Last weekend, neither director Guillermo Del Toro nor his birth city of Guadalajara so much asfeigned interest in winding down their separate victory laps, which began after Del Toro won two Oscars, March 4, for his efforts at the helm of “The Shape of Water.”
The cineaste, who left Guadalajara for L.A. in 1997 following the kidnapping of his father, returned to his hometown like a conquering Roman general, the impaled visages of his barbarian enemies held aloft to the amassed hordes shrieking their adoration.
Standing in for severed heads, however, were two slender, gold statuettes brandished before multiple flocks of admirers during three events he featured in as part of the well-timed Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG).
FICG, now in its 33rd year, couldn’t have had better fortune in Del Toro’s win. The director was already lated to give a special master class to an audience of eager cinephiles at UdeG’s new “state-of-the-art” Conjunto de Artes Escenicas (CAE). In fact, there was originally supposed to be just one master class, but so wildly popular did the event prove to be that two more events were added, to be held at the capacious Auditorio Telmex nearby.
During his appearances, Del Toro held forth at length on a variety of subjects. His discourse touched on, for example, the recent wave of bloody violence that has gripped the city – no doubt giving the director a sick sense of deja vu, as it was precisely the sanguine nature of Guadalajara in the 1990s which forced him and his family to flee for the United States.
“I don’t think that a school for cinema is going to do anything for four people murdered everyday,” said Del Toro during a discussion about the support – or lack thereof – for cinema education in Mexico. “What we can do in the creative community is use what we have at our disposal to change our circumstances.”
However, the prevailing tenor during the majority of Del Toro’s time before his legion of idolizers was one of sly humor and earnest engagement with both his audience and the multifaceted subject of cinema.
You can argue that no art form is more collaborative than cinema. To that effect, Del Toro counseled balancing compromise with sticking to one’s guns, bolstering his advice with an anecdote featuring a much younger version of revered Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, not as well known a quantity as Del Toro, Cuaron, et al, but no less talented for it. Del Toro and Lubezki cut their teeth together back in the late ‘80s on “La Hora Marcada,” a now-defunct Mexican horror anthology T.V. series.
“Chivo was filming an episode and the director ordered him to zoom in,” recalled Del Toro. “Chivo said, ‘I won’t do it. Zooming is for pendejos.’ The director, who was very well-known, told him, ‘Use the zoom.’ Chivo replied, ‘You use it.’ He was only 22. That’s how it should be. As a collaborator you have to stick up for your vision when you know for sure that it’s the best thing for the movie.”
Del Toro also touched on religion, a thorny subject in Guadalajara, where angry Catholics picket secular, religious-themed works of art (Sincretismo, on Federalismo) and regularly manifest their distaste for the LGBTQ community and public nudity. The generously proportioned director, both owlish and impish in manner with his thick glasses and bulky sweater vest, was unsparing in his disdain for the church, stating that, as a child, he found his beloved fictional monsters to be possessed of more compassion than the faith’s many saints whose lives he was presumably induced to study and use as models for living a pious life.
“There’s a curious phenomenon in me, which is a kind of syncretism between religion and monsters,” said Del Toro with a twinkle in his eye. “When I was growing up, there are people that identified with Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, I identified with Frankenstein.”
But the writer, director and producer of “The Shape of Water” didn’t come all the way from Los Angeles to just dish about his colleagues and thumb his nose at theocracy, he also took the time to announce a special scholarship, to be awarded to one promising Mexican student a year. The endowment, known as the Jenkins-Del Toro International Scholarship, will send one student to an important film school abroad every year for the next ten years. The scholarship will cover not only tuition, but room and board, transportation, medical insurance, books and school equipment. The jury convened in order to select each lucky student will be chaired, naturally, by Del Toro himself.
Also announced during the talks was the installation in the UdeG’s art gallery MUSA of “Guillermo del Toro: En Casa Con Monstrous,” an exposition that will treat of the director’s love of the many creatures that populate his imagination and inform his work; front and center in movies like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the two “Hell Boy” movies, “The Devil’s Backbone,” and, of course, “The Shape of Water,” is Del Toro’s proclivity for mixing the fantastical and grotesque, undergirded by the tone and sensibility of fable and fairy tale.
MUSA’s exposition, curated by “Pan’s Labyrinth” Oscar-winning art director, Eugenio Caballero, will be ready for the public in March of next year.
Not one to let his public down in regards to tantalizing glimpses of future projects, Del Toro let slip hints of what moviegoers can expect from him going forward – that is, if the particularly merciless brand of Murphy’s Law which snarls the machinery of the movie business doesn’t make mince meat of his and his associates’ best laid plans before they’ve gotten off the ground.
A notion long-simmering on the steaming, burbling stove top of Del Toro’s mind is a re-imagining of Pinocchio. The potential remake, if it ever gets made, will more closely hew, he says, to the original book than previous versions. And in true Del Toro fashion, he says his vision for the tale of a wooden doll brought to life will avoid any hint of the sentimental treacle of the Disney classic and instead thematically parallel one of his favorite tragic monster/heroes, the above-mentioned Frankenstein. Clearly, Mary Shelley’s doomed, pitiable man-thing is never far from Del Toro’s febrile mind.
Another item on Del Toro’s long-term agenda concerns one of The Shape of Water’s ancillary pleasures: the performance in the movie of Octavia Spencer as Sally Hawkins’ hard-nosed work friend. She crafted a pitch-perfect master class in comic timing, her no-bullshit character functioning as the perfect foil to Hawkins’ ethereal, head-in-the-clouds protagonist. It was presumably her work in the film – and possibly her turns in movies like “The Help,” for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar – that has impelled the director to begin penning a script with Spencer at its center.
Finally, Del Toro oh-so-casually hinted at plans which may involve his hometown, for more than 20 years snubbed – and for good reason – by the Del Toro clan.
“Alfonso Cuaron and [Alejandro] Iñarritu and I often say that each one of us has a different history with Mexico,” reflected Del Toro. “Mine is with Guadalajara. So yeah, of course I’d like to return to Guadalajara and make a movie someday.”