There is beauty and humility in imperfection.
Guillermo del Toro
I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn't define you until the end... The way you end your story is important. It's important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.
I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It's shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.
Making a film is like raising a child. You cannot raise a child to be liked by everyone. You raise a child to excel, and you teach the child to be true to his own nature. There will be people who'll dislike your child because he or she is who they are, and there will be people who'll love your child immensely for the very same reason.
Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.
There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.
The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.
For me, real life is hard work. Making movies is like a vacation for my soul.
When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.
I wrote a screenplay for 'The Witches,' which Alfonso Cuaron was producing, but we couldn't get it made! The studio just wouldn't greenlight that movie. It's my favorite Roald Dahl book, 'The Witches,' because I grew up with my grandmother a lot of the time, and the relationship between the boy and the grandmother speaks volumes to me.
I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.
I'm a huge David Fincher fan, and to me, 'Zodiac' is a masterpiece. I re-watch that movie all the time.
I was directing before I knew it was called that.
More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.
I was very attracted to doing 'The Wolverine' in Japan because that's my favorite chapter in the story of Wolverine. But I'm not a superhero guy.
Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.
The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.
I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are, all of us, agents of construction and agents of destruction.
In Mexico, you're close to death all the time.
I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.
I love to travel, anywhere in the world. Wherever it is... India... Tibet... wherever. I'll go anywhere.
I think the greatest giant insect movie ever made is 'Them!'
Ultimately, you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It's an impulse that's intrinsic to the Mexican character.
When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You're the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.
I have a very promiscuous relationship with all my objects.
Any actor I admire and enjoy working with - Sergi Lopez as the bad guy in 'Pan's Labyrinth,' or the little girl who played young Mako in 'Pacific Rim,' it makes no difference - I like actors with a very strong centre.
I have said no to many, many Day of the Dead projects in the past, about 10 or 15, because every time I heard a take it was from someone who didn't know the celebration.
Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don't have any human or mammalian instincts. They'll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There's no empathy - none.
You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.
I hope to continue doing TV, and I think that what I've learned on 'The Strain' will come in handy.
Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.
It's only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism.
The problem with 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark' was that it was designed to be a PG-13 movie. It was literally a horror movie for a younger generation. I was trying to do the film equivalent of teenage, young adult readers, and when they gave it an R rating, the movie couldn't sustain an R.
I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.
I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.
If you want to know how to handle a crew, it's great to be part of a crew.
You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.
Everything I do, I do it with the hope that people will watch it more than twice. Whether it's 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Pacific Rim' or the opening of 'The Simpsons,' I do it with that hope.
I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.
I have a lot of artifacts - books on witchcrafts and talismans. I have a big, big collection of original occult books from the 1800s and 1700s, and some of the oldest books on apparitions and vampires. All original printings. It's not that I'm a crazy believer, I just find it to be amazing research material.
For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.
Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.
I don't think there is life beyond death. I don't. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn't do.
I'm a lapsed altar boy.
When I did 'Mimic,' it was such a difficult experience to try to make. Believe it or not, I did try to make a really adult giant bug movie. And then, in the course of the process, it kind of died a horrible death and gave birth to the movie that exists now, which now, in retrospect, I like. But it's not the movie I set out to do.
What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.
To me, the thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are. That's the greatest act of love because you wash away imperfections.
Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.
To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.
I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen.
