In this way, one of the notebooks played a direct role in perhaps the most important juncture of Guillermo’s career. “I lost the notebook at the end of shooting Hellboy, right before Pan’s Labyrinth. It was a very important moment because I was considering doing a big superhero movie. Avi Arad [then head of Marvel Studios] had seen pieces of Hellboy and had liked Blade II, and he offered me Fantastic Four. It was a big, big, big movie for me. And I was thinking, ‘Do I do Pan’s Labyrinth, or do I do Fantastic Four?’ And I was in London, and I left the notebook in a cab.
“I always say everything that happens is a ciphered message. Like Freud said, ‘There’s nothing accidental.’ And I was thinking, Why did I lose the notebook? I spent all night meditating—I do transcendental meditation now and then—and I cried a lot. I really cried and cried and cried because these books are for my kids; I want my kids to have something from their father.
“And finally I said, ‘I get it. It’s because I was about to lose myself. I’m going to do Pan’s Labyrinth.’ And at that moment, the phone rings, and it’s the cab driver bringing it back to the hotel. I had given him an address for a comic book shop in London, and he had seen the logo of the hotel on the piece of paper, and he remembered.”
Guillermo continues to draw and write in the notebooks, and in truth, he does so for both his daughters and himself. “When I start a screenplay or a movie, a shoot, I carry all of them with me, and I browse through them because it’s like having a dialogue with a younger me. I see the stuff that was important to me at twenty-nine or thirty. I view them with great curiosity. ‘Oh, this kid was interested in this; this kid was interested in that. That’s funny.’ And ideas will spark that you wouldn’t have had before. At the end of one notebook, I made a list of what I was going to achieve in the next five years of my life. I was twenty-nine or thirty. I look back at it, and I have done all of that and more.”
While the early notebooks record an avid mind capturing impressions and developing ideas in an exuberant, spontaneous way, the later ones are increasingly self-aware, done with the knowledge that others will ultimately scrutinize them. They have been crafted with precision, each page composed as its own work of art, although images and words are now often disconnected. “I do the drawings first,” Guillermo explains. “I write around them. These things are not chronologically intact.”
The notebooks form a piece with Guillermo’s house and films, but they exhibit one key difference: With those other works of art, we see the end results brought fully to fruition, presented to us wholly formed, the edges neatly planed off. The notebooks are both process and product, expression and rumination. They are Guillermo’s creativity laid bare.
In these notebooks, we see the private man and his stance toward a public world—processing problems and working out solutions, viewing present and future with guarded optimism and counterbalanced by painful experience. On these pages, Guillermo’s projects intermingle in the most intriguing ways. Mimic, Blade II, Hellboy, The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Pacific Rim all crash into each other. They bleed together, inform one another. It’s as if the toy shop came alive when the toy maker was sleeping. The extravagant vampire design first considered for Blade II reaches full expression in The Strain, Guillermo’s trilogy of novels with Chuck Hogan; notions of clockwork mechanisms and tentacled nightmares migrate from one project to the next.
Most of all, Guillermo’s notebooks present the same creative generosity one finds in the man himself. Whether he’s talking in the room where it always rains, or adding to his notebooks, or sharing his fantastic visions on-screen, he gives the gift of his whole self, and in this way makes our world a little more messy, visceral, boisterous, and exalted.
The thing about great storytellers is that they are full of great stories. Pretty much everything Guillermo says or writes is by turns fascinating, surprising, appalling, hilarious, enchanting, or moving. And like all truly great storytellers, he’s also a great soul. His stories can’t help but instruct, impart, and illuminate. In Hollywood, a dark vision is often merely a faddish pose. But you can tell when a writer-director has never seen a dead body, never spied anguish up close. With Guillermo, his heart of darkness is authentic, born of a fully lived life. He not only observes deeply but feels deeply, and he has survived to tell the tale.
“You try to make the right choices,” Guillermo notes. “I’m not a fatalist. I think that the plan, the universal plan and the universal energies, have a direction for everything. I don’t think there is a design that we can comprehend, but I think that we are all agents of destruction or construction in our lives, and one must try to make the best choices within that. When people talk about heaven and hell, I always think of Defending Your Life, the Albert Brooks movie. I think that you have a responsibility not to propagate the cancer of despair, resentment, and envy. You have the responsibility to make the right choices for the people around you and yourself. We are not going to be important, but I think the collective choices that we make are. We are going to be extinct or not by the accumulation of those choices.”
On one of the notebook pages for Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo has the Faun giving Ofelia a volume that reads, “The book contains every possible destiny, every possible future which your decisions could create. It was made just for you, written in your father’s blood, and will reveal its secrets to your eyes alone. Infinite and limited.”
Of this, Guillermo says, “That’s very Borges and is ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ Because the whole movie is about choice, and every choice gets defined when it’s made, and the choices are revealed only at that moment. So the Faun gives her a book where essentially the book tries to guide her one way or another, and she takes her own choice. This is the book that writes itself, a riff on a famous Borges story called ‘The Book of Sand,’ where every page you turn fuses with the rest and is both infinite and limited.”
Through the images in this book and the conversations with Guillermo, you’ll be given the opportunity to see the world through different eyes. There is wisdom here and heartache, exaltation, exhaustion, joy, and deep compassion.
When Guillermo began writing in the notebooks, they were for himself, then for his daughters, and now we have been invited to share in them. And at the very last, these notebooks are addressed to the boy Guillermo once was, to his past and future, a love letter of hope and of the impossible made possible. As he puts it, “If I were a kid in Mexico and I read this book, I’d be inspired.”