Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

^{For Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro envisioned an underground city.}

^{Where Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) would meet her parents in a throne room and be declared Princess Moanna.}

^{Raúl Monge’s sketches and storyboards.}

MSZ: This [opposite] is the underground city Ofelia goes to at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth. I have a question about that, because at the last moment, when she returns, it seems so cold and so austere. Was that your thinking?

GDT: When she comes back, I wanted her not to embrace anyone because then it would become very sappy. So I put her father and her mother in these super-high thrones, because if we made her embrace them and then you cut to her dying, it is melodramatic in the wrong way. There is melodrama that is a little more austere, and melodrama that is a lot more syrupy, and I thought if we had them all dancing around her and embracing her, and then you cut and she’s dying, it’s really cheap. But if you hear them applaud, and she’s there but she’s alone, still alone, it’s an easier transition to her dying. So I made them sort of very high and mighty, literally.

^{Of the high thrones that kept Ofelia at a distance from her parents, helping to avoid an overly melodramatic ending.}

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 14B}

Walk with him for the reaction shot

–Open with the TITLE PAGE/CLOSE.

–The exterior world is blue/Hades: Gold

–The sky was truly blue in those days and the grass was greener—And now—Now look at what it has all become. What the world is today.

–USE THE MIRROR—to escape/Ofelia needs to react in front of the mirrors—

–Cages with hens in them—

–SUNlight/Ed/CGI.

–The Mouros live in underground cities. They’re beings related to the giants. In Galicia, it is believed that the mountains are hollow and contain underground palaces. Kingdoms.

–The girl is THIRSTY.

–We had dinner with Belen, Paolo Basili, Manuel Villanueva, and Alvaro at Viridiana Tuesday/2/05

–Commemorates the 600th anniversary of the TREUCE

–The prince is irritated by what people say to him at the auction and he gets very angry

–They will eat the souls of all of you, infidels.

–Manning walks through the hall with Abe Sapien/explo.

–The prince gets his arm cut off in the story. Perhaps the BPRD keeps the arm in its museum of FREAKS. “No wonder he is pissed off.” HB.

–There goes a pissed off fish, HB says to Abe.

–The film begins at Christmas with PC in the snow. The demons have lost HB.

F Porto 3/5/05 Use the sketch of Gaudí’s “Sagrada Familia” cathedral as a model.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 18A}

–In the face.

Pillars for the duel. Travels in order:

(1) Lilliput, (2) Brobdingnag

(3) Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan.

(4) Houyhnhnms.

–The key to the crown. Change the beginning and make it a flashback to the scene with the stack of pancakes. Return and find the book again in the library/storeroom of BPRD.

–Abe and the princess use the “magic” escape route to reach the other side of the planet. The BPRD uses the $ media buys.

3 keys

–Count the number of keys.

–One of the keys makes the water level drop and opens the locks to the ocean.

For the battle with the giant.

–He/she cooks dinner for Abe Sapien.

–Upon entering a certain place, they find the remains of others who entered first.

–One of the keys is underwater, so only Abe can fetch it.

–Eliminate the station and trains 6–6-05 and build the interior of the Bentley to fill the plates in time for summer.

RIVER

Downriver.

Fairy tales.

Insect looks at itself in front of the book.

^{While reading The Book of Crossroads, Ofelia [Ivana Baquero] inspires the insect to become a fairy.}

^{Del Toro’s notebook, Raúl Monge’s storyboards, and the film itself persistently refuse to declare whether this transformation is real or imagined.}

GDT: This frame here [opposite, top] is the moment in Pan’s Labyrinth where Ofelia shows the insect the illustration in the fairy tale book and it becomes a fairy. The act of magic I believe in is if you tell the world what you want out of it, the world conforms. Not if I hold a picture of a Porsche against my forehead, a Porsche’s going to come to me. Nothing as base as that. But the world is like a torrent of impressions, I think. Spiritual, physical, all of them. And we’re like a sieve. If you adjust the size of your sieve, and you declare something, you declare the size of the sieve, you start seeing reality, and interacting with reality, in a different way. I love the idea that this girl tells the bug, “Are you a fairy?” And the bug transforms for her. It’s a moment in which magic occurs, and it becomes objective.

Pan’s, for me, responds to an original principle: that, at the end of the day, in the geological time scale, we are all insignificant. In other words, at one time or another, long after we are gone, the worst-worn pocketbook is going to mean the same as the entire oeuvre of Dickens or Shakespeare. In geological time, in five million years, we will be a stratum in the geological plate that is going to be found by no one, perhaps. All we can do is change the world in small ways. No work of art is so big that it’s going to change the world, to make a difference, geologically. That’s why the Faun says Ofelia changed the world in very, very, very small ways. Like, there are people that will remember her, and there’s one little flower blooming in the fig tree because of her, because she killed the frog. It’s a tiny, tiny change, but it says she left traces of her time in the world for those who know where to look. I think that’s all of us.

The artist only changes the world in tiny ways. To think, “Oh, my work is so important,” is misguided. Really? In what perspective? Seriously. I mean, who remembers the great poet Triceratops?