William tells
18 November 2006. Inspired by critical panning.
About to send Europe silly, Pan's Labyrinth has been about in Spain for yonks, and is widely seen, in the Hispano world at least, as the only serious competitor to Volver for that elusive "rest of the world" Oscar (it's being entered by Mexico). It's a cracking and beautiful film, let down a little by some lazy faunishness and a disappointingly uncomplicated eeevilll bad guy - but if that's all that I can find to criticise, it's still one of the best you'll see this year. The moment when the little girl says "Look! A fairy!"... anyway, go see it for yourself.
As part of my roving role as InMadrid's film nut, I met its director Guillermo Del Toro, and wrote a piece about it all thusly...
Mazing grace
By Andrew Losowsky
"This has been a huge force of will, imagination and hard work for an obese man like me." So says Guillermo Del Toro, the acclaimed and seemingly self-aware Mexican film director.
The 'this' in question is his new film, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), a Spanish/Mexican/USA co-production and a strange and original take on the last days of the battle against Franco.
Many, many films and TV series have been made about the civil war and its aftermath; however, this is the only one featuring fairies, princesses and magic spells. It’s also the only film to combine discussion of the period with childish nightmares since. . . well, since Del Toro's last Spanish film, the Almodovar-produced El Espinazo del Diablo (Devil's Backbone).
That film was sold as a ghost story, and many reviewers complained that the ghost wasn’t scary - but that wasn’t the point. The ghost in the story was a reflection of the everpresent menace of the period, and the film wasn’t out to shock or scare – instead, it spoke of innocence and comradeship in an orphanage, made more poignant for being at a time when elsewhere there was none.
Simliarly, El Laberinto del Fauno is described in the media as a ‘fantasy’ film. Yes, it does have impressive special effects (near-miraculous on the €13.5m budget), and features a faun, fairies and a hideously wonderful creature soon to be starring in a nightmare near you; but these elements do not exist in isolation. They appear as terrifying echoes of the real-life horror happening outside, and fantasy and ‘reality’ get muddled up as fear, hope and magic move between the two worlds.
It’s a complex piece, brilliantly realised by writer/director Del Toro. In the substantial flesh, he comes across as a likeable, excitable geek whose laugh is the swallowed giggle of someone who is afraid that Teacher might hear him. He also seems to be an approachable, warm person - he clasped your correspondent's hand firmly and delightedly for a good five seconds following a six-minute group interview, thanking InMadrid for its humble gift of a piece of comic-book silliness.
The big man's formative years in Mexico were spent enjoying the work of exiled Spanish authors and filmmakers, and their tales of what they left behind became the basis for both El Espinazo and El Laberinto. But not in any traditional, docufiction kind of a way.
"It's easy to make a film about magic set in a castle with dragons," he says. "The tricky thing is to look for magic where you don't expect it, to find magic during a war. Magic hides where the world is opposite - it's part of the darkness, not the light. The Spanish civil war was like a war between lovers in the same metaphorical house. It seemed the perfect setting for a fantasy."
Del Toro admits that his upbringing continues to influence his creative output. After all, if you’d seen a dead body aged 4, reportedly been exorcised by your own grandmother aged 6, and grown up in a country that celebrates El Dia de la Muerte every November, it’d probably leave you with a few expensive psychiatric bookings, and a penchant for drawing skulls without realising.
“As a good Mexican, of course I believe in magic,” he says. “But it exists in Spain just as much. I live an everyday life surrounded by magic. You see magic when you have a child, when you have a great moment with your father, when you fall in love, when you walk down the street and it's a beautiful day… and there is also less accessible magic that I don't dare even to speak of – but I've seen it, and I've heard of incredible things that actually happened. Magic exists, I'm sure of it.
“The main human error is that we think that, in order to praise rationality, we have to eliminate emotion. I think we need to value emotion just as much or more than rationality. We have to value what's important - a beautiful walk, a great cochonillo, your friends... The inane everyday reality – your rent, your car, your job – strikes at your heart and stifles your creativity and your imagination. Magic exists if you know how to look for it. That’s what my film is really about.”
Del Toro’s own imagination seems far from stifled. He spends much of his spare time filling expansive notebooks with tiny handwriting, exploding ideas and amazing sketches, the basis of future projects, onto the pages. El Laberinto’s own sketch books, with their tiny writing and beautifully painted monsters, look like the work of a particularly artistic psychotic, and are sure to fill a bonus disc of a DVD to come. Other projects waiting to leave his pages include Hellboy 2 and the intriguing 3993, a film set in the Madrids of 1939 and 1993.
Del Toro’s regular fans - mostly the kind who hand-paint their own orcs - worship him as one of their own who somehow managed to bluff a camera and a budget. It's not hard to see why. He loves comic books. He obssesses over the DVD extras for his films. His first film, Cronos, was a Mexican horror involving a metallic beetle that killed people. He spent years waiting to film the cultish made-from-comic-book Hellboy. When Hollywood fumigated his original vision during the filming of insect-horror Mimic, he was the first to decry them and disown the film, despite the potential career implications.
Perhaps because of all this, many dismiss Del Toro’s work as fodder for teenage goths. It’s an easy charge to accept… until, that is, you see his films for yourself. Ignoring the poster design and some of the geekier elements of his back catalogue, he remains a storytelling purist (not for nothing does each of his films start with a narrator), an explorer of the darker sides of fear and menace that anyone can relate to. His work is essential, brutal cinema, powerful and entertaining, whether ghost story, comic book adaptation or fantasy horror.
And don’t even think of dismissing his work as irrelevant, escapist nonsense. “All cinema is political,” he says. “All cinema is ideological. Zombies are political. Fantasy is particulary sensitive to politics; it always reflects the time in which a film is made. Even fairy stories are political: they have two main threads - the moral one about listening to your parents, and the more anarchist side concerning what the fairies get up to. As my mentor in Mexico once said, if you don't bother with politics, politics will bother with you.”
(ends)