Frans Francken the Younger’s Chamber of Art and Antiquities (1636), a painting depicting a seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities made up of art, collectibles, and oddities from the natural world.
Initially, Guillermo jotted down notes and illustrations mainly for himself and for those he was working with. “Usually those notebooks were used only to communicate with actors or designers, to show them the world.”
With the birth of his first daughter, Mariana, Guillermo began to rethink the notebooks as mementos to leave his daughter—as something that might interest and entertain her in the future. “I gave myself the luxury of buying inks and pens, and I thought, ‘I’m going to make it an art project that she will find fun to look at.’ So I changed my handwriting, did the elongated Ts and elongated Ls to give it an old-fashioned feel, bought a quill. I wanted to make it fun for her, like finding letters. So every note that is there is not to myself, but to her.”
With the birth of his second daughter, Marisa, this determination only strengthened. “I instructed in my will that those notebooks are for them. They can quarter them, sell them, keep them, frame them, throw them out, burn them, whatever they want to do. But what they will have is a testament to curiosity. I think they indicate, not how much I know, but how much I want to know, how much I was thinking about this or that.”
He also built a conscious whimsicality into them. “What I love is the idea that the deepest stuff in these notebooks is the stuff that looks the quaintest, and the stuff that looks the deepest is the stuff that is much more playful and crazy and not necessarily meaningful.”
In designing the notebooks, Guillermo was intent on rendering flaws into the weave, deliberate stains and blemishes. “In the end,” he says, “perfection is just a concept—an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature. We pursue it—God knows we have to, as artists—but ultimately, like [Friedensreich] Hundertwasser says: A straight line is pure tyranny. In art, as in life, the love of imperfection is the perfect love.”
More than valuable objects, mementos, or artworks, the notebooks possess an almost magical significance for Guillermo, who explains, “It’s really important in our life to have talismans. Everybody has one or two or three. In my case, I have dozens. You have to imbue things that surround you with power.”
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.
Notebook 3, Pages 48A and 48B, which include the receipt for the taxi ride in London during which del Toro lost his notebook [left], as well as the record of the police report del Toro filed [right].
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.”