Written Interview: Guillermo del Toro
Wide ranging interview with Guillermo del Toro in IndieWire this week. Some excerpts:
You mentioned your affinity for transmedia. Last year, you launched a transmedia studio called Mirada. What have you been doing with it so far?
We’ve had a very interesting first few months. We’re a very curious company. We got involved in a huge multimedia installation celebration for IBM’s 100th anniversary called the THINK Exhibit [opening at Lincoln Center in September]. Using all the resources of our company, we created a special shooting rig that [Del Toro’s cinematographer] Guillermo Navaro designed called the Medusa. It’s a four-camera rig that shoots panoramic images that are almost life-size. It was fulfilling, exactly what we want to do. We did commercials, video clips, all the regular stuff, but we’re also developing a viral for [Del Toro’s next feature] “Pacific Rim,” and a teaser trailer for it internally to show the studio what it would look like.
It’s been a really interesting year. When we talk about transmedia, I think it’s incredibly important that one of the words that’s sacred for what we do at Mirada is “storytelling.” The word “transmedia” is very fancy, but what it means is that we’re at the edge of a new era for storytelling, one that I am convinced will be multiplatform. It will be a delivery-driven experience. You can have an audience participate in the way a story evolves. It’s really important as a storyteller to know how to write a novel or a comic. People think about them as if they need to be similar. They fixate on those similarities. For example, they say, “comic books are storyboards.” Absolutely not. They are not. I think it’s a mistake to talk like that. It negates everything that is unique about storytelling in that medium. I cannot qualify my work, but I know that I am a storyteller. I can only qualify the passion I bring to it, and that’s why I’m involved in transmedia.
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You often talk very openly about the challenges of making quality movies in Hollywood, but one of the stigmas associated with that perspective is remakes. So how do you justify doing a remake?
I think a remake is perfectly reasonable thing when it’s not dictated by commercial reasons. When it comes from somebody who wants to tell a different version of the same story, and take liberties with it, then it becomes a re-imagining. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not a new phenomenon. I think it’s horrible when you have things like hyper-expensive colorizations or when there’s no real intention aside from the commercial one. That’s what I really find quite scary.
In that case, what made you certain this was a valid remake?
This was such a big battle. First of all, it’s a property that’s remembered by a very narrow generation of people, mostly my generation and the one immediately after it. It was very difficult to get the rights to it. That took many years. It took 13 years to get the movie made. There was no easy route for making this movie. The reason I stuck with it was that I thought it was worth it to take a story that had been told from the point of a pathological married woman played by Kim Darby in the original and retell it like a dark fairy tale with a young girl. We tried to make the horror of the movie come out of a family situation, as Hitchcock did with “The Birds” — it’s a manifestation of everything that is wrong with the characters’ relationship. I think creating a new story for them makes it completely different. That was the challenge.
There’s also this: Anyone can email del Toro at his public address which is Abe_Sapien@hotmail.com. He spends 1–2 hours per day responding and says he tries to answer all of them. But he can not read scripts for legal reasons.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
For Part 2, go here.