Just saw an interview with Guillermo del Toro in which he said “Emotion is the new Punk” and tbh that’s the mood for 2018
Holy shit dudes
As someone who has worked in both the film and literary world, this is great information and something they teach at some film schools.
For film: Always have something you are prepared to sacrifice to the producers so you can ignore the rest of their ideas. There are too many of them and 99.9% of their ideas are things like, “have you thought about adding a dead wife?” or “what if they were all cis white men?”
For books: Do not do this with book editors. They, unlike producers, know their shit. They will make your writing better. Listen to them.
Here it is, the outsider movie of the year, from our Guillermo.
And god, it’s beautiful. It’s green, everything, everything is green, a deep grotto emerald. It’s 1961, and it’s underwater, and I am living. The Shape of Water is a floating midcentury jewelry box, a fairytale for the people who always fall in love with the monster. This is the movie for anyone who has looked at what is being called monstrous and seen the extraordinary, seen something startling and misunderstood and lonely, something beautiful. Something attractive. Attractive. I love a work where the very fact of the characters’ eroticism is a daring act. It’s like Robert Rauschenberg putting his bed on an art gallery wall.
THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017) || dir.: GUILLERMO DEL TORO
“When he looks at me, he does not know - how - I am incomplete. He sees me… as I am.”
“Once the choice is made, it’s a meaningful choice. That’s why the discussion in art is that the moment Duchamp signed that urinal, he declared it a work of art because his gaze made it art. He said, if I look at it the right way, this is art. Which in a different, pop way is Andy Warhol transforming the Campbell’s soup can by making it a work of art, or Lichtenstein blowing up comic book panels. Because I think that the moment you look at it as art, and you treat it as art, it is art. There’s a willingness, there’s a faith, there’s a very, very magical alchemy that happens when somebody looks at something with enormous love and enormous passion—and it doesn’t matter what that material is. It can be a comic book page, it can be a silly story, and you don’t change it, but the way you look at it transforms it. Which is a very different exercise than postmodernism. Postmodernism or kitsch is me winking at you, saying ‘I know it’s silly, but I’m being ironic. I’m above the material.’ And for me, the transformative power of art is you are not above the material.”
—Guillermo del Toro (Read the full interview in our latest issue)
The horror? The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you, maims you, twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love. And it makes monsters of us all.
Crimson Peak (2015), directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Anonymous asked:
What say you to the lest flattered critics giving CP negative reviews?
I have not seen these negative reviews, but I can imagine and resent them.
True facts, I actually haven’t read a single “”professional”” review of Crimson Peak OR Pacific Rim, because I got my review from you all. Which I think is right – these aren’t movies made to charm a few critics, these are movies made to bring joy to the people. And Guillermo del Toro’s people happen to be my people: over-excitable nerds who are way into ~storytelling~ and monsters and how everything is really just about our hearts.
I’m sure these negative reviews will say things about how the visuals are the strongest part, under this strange idea that you can divide del Toro’s plots from the imagery. I’m sure they will use a large amount of condescending qualifiers when talking about it as a grand sweeping gothic Romance, as if the discerning filmgoer should always find intensity of feeling to be silly and overdone, something you have to consciously lower yourself to enjoy. I’m sure a fair few will fault it for not being as scary as they wanted, though that has nothing to do with the movie, and some will conflate fairytale with predictability, and others will not like Mia Wasikowska’s heroine for any multitude of reasons, because the greatest and trickiest beast a female hero has to face is always her own audience, who demands far more than just her blood.
But one of the probable negative comments I most anticipate resenting, is any that somehow tries to make Crimson Peak out to be lesser in importance and intelligence than any other movie that doesn’t have the gall to be Genre. As if tropes and archetypal forms somehow take away meaning. Guillermo del Toro is one of the wisest storytellers I have ever come across. He talks about monsters as the hungers & wildness in us that we try to call Other than ourselves. He talks about horror as being, quite simply, the thing that is there that should not be, and the thing that is not there that should be (from roofs to love, you’ll see that tracks). And, much like his haunted house, what clay he builds his movies on top of comes seeping up, bold & red, through the floorboards – issues of class, of feminism, of institutional control.
Sometimes people try to defend certain blockbusters by urging you to just turn off your brain and enjoy the spectacle. Guillermo del Toro and Crimson Peak do not ask you to do such a thing in order to enjoy theirs, and it’s thrilling, both on its own and for that.
In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.
Guillermo Del Toro (via iwearthecheeseyo)
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
Guillermo del Toro on how horror is inherently political as a genre, Time Magazine (x)