that differentiate these two worlds. He noted in his journaclass="underline" “The real world is made of straight lines, and the world of fantasy is curved. Reality is cold. Fantasy is warm. The fantasy world should feel UTERINE, INTERIOR, like the subconscious of the girl….” Guillermo’s film gives audiences intimate contact with an interior life—the world that must be believed to be seen.
The Pan’s Labyrinth journal entries also include another startling juxtaposition—the presence of someone else’s handwriting in these most personal pages. This guest contributor provided Guillermo with the film’s first review, letting him know how the great gamble of Pan’s Labyrinth had turned out. Written when the film was completed, on the day Guillermo screened Pan’s Labyrinth for his favorite living writer and that man’s son (another writer of note), the note says simply: “WE HAD A BLAST!! Steve King.”
Mr. King and his son were not alone. Pan’s Labyrinth was lauded far and wide, both within the industry and among audiences. The film won Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and makeup, netted an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and became the highest-grossing Spanish-language film ever released in the United States. Most satisfying of all, this acclaim rewarded Guillermo’s fidelity to his own values and aesthetic, or as he concludes: “I didn’t have to do a serious piece about Edwardian drama to be nominated for an Oscar.”
–“Don’t get me wound up, animal… don’t push me”
–They use the binoculars to spy on the police officers who arrest the fighter from the train. They can make them out perfectly.
* Julio Vélez, a good actor to play a civil guard. Thin.
–Hellboy calls the new agent “Lil’ fella” or “squirt.”
–Abe has “insight” that they are very weird “Kidney.”
–When I was a boy, I could feel them in my bones. My hand.
–The spotlight doesn’t work. Would there be electricity?? In the middle of the countryside??
–High Relief Portico, LEDGE, CORNICE, Pillar, Post
–Chimneys in the Pyrenees.
–One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice. Memorable TRUEBISMO #1
–Ofelia has: a very slight hunchback DDT or a lame leg (?)
–Take your hat off when you speak to me you goddamn son of a bitch!!
–Production Designer: Martin Childs for HB/MoM.
–Maria Portalez Cerezuela is the name of B.’s mother.
–What Vidal keeps in his safe must be SEEN (dry sausages).
–Crown/how much, sleeps, fire in the window, the house awakens, labyrinth. enter (stable-ish dynamite). It’s you. It’s you. Here we go.
–The wooden man instead of the ghosts
–They prick her cheeks to give them color.
–Art Director: WOLFGANG BURMANN
–In some stories, elves replace people with wooden logs that turn into human beings the next morning.
–She has a shoe catalog that belongs to her father.
–Don’t open your mouth or make a sound or you’ll remain there with them forever. Forever.
–The old, blind man’s name is Benigno and he’s the girl’s father.
–Benigno knows the house and labyrinth inside out. He tells Ofelia about the children that the well “swallowed up” and about how nobody ever saw them again.
–Mercedes and the old man need to be seen doing “what they do” without it having anything to do with the plot.