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Guillermo del Toro is part of a dynamic generation of Mexican filmmakers that includes his friends and colleagues Alfonso Cuarón (Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (BABEL). Often supporting one another on projects, these filmmakers have revitalized Mexican cinema, making it a locus of innovation, excitement and daring. Del Toro leapt to international prominence in with his 1993 feature debut, CRONOS, an allegorical vampire tale that garnered the Mercedes-Benz critics’ prize at the Cannes Film Festival as well as five Ariels, the Mexican equivalent of the Academy Awards®. In the succeeding years, del Toro has shuttled between independent projects and mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, bringing to each his own distinctive Gothic sensibility. Like the filmmakers he cites as influences, including David Cronenberg, George Romero, James Whale and Mario Bava, del Toro has mined horror and fantasy for entertainment and for insight into the human condition, our primal fears and our own capacity to inflict terror. With each film, he has proven himself an ever more sophisticated cinematic storyteller, orchestrating atmosphere and tension while telescoping layers of meaning and information in singularly vibrant images.
PAN’S LABYRINTH is del Toro’s most personal work to date, fusing his deep understanding of childhood with his extravagant imagination and his abiding interest in the Spanish Civil War and the dangers of ideology. Tracing the fate of an innocent little girl in a landscape of man-made evil, del Toro PAN’S LABYRINTH draws us in to its complex universe from its very first frame, sweeping us along for a story that dazzles, frightens and moves. It is filmmaking at its most visionary and disciplined, and with it del Toro moves to the front ranks of world cinema.
PAN’S LABYRINTH is del Toro’s second film set against the historical backdrop of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The war began when a group of right-wing military generals attempted to topple the newly elected leftist government, which among other programs sought to implement meaningful land reform for the country’s peasant farmers. The rebel Nationalists commanded by Francisco Franco were supported by Catholic Church hierarchy and Spain’s landowning elite, and received material aid and armed support from the governments of Hitler and Mussolini. Many ordinary Spaniards, along with communists and anarchists, joined the government’s Republican Army; the Republicans also received manpower and support from the progressive International Brigades, the Soviet Union and Mexico. Estimates of the War’s casualties vary from 250,000 to 1 million.
Del Toro’s interest in the War and the Franco regime dates back to his childhood in Mexico, where many Spanish exiles sought refuge. “Mexico was a very brave country at the time of the Civil War,” del Toro notes. “We opened ourselves to any and all Republican immigrants that would come to us. These expatriates heavily shaped Mexican culture and cinema. Some of them became key mentors of mine growing up. They had tales of leaving Spain behind as children. These tales affected me a lot.”
Del Toro first explored the period in his 2001 ghost story THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, which was set in at boy’s orphanage/school in the final days of the war. He initially conceived PAN’S LABYRINTH as an outgrowth of that film, but set the idea aside when he went on to direct BLADE II. BLADE II was immediately followed by del Toro’s acclaimed adaptation of the Mike Mignola’s comic book series HELLBOY. By the time del Toro was able to resume work on PAN’S LABYRINTH in 2003, he had a different idea for the film: he would write it as a fairy tale.
Del Toro counts fairy tales among his earliest influences. Derived from oral folk stories passed down since antiquity, the written fairy tales of the 17th- 19th Centuries were filled with blood and violence as well as beauty and enchantment. Fantastic as they were, the stories spoke to the fears and anxieties faced by their audience, both adults and children.
“I have been fascinated by fairy tales and the mechanics at work in them since my early childhood,” del Toro says. “I have enjoyed reading the original versions of ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ and have always found that the form itself lends easily to deeply disturbing images. Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde in fact have some tales of thinly veiled S&M, full of horrific and brutal moments. I always try to integrate some fairy tale elements in my films, going back to CRONOS and MIMIC. Once I was done with HELLBOY I was aching to do a tale that was rooted in a visual world that I could codify and then run amok.”
Del Toro discussed his concept for PAN’S LABYRINTH with Alfonso Cuarón, his close friend and colleague for over 20 years. Cuarón loved the idea, as did producer Frida Torresblanco, his partner in the production company, Esperanto Filmoj. Esperanto thus joined forces with The Tequila Gang, the production company co-owned by del Toro and his longtime producer Bertha Navarro, to make the film. Torresblanco notes that the arrangement allowed for del Toro to work without creative restrictions. “Alfonso really was so curious about what Guillermo wanted to do. He said, ‘I just want to make this happen – I want to see this movie!’ Alfonso has total trust in Guillermo,” she says. “I think for Alfonso, it was important to give Guillermo a platform of total freedom. That’s something the three of them -- Alfonso, Guillermo and Alejandro González (Iñárritu) -- really need. To express themselves, to let their imaginations go.”
Adds del Toro, “Alfonso and I met at a time when we could only dream of film and went at it with blind faith. We had worked together in a TV series and later, officially, as co-producers of Sebastián Cordero’s CRÓNICAS. We are truly like brothers. I wanted Alfonso involved as an official friend of the project that could help me and be a true champion when my strength waned. And he was.”
Like its fairy tale forebears, PAN’S LABYRINTH uses fantasy and the supernatural to confront the malevolence and violence of the real world, in this case Spain under Franco. Comments del Toro, “PAN'S LABYRINTH unfurls during the middle of the pro-Franco period, and thus deals with fascism -- its very essence. For me, fascism is a representation of the ultimate horror and it is, in this sense, an ideal concept through which to tell a fairy tale aimed at adults. Because fascism is first and foremost a form of perversion of innocence, and thus of childhood.”
He centered the story on a young girl, Ofelia, who enters the heart of Francoist darkness when she and her pregnant mother, Carmen, go to live with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal. Like generations of children before her, Ofelia has learned about good and evil from fairy tales in which life and death are a separated by a hair’s breadth. She hasn’t yet reached the age where she is ready to set aside those stories, and beings that have enchanted Ofelia in books will come to inhabit the labyrinth she discovers on the grounds of Vidal’s headquarters.
Del Toro structured the narrative to shuttle between Ofelia’s private world and the historic reality of Franco’s Spain, a place of remorseless repression and wholesale violence personified by Captain Vidal. “Vidal is sent to destroy a group of people and he goes at it without ever even wondering who they are or why they do what they do. Sadly, I believe there are there are people out there that believe they can kill others ‘for their own good’ and that go to bed peacefully, comforted by their beliefs,” del Toro comments.
Ofelia’s private world has its share of unsettling residents, including child-eating ogres and vile giant toads. The Faun, a satyr who guards the labyrinth, is an enigma, by turns playful, complimentary, and fierce. That is essentially his nature, del Toro points out. “Satyrs are neither good nor bad in classical mythology. They are mischievous, ambiguous creatures that can kill a man or give birth to a field of flowers. They are Nature: uncaring but neutral. The Faun is an ambassador, a test monitor that will push Ofelia towards revealing her own spirit or failing to do so.”
Painstaking research informed del Toro’s portrait of both real and unreal worlds of PAN’S LABYRINTH. His thorough immersion in the history of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath ensured accuracy in every detail, from its depiction of Republican resistance in Northern Spain to the Nationalist insignia on various automobiles. Del Toro is well versed in mythology and the history and forms of fairy tales, as described by authors including Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes, Vladimir Propp and Bruno Bettelheim. He drew upon that knowledge in creating Ofelia’s adventures in the underworld. “All the elements are fashioned rigorously after classical patterns: the banquet where you should not eat, the three doors, the descent, the blood, etc.,” del Toro explains.
It is an environment that conjures shivers as easily as wonder. “This fairy world has a grimy edge to it,” del Toro affirms. “Even the fairies are meat eaters!! I wanted all the creatures to have an air of menace. Fantasy is not an escape for Ofelia but it is a dark refuge. There is something vaguely embryonic about all the magic environments because I believe that fairy tales are ultimately about two things: facing the dragon or climbing back to our world inside.”