“Pan’s Labyrinth” turns 20 this year and will return to cinemas. To celebrate, I am digging back into the Cinema Junkie archives for my interviews with Mexican director Guillermo del Toro and a fresh look at “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Twenty years ago, del Toro decided to step away from Hollywood after making the popular films “Blade II” and “Hellboy.” He wanted to make something more personal and knew he could never have the complete control he wanted over a Hollywood film with executives and accountants looking over his shoulder.
Del Toro represented a new breed of Mexican filmmaker, one who could straddle multiple cultures and work globally. It was 2006, and he, along with Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, was trying to break down the boundaries between independent and commercial films, as well as those between Mexico and Hollywood. All three had already proven they could succeed on both sides of the border.
But trying to move back and forth between Mexico and Hollywood, and between personal and commercial filmmaking, was not easy.
“You can’t be a pussy,” del Toro told a crowd at Comic-Con in San Diego in 2006. “You have to be stubborn and kind of unyielding.” That meant holding out for years until a Hollywood studio finally approved his choice of Ron Perlman to play Hellboy. Del Toro confessed that if he had been less stubborn, he would have had far more films to his credit after a decade in the industry. But he has never regretted the choices he made, even when he could not claim the films as entirely his own.
“’Mimic’ was tampered with, and ‘Blade II’ was part of an ongoing franchise,” del Toro said. “But I enjoyed the hell out of making ‘Blade II.’ It was pure joy. It was like the difference between dining out at a little French bistro versus having a six-pack and a pizza. I think I enjoy both. And they are both part of my personality in a strange way.”
But as he contemplated what to make after “Hellboy,” he opted for the six-pack and pizza, or maybe more like cerveza and tacos. He pursued “Pan’s Labyrinth” as his follow-up project, and it was a small independent film co-produced by Mexico and Spain.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” serves up a dark fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco’s Spain. The film taps into some of the same historical and moral themes that del Toro tackled in his Spanish Civil War ghost story, “The Devil’s Backbone.”
Neither film could have been made in Hollywood.
“I never would have attempted to do ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ in Hollywood because we would have audience tested it, and we would have a super-happy ending with dancing little creatures.”
“Pan’s Labyrinth” centers on a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) whose widowed mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), has married Captain Vidal (Sergi López), a cruel, intimidating man. Vidal has no interest in either Carmen or Ofelia; his only concern is that Carmen produce a male heir. Ofelia escapes her stepfather’s oppressive rule and the bleak conditions of the rural military outpost by reading fairy tales. Then she discovers a labyrinth hidden in a nearby forest. There, she finds a refuge inhabited by fantastical creatures. But it’s a dark refuge with monsters that reflect the human ones above.
In my 2006 interview with del Toro, he said the film was inspired by the political climate in the United States at the time.
“I think the movie is about two things that are incredibly important now and they were incredibly important then,” del Toro stated. “And those are choice and disobedience. We have just gone through an election in this country that shows the importance of those two. Especially when you have a structure behind power that was telling us to simply obey and conform and support and not question.”
In November 2006, George W. Bush was in his second term and waging a war on terror. The midterm elections ended more than a decade of Republican rule, with the Democratic Party gaining majorities in both chambers of Congress, winning governorships and making gains in state legislatures. This “Democratic wave,” as it was called, was attributed to a number of things, including a decline of the public image of Bush, dissatisfaction with his administration's handling the war in Iraq, Bush's legislative defeat regarding immigration reform, and a series of scandals that year involving Republican politicians.
Hmm? Anything sound familiar?
Del Toro’s 2006 comments on his film resonate today: “I think disobedience is the threshold of responsibility and I think you have to go by your instinct and the movie tries to show through a parable that choice and disobedience go hand in hand sometimes.”
In “Pan’s Labyrinth,” choice defines each character. The fascist captain is defined by his choice to torture and brutalize people. A housekeeper is defined by her willingness to support the resistance. A doctor is defined by his unwillingness to obey orders.
“The idea was to actually show permutations of the same angle, which is ‘Do I obey blindly or do I stand by my choices?’” del Toro explained. “You see it in each of the characters, be they adult or child, and each of them has a choice and takes it or not, and how when you displace that choice to a religion or a political faction, you stop being responsible for your choices and you just follow orders. That’s one ending. If you decide to stand up, that’s another ending. Your choices ultimately define who you are.”
And the young Ofelia is defined by her decision to explore a fantastical netherworld filled with strange creatures.
Ofelia crosses from the real world into a fantasy one. Crossing borders is something that del Toro is especially adept at. Ethan Van Thillo, founder and executive director of the San Diego Latino Film Festival, noted, “Guillermo del Toro is a border crosser, both physically by producing and directing films in Mexico, the United States and Spain, and through his films, his films cross all types of genres, all types of categories and reach audiences at many different levels.”
Despite this mix of elements, del Toro believes his films maintain a distinctly Mexican sensibility.
“The willingness to mix and match and transpose and the transgression of the genres, mixing a war movie with a fairy tale, the desire to not conform, the distrust of institutions, and the celebration of fantasy, all that is very Mexican,” del Toro insisted.
And very Latin American, Van Thillo added. “You look at the magic realism made famous by Gabriel García Márquez, where you can be both fantastical but at the same time you’re rooted as a viewer in the intense, gritty reality of what you’re seeing there.”
“Pan’s Labyrinth” does precisely that. There’s incredible beauty in the film, as well as horrific violence. What makes the violence so effective may be the fact that del Toro has witnessed death and violence firsthand.
“I speak about it from a humanistic point of view but from an absolutely intimate knowledge of it,” del Toro said. “I have experienced it in my life and I’ve been the victim of and the witness of a lot of violence in Mexico, including the kidnapping of my father. So it’s not a detached view ever. Even if I choose to do it as an action spectacle in 'Hellboy.' It’s never detached.”
Back in 2006, del Toro was an inspiration to a young Latino filmmaker like Aaron Soto, who appreciated his ability to enter a global marketplace without sacrificing cultural identity.
“He can’t change Hollywood, that’s impossible, but he’s gonna put something from his roots from his culture in American cinema,” Soto said. “I know he feels like a Mexican director but at the same time I think he feels like a director of the world, he doesn’t have boundaries and that’s what I like about him. Art doesn’t have a nationality.”
Del Toro works in the underappreciated genre of horror. But his horror films push the boundaries of the genre. He’s turned a vampire into a Christ figure in “Cronos”; sympathized with a ghost in “The Devil’s Backbone”; showed that lethal bugs were just fighting for survival in “Mimic”; and revealed compassion for the brooding, day-walking vampire superhero in “Blade II.”
Del Toro had once told me that horror films generally use horror to talk about inhumanity, but that he wanted to do the reverse, or at least to make a horror film that reveals some kind of hope.
“I really think that horror contains a particular code of poetics that is all its own,” del Toro said. “It certainly is the one that approximates metaphor and parable the closest, and as such is one of the most poetic and liberating genres in cinema because it is the metaphor made flesh. And it is spiritual. The oldest spiritual tales will always be about angels battling demons or man battling demons. That’s fantasy, that’s the horror. I think we can articulate particularly difficult spiritual subjects through this genre.”
But in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” del Toro said, “The biggest monster is the fascist captain. And the monsters that inhabit the fantasy world are actually much more benign or much less perverse creatures than him.”
Taking the monster’s side and embracing the other seems especially potent right now, as politicians and the media use fear of the other to divide people. Del Toro challenges us to view the world through a different lens, one that has compassion for the monster and can see through facades that hide evil beneath the surface.
“There’s no such thing as a guy that does something terrible and doesn’t have a backstory to make sense of it emotionally,” del Toro said. “But I do not believe that means I have to artificially nuance him so that everybody has both good and bad at the same time. I do believe that there are people that do evil things, and that’s what they do. I think Sergi López’s captain is a character like that. He’s a sociopath.”
Again, the film seems to reflect our current situation, and critics of President Trump have described some of his behavior as sociopathic.
Del Toro endows the film with a dark beauty and an odd strain of Catholicism, which he says comes from being raised on a steady diet of “Catholic horror.”
Visually, “Pan’s Labyrinth” reveals the influence of illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen and taps into pagan mythology. Del Toro also references “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Wizard of Oz” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.” But once del Toro stirs up all these ingredients in his cinematic cauldron, he comes up with something uniquely and breathtakingly his own. The film is a beautiful and terrifying meditation on his theme of choice and disobedience.
When “Pan’s Labyrinth” arrived late in 2006, del Toro felt strongly that it reflected the world he saw.
“I felt definitely that the world was destroying our innocence and destroying imagination,” del Toro said. “I still fear that. One of the main things that I fear right now is that the most prosaic obedience and most prosaic materialism are eating away our spirituality and our imagination. And by spirituality I don’t mean any religious denomination. I think we cannot think beyond dollars and cents. We are becoming incredibly prosaic, and fantasy and imagination are the only doorways to spirituality these days, the only ones that we accept in a world where cynicism has usurped intelligence. So all these things were in my mind along with the incredible swing to the right that up until this election seemed to be taking a hold of most of the first world. I mean as a citizen of the world I acknowledge the fact that the destiny of America affects the rest of the world and I was very happy to see the elections turn out the way they turned out.”
Del Toro’s fears about the threat to imagination have only been amplified by the increase in the use of AI. But perhaps the return to cinemas of the wildly imaginative and richly layered tale of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” right before another crucial U.S. election, will remind voters of the importance of choice and disobedience, and how the choices you make will define you.
