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Preparations for PAN’S LABYRINTH were completed at lightning speed, in just three months in 2005. However, del Toro had begun working on set and character sketches early on, adding still more after completing the screenplay. His main visual influences were paintings and illustrations, rather than films. “I love the fairy tale illustrations of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Nielsen and remain entranced by the way they made fairy tales sensual and dark. Rackham, in particular, was key in this film. There is a perverse undercurrent in his work. His vision was plagued by knotty, twisted things that had a perverse will to live.”
His collaboration with his longtime director of photography Guillermo Navarro and production designer Eugenio Caballero moved swiftly. Recalls del Toro, “We were popping out set designs in one or two days. It was very intricate work: puppetry, traditional prosthetics, CGI, etc., but executed in a context that was totally unexpected. Eugenio and Guillermo were completely attuned to what I wanted. We were all incredibly driven by this.”
Having established the classical motifs of the film’s fairy tale universe, del Toro let his imagination run wild in conjuring its various denizens, from the ghastly Pale Man with his eyes in his hands to the singularly repulsive Giant Toad. As strange as they are, these characters are not entirely separate from the world of Vidal and his men. When Vidal’s dinner guests arrive during a rainstorm one night, the umbrellas that inflate to shelter them are remarkably like the heaving black flesh of the Giant Toad confronted by Ofelia. “I tried to very delicately trace visual and content parallels between the real world characters and sets with the imaginary ones,” del Toro acknowledges.
One of the most impressive expressions of del Toro’s imagination is the Faun, a towering creature with ram’s horns, mysterious opaque eyes, cascading blond hair, and a strangely jagged body. The costume was made mostly of latex rubber foam, and the ram horns were made of fiberglass horns; makeup for actor Doug Jones took five hours each day. When performing, Jones operated the lower half of the Faun’s head, while an off-camera puppeteer controlled the movement of the creature’s opaque eyes and eyebrows through a machine installed inside the head. That puppeteer was also responsible for Jones’ makeup, so the two would run through a scene during makeup. Comments Jones, “I trusted totally that whoever was operating the eyebrows and the eyes was working in concert with the bottom half of the face that I was operating, and with my body posture, the tilt of the head and the dialogue that I was speaking. If Pan had one of his explosions, the puppeteer knew when that came. He would watch my body language and follow that with his upper-half facial expressions.”
PAN’S LABYRINTH filmed for 11 weeks from June to October of 2005 in Madrid and the suburbs outside Madrid. It was Spain’s driest summer in decades -- a considerable problem for a story that unfolds in a verdant forest. Reports del Toro, “Everything was dry and brown. We literally had to shoot only around shaded areas where ferns grew for a few weeks. Immediately at camera left or right in most shots, the field was dry and dead.”
Weather aside, the filming was a memorable and enjoyable experience. Baquero reports that she loved working with del Toro and her fellow actors. “Guillermo and I started working together a few weeks before shooting, and we talked a lot about Ofelia. I had to know stuff about her that wasn't in the script, but was necessary in order to build the character. Guillermo is like an open book. He knows everything and is very smart. I tried to learn as much as I could from him,” she says. She also enjoyed watching López transform himself into the evil Vidal. “Sergi is such a funny and good man but Vidal is so mean and raw. It was incredible seeing him become Vidal. Working with all these amazing actors was a great experience.”
López relished his chance to be the true monster of PAN’S LABYRINTH. “I just had to let myself go and be the ogre of the film and enjoy the present that Guillermo gave me,” he reports. “For me it was like a big dream -- submerging myself in Guillermo’s fantastic and overflowing universe.”
Del Toro turned to DEVIL’S BACKBONE composer Javier Navarrete to create the score for PAN’S LABYRINTH, and entrusted the sound design to Martín Hernández, who has worked on all of Iñárritu’s films as well as CITY OF GOD. The score and sound design combined to create an atmosphere del Toro describes as “very expressive, very grand, fairy-tale like in some aspects. Martín Hernández and his team prepared thousands of sound tracks for environments and creatures. Javier Navarrete created a very emotional score. I felt that the central piece should be a lullaby, one that would suggest some Celtic elements in the North of Spain and be full of sadness. We tailored the score on the basis of ‘themes’ for each character and its environment, thus giving each situation its own sound and personality.”
Cuarón accompanied del Toro to the world premiere of PAN’S LABYRINTH at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. “There was 22 minutes of applause. It was so beautiful to watch that,” Cuarón recalls. “This film is a big bang of Guillermo -- if anything, the film shows Guillermo’s true potential. It’s the pinnacle of what he’s been trying to do in his most personal films, like THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE and also HELLBOY, in which you have these comic book characters have highly metaphysical conversations. Guillermo masters the genre, but the story also expresses his very personal philosophy.”
He continues, “These films are about moral choices. And they have to do with the universe of children, and how ideology becomes the first big trap and prison for humanity. What is amazing is how Guillermo juggles it all. He doesn’t lose a beat of the suspense of the fantasy world that he’s presenting. And he doesn’t lose a beat in the political discourse that he’s delivering. And within all that, there is the humanism of the piece.”
PAN’S LABYRINTH is an affirmation, serious and beautiful, of the centrality of stories and the imagination in withstanding the world’s horrors. Says del Toro, “I know for a fact that imagination and hope have kept me alive through the roughest times in my life. Reality is brutal and it will kill you, make no mistake about it, but our tales, our creatures and our heroes have a chance to live longer than any of us. Franco suffocated Spain for decades as he tried to fashion it after what he believed to be ‘good for her.’ Yet Spain didn't die; she exploded, vibrant and alive, in the 80’s. Spain lived the 60’s in the 80’s and they are still feeling the aftershocks of such a wonderful explosion.”