Now, this was misguided and all, but it was really good discipline. He was a really tough guy. I always tell the story of how back then, you didn’t have even word processors, and he made us typewrite everything by hand. So formatting became an act of discipline. Take The Devil’s Backbone. Before I did Cronos, I wrote Devil’s Backbone as a feature. It was a very different screenplay. He took the screenplay, which was pink, and he flipped through it. He flipped through it, and he threw it in the wastebasket, the original. He said, “It’s badly formatted. If you cannot take the trouble to write it well, why should anyone take the trouble to read it well?” It was too Mr. Miyagi for me, so we kind of fell out of contact for several years after that. That’s when I wrote Cronos. I said to myself, “I can retype Devil’s Backbone by memory, or I can start over and do Cronos.”
MSZ: You’ve mentioned that he used to say, “If a road is not presented, you build one.”
GDT: Yes. He always said that. He would give you rules that you understood immediately. One of those things he used to say was, “Look, it’s bullshit that a character needs to change through the movie. Sometimes the greatest character is the one that doesn’t change.” Like Candide, or Forrest Gump. Those are characters that, whatever they do, they stay the same. It’s not like Forrest Gump becomes smarter in the end. Sure, there is a journey, there is a pilgrimage, but there is not necessarily what Hollywood understands as an arc.
As a screenwriter and director, del Toro is able to identify with all of his villains, even the menacing Vidal (Sergi López) in Pan’s Labyrinth.
Another thing that Humberto used to say was, “In writing for a film, there is the star of the film and the main character. And sometimes they are very different things.” For example, the main character of Fight Club is Edward Norton’s. But the star of Fight Club is Brad Pitt. Or take The Shining. Tom Cruise said to me that Kubrick told him he cast Shelley Duvall because he found her irritating, and he knew that the star of the film, the main character he was painting, was Jack. So all the big moments, they all go to Jack. Kubrick said, “The only way to make people understand him is to share some of his darkest emotions in spite of themselves.” So if he made Jack’s wife grating enough, the audience would enjoy him going insane because they dislike her. I find that misanthropically fascinating.
In my own films, in Pan’s Labyrinth and Mountains of Madness, I identify with the assholes as much as I identify with the good characters. Why? Because we are all assholes, many times, during the day. You have to write them all from inside. Both of them have to contain things that you would be ashamed to discuss publicly, aspects of your own person that you can socialize only by fictionalizing them.
MSZ: In your work, one consistent theme that runs throughout is that your characters triumph if they hold true to themselves when put to the test. And often, they are silent victories.
GDT: That applies to all the things in life that are important. That’s why I find it so hard to write dialogue. Dialogue is the most challenging thing for me. In Spanish or English, I don’t care. The rhythm of it is easier for me in Spanish, obviously. But really good dialogue, which eludes me most of the time, has to be about something while being about nothing. I don’t mean the ramblings that you find in brilliant pieces of work like Barry Levinson or Quentin Tarantino. But I mean really, truly, in the same way that body language tells you a lot about the person. It’s very hard, but dialogue needs to communicate things, but not the things the characters are talking about.
If I had to, I would love to have lived in the time of silent film because I think it’s the purest cinema. Chaplin said, when sound came, “Film has died.” At some point he was very, very reproachful about it, and it was because, right at that moment, the black-and-white film was perfect. I mean, you were getting really beautiful hues of gray, and the visual language of silent cinema was completely absorbed.
Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) strikes a pose reminiscent of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. In many ways, Cronos is indebted to silent film.
MSZ: Cronos is very much like a silent film.
GDT: It is. I like writing silent. I mean, I can come up with stuff I like, such as, “In the absence of light, darkness prevails.” Or, “There are things that go bump in the night. We’re the ones that bump back.” Or things that I’m proud of, like in Pan’s Labyrinth where the Faun says, “I’ve had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce.” But that’s it. If I attempt to be naturalistic, I often fail. Most of the time I fail completely.
Some people develop their own style, like David Mamet, who has a rhythm and a style that is inimitable. I suspect—I may be wrong—that part of his writing style comes from the theater theories of Sanford Meisner, with their famous exercises in repetition, like where you go, “I’m okay.” “Oh, you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” “You’re okay.” It’s a rhythm that is meant to be about listening. I think that at some point maybe Mamet realized, if you really want the audience to listen to the dynamics, you have to hammer it three times. “I’m alone.” “You’re alone?” “I’m alone.” “Alone?” “Yes, I am alone.” “You are alone.”
But it’s funny because I always say a screenplay is almost like a partitur, but it’s missing half of the musical notes and annotation. Ultimately, when the director fills those in, he’s also directing the orchestra while completing the partitur.
I’ve always written my movies, but I have a real problem with writing them the way they should be written.
MSZ: In what way?
GDT: In the way that I read every screenwriting book growing up, but I couldn’t help but disagree constantly. Because I would always think of how many times Truman Capote, or Ernest Hemingway, or Saki, or Isak Dinesen, or so many of the writers I admire don’t follow or portray their characters through any of those devices. A lot of the stuff that we leave in as screenwriters—like the “rules of the game,” the antagonist’s plan, and finally, the character’s arc—is contradicted by majestic works of fiction that contradict and question those rules.
Concepts by Carlos Jimenez for the frescoes that array the Pale Man’s lair in Pan’s Labyrinth.
This translates to difficulties down the line if you follow their examples. Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance, was a difficult movie to finance. Nobody wanted to give us the money. I remember a meeting where some producers said, “Well, this is a very interesting movie. But we can’t put money into it because we think it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of people.”
They gave me a few notes, and they said, “If the girl really loves books, we should see her reading more often.” But you don’t need that. I mean, I love books, but you never see me with a book on the street. I read them at night, or I read them in the morning. I didn’t carry them around. I said, “The way I show the depth and the breadth of her imagination is when she makes up a story to the baby brother in her mother’s belly.” Because she’s not reading the story, she’s telling it. So that tells you how much she has read, but without doing it directly.