–I had a dream and I know I’m not his daughter.
–Vidal has a gold cross or a rosary hanging from his neck.
GDT: I did a lot of research on the architecture of northern Spain while working on Pan’s Labyrinth because the north of Spain is very peculiar. It has sort of a fairy-tale feel, both the northeast and the northwest. Whether you’re in Galicia or on the border with France, either way you get these lush, cold forests.
And I just made the house they lived in out of the chimneys of the Pyrenees because I thought it needed to feel crooked, or needed to feel like straight lines going wrong, like a motion detector.
Then [opposite] it says, “In some stories, the elves replace people with wooden logs that turn into human beings the next morning.” That is the changelings. I thought, at some point while creating Pan’s Labyrinth, that there would be elves who would take the baby into the labyrinth. I obviously changed that.
“One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice.” This is a reference to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, who said that about rivers, but it’s also true about film. You never see the same film twice.
Then it talks about Ofelia having a limp leg. I wanted her to not be completely normal, but then I thought what is great is making her physically normal, but making her different in other ways.
GDT: There are some notes here [opposite], like I’m playing with what the movie would be called in English because I knew that “The Faun’s Labyrinth” would be bad.
And then it says, “Coat on his shoulders, gloves, glasses, and silver cane.” Everything but the silver cane is the captain. And it says, “Hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes, beige scarf.” No scarf, but the shoes and the gloves were very important for me with the captain because I needed him to creak.
MSZ: What is this house? Is it something you invented or remembered, or did you come across it?
GDT: It’s actually the house where Luis Buñuel lived as a kid. I thought it would be great to use it as the model for the house in Pan’s, but I abandoned it because I thought the mill was a better thing.
I went to the cinemathéque in Spain and read a lot about Buñuel for Pan’s Labyrinth. He’s one of my two favorite filmmakers of all time, along with Hitchcock. Formally, they’re polar opposites. But, content-wise, they are very similar, and there are traits of their personalities that are interesting. As a friend of mine put it very brutally, “The only difference between Buñuel and Hitchcock is that Buñuel was handsome.” Which is a big difference. But they were both guys that lived very bourgeois, very middle-class lives. They lived like gentlemen. You went to Buñuel’s house, and he was very rigid. He was very much a male, a very macho guy with his wife. It was like old-school gentlemen, but in their imaginations, they were anarchists. Buñuel was a huge fan of the Marquis de Sade, and he was obviously a man with many, many twisted ideas and an iconoclast. Hitchcock was the same. The curious thing is that they lived these guarded lives and had completely unguarded imaginations.
So for Pan’s, I was very attracted to the idea of making some kind of reference to Buñuel.
–FOUNDLING: Abandoned or consigned to an institution
–CONSTRUCTION: MATEO MARIOTTI (Madrid/Barcelona).
MAKEUP: Gregorio Ros/ Hair Stylist: PEPITO JUEZ.
–In the Labyrinth/ In the Labyrinth/ The Faun’s Labyrinth.
–Boston, Bostonian furniture, vertical in the entrance.
–Coat on his shoulder, gloves, glasses, and silver cane. Hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes, beige scarf.
–There are runes on the stones around the well (name of God).
Luis Buñuel’s house
–Man may acquire grace directly from the world and not through public/ charitable organizations
–A watch instead of liquor. He/she tells them the story—
–I believe in two things: God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind—
–For the coffin with blurred “edges.”
–My mother taught me how to live. My father taught me how to die. To die with courage. The only decent way to die. That’s where the broken watch comes in.
–The doctor is going to help him “DIE WELL.”
–Why do you smile when you say it… this? You call this a smile?
–Ramon Fontserè for the role of the priest in P.L.
–Kate Corrigan drums her fingers incessantly on the table
–We have gained arrogance instead of Wisdom, gained cruelty instead of intelligence and made the world a cruel, cold place.
–Abe, you look like a woman when you laugh like that.
–Devane’s Speech in Marathon Man to explain the BPRD.
–Abe to HB: You should have a “blurb” a one-liner, a signature piece that people remember you by, like: Crime is a disease and I am the cure. Later HB tells him, Aw, crap.
–Use Abe Sapien in the programs with the Hannusen model
–Hellboy versus the GIANT PIG MAN/flaming skeletons.
–Good punch, HB!! K.C. says, “Somehow I think it’ll take more than that, Red responds. Abe makes his “AOL” impersonation.
–Manning explains his “BALL OF GAS” theory to the press.
–1/23/05 Carmen gives clothes to my daughter./Better life/She believes in weddings.
–You cannot deny that your soul has been touched by fire.
–You don’t Diddly-squat about us.
–For the ghost VFX it would be worth it not to use a conventional [?] but instead to use a CH [?].
–STOP MOTION instead of CGI.
–Hellboy flicks away a fairy with his finger.
–She puts the mandrake root under the bed. Explosions. Pitched battle. A wounded man. Theft of the antibiotics. They’ve captured one of them. Mercedes and the doctor speak to one another. The antibiotics are the same. Torture, the deaf-mute’s suicide.
GDT: At the top [opposite], I have the captain’s watch, broken. This came, actually, from a Fascist movie. There’s a Fascist movie called Balarrasa, which is a movie that was done during the Franco years, so the heroes are Fascists. And one of them hits his watch right before he thinks he’s going to die, and he says, “I want people to know the time of my death.”