Fairy Godfather

Guillermo del Toro on Pan's Labyrinth's twisting realities.

by Cindy Fuchs

Guillermo del Toro is smart, enthusiastic, and in love with what he does. He loves movies and fairy tales, horror and special effects, and although he's 43 and bearded, a proud father of two (ages 5 and 10), he acts like a big kid as often as not. Even when he's talking about gothic horror or the Tequila Gang (the production company he co-founded to support new filmmakers in Mexico, Spain and Latin America), the Guadalajara-born filmmaker is both intensely focused and passionately distractible. He obviously has lots on his mind.

Set during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth follows 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), as she comes into a kind of adulthood, violently. "The idea," he says, "was to juxtapose a purely masculine universe with a purely feminine universe. I'm a big fan of Jung, [his use of] feminine and masculine energy and symbols." The feminine is spread over several characters, the mother, housekeeper, gossiping servants and primarily Ofelia, "the most free of them all. She fears nothing. That is the characteristic that makes you invulnerable and immortal." Opposed to Ofelia's courage is the fascist captain, whom del Toro describes as "pure male energy, pure lingam."

Asserting that "war and fascism are boys' games," he adds that this gendering is determined by "mammalian genes," then exacerbated by "human concerns like religion and politics, absolute perversions of natural order." He's addressed this theme repeatedly in his films, from Cronos to Hellboy.

Del Toro describes Pan's Labyrinth as a companion piece to The Devil's Backbone, which was set at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939). That film, he says, was "unleashed" in only 16 theaters in the U.S. in the winter of 2001, "the wrong time to tell a story about cruelty of war and children." Now, five years later, he's also set his film five years later (1944), so that it "speaks about the past and the present, both crucial times."

Pan's Labyrinth, he says, "deals with crossroads, moments of decision. 1944, after Normandy, becomes a moment of decision for the entire world and Spain, because the Spanish resistance has been in the woods, in the mountains, for years, in many ways supporting the Allies in their war against Hitler and fascism. And they are rewarded by indifference by the Allies. It's their idealism ... Now, we've come to a [similar] point. It's not like there was no cruelty before or no brutality before. But the fact that now people can go out in the open about it, publicly, and not be shamed, even be proud of it? I think it's a very dark time right now."

To throw light on this dark time, del Toro focuses on a child, but not the usual sort of movie child. "The way I view childhood," he says, "is that it should not be a time of isolation." He worries that today's children are too often overprotected: "We keep creating these thin-skinned little brats who reach the age of 25 and have the same system to deal with pain as they had when they were 5 ... You have 25-year-olds throwing tantrums at life, suing someone because they got burned by coffee."

Rather than absorbing children into institutions and teaching them rules, he says, "We should be in awe, and try to help them with the things they don't know and try not to teach them things they don't need to know. I was 4 years old when my grandmother introduced me to the notion of original sin. Why tell a kid that he's going to the flames of purgatory? I don't understand how that helps anyone."

Ofelia is a child who experiences pain and so, understands her world. Children, del Toro says, "should understand that the world is a messy, imperfect, fucked-up place where there are people who love you. The world is not Barney and not ever seeing the news. The world needs to be the place it is." Ofelia makes mistakes, he observes, but, "like they say in Hellboy, 'We like people for their qualities, we love them for their defects.' I think Ofelia is a lovable character for that."

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)