Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro learned to film monsters by coating his hands in latex and synthetic blood in a workshop in Guadalajara. Before taking home golden statuettes, he spent ten years shut away in his own special effects company, Necropia, learning the secrets of the craft by correspondence with Dick Smith, the artisan who turned Marlon Brando into El padrino: The Latin Godfather.

To shoot his debut, Cronos, in 1993, he mortgaged his own house and built up a bank debt of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The film won the top prize at the Critics' Week in Cannes and caught Hollywood's attention.

But his leap into the American film industry almost ended his calling before it began.

In 1997 he agreed to direct Mimic under Miramax's control. Bob and Harvey Weinstein sent contradictory notes every morning, shot alternate takes behind his back and threatened to fire him midway through the schedule. Del Toro finished the job vowing never to work with a studio again unless his final cut was guaranteed by contract.

Soon after, real-life violence struck his circle. In 1998 a criminal gang kidnapped his father for seventy-two days in Guadalajara, and James Cameron lent more than a million dollars in cash to cover the ransom.

The event forced the director to move his entire family out of Mexico and into exile.

Gunpowder, Mud and the Shadow of Francoism

En 2001 encontró en España el refugio creativo que Los Ángeles le negaba. Pedro Almodóvar y su hermano Agustín financiaron The Devil's Backbone, un relato gótico ambientado en un orfanato solitario durante la Guerra Civil española.

There he understood that real-world monsters don't have fangs or latex claws. The true monsters wear military uniforms or gray bureaucrats' suits.

With that lesson learned, he returned to large-scale filmmaking, directing Blade II in 2002 and Hellboy in 2004. But his riskiest work from that period returned to the Spanish mountains with Pan's Labyrinth in 2006.

Nobody believed in a fairy tale shot in Spanish.

Distribution executives demanded that he shoot in English with big-name stars to recoup the investment. Del Toro turned down the multinationals' money, cut his own salary to the minimum and shot the film in the pine forests of San Rafael on a budget of just thirteen million euros.

The film won three Academy Awards and received a twenty-two-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

Black Notebooks and Studio Monsters

In the following years his career went through a stagnant stretch. Del Toro spent nearly two years of daily work designing and writing The Hobbit, but financial problems at the MGM studio indefinitely delayed the start of filming, until he was forced to resign in 2010.

That stumble ushered in a period of frustration in which dozens of sketchbooks were left gathering dust in drawers.

Así que decidió cambiar de escala. En 2013 dirigió Pacific Rim, un homenaje al cine japonés de monstruos gigantes que costó cerca de doscientos millones de dólares, y en 2015 estrenó Crimson Peak, un melodrama gótico que no funcionó en taquilla.

Many industry analysts believed his baroque cinema had no commercial appeal.

And the response came from the margins.

In 2017, he shot The Shape of Water on a modest budget of nineteen million dollars. The unlikely romance between a mute woman and an amphibian man swept the Hollywood ceremony of 2018, winning four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

In 2021 he presented Nightmare Alley, an immersion in film noir with no fantastical elements. In 2022 he completed his stop-motion animated adaptation of Pinocchio after fifteen years of rejections from the major studios.

In 2024 he shot his version of Frankenstein on location in Scotland and England. The production spent seventy million dollars exclusively on physical wood and stone sets, forgoing green screens for the laboratory interiors.