Guillermo del Toro

Birthplace

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

Birth date

October 9, 1964 (age 47)

Occupation

Director, Writer, Producer

First Film

Doña Lupe (short)

Active Years

1985-present

Notable Films

Hellboy series, Pan's Labyrinth, Blade II, Mimic

IMDb entry

Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known as a film director of weird science fiction, fantasy, and war films, having begun is career in his native Mexico as a visual effects and makeup artist. Unfortunately, after he was given a $30 million budget for the film Mimic, he gained a lot of notoriety in the crime-ridden country and his father was kidnapped and held at ransom.

Since then, del Toro has exiled himself from Mexico where he continued his career in the United States.

Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro is both the director and producer of the 2013 film Pacific Rim. The script was written by Travis Beacham. He had this to say about the Japanese-inspired film about humans piloting giant robots to defend Earth from huge alien creatures, "It’s a great, great kaiju-vs.-mankind extravaganza. I saw all those movies as a kid; I grew up watching GOJIRA, WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD, you name it. We saw them every Sunday in Mexico; there was a matinee with either British horror or Japanese horror, so I grew up on a steady diet of Japanese horror and science fiction. And we used to get a lot of Japanese TV—ULTRAMAN, SPACE GIANT… Mexico, for whatever reason, unexplainable to me, had a huge market for Japanese fiction.” [1]

Quotes

About Pacific Rim

• “A movie like this, it’s easy to forget how unique you can make it. I wanted to make the movie not a war movie but an adventure movie — a movie that has a huge, romantic sense of adventure, grandeur, operatic battles that were not only respectable but have a huge emotional content. Because in a movie like this when you have 25-story monsters and you don’t have a sense of awe and scale, everything is lost.”
• “I wanted to recreate the sensation you have in an adventure movie of what it was to be there battling with a thing that is the size of a skyscraper – a thing that can actually face a tornado and win. When you get a budget you can do two things: you can get crazy or lazy. And I chose to be as crazy as I could. We used creativity and passion and madness as a fuel to make this movie.”
• “When we built the streets, we rigged the streets with hydraulic systems, so when a monster’s walking, the pavement is rigged to bounce. And blocks of pavement bounce and cars bounce and buildings bounce. You may think, ‘Oh – that’s CG!’ It wasn’t. We were shaking the entire set!”
• On CGI - "We approached it like Harryhausen approached stop motion. One of the things we were very clear about is no fucking motion capture. It was because I don’t want the robots moving just like human beings. I needed the robots to really move with a sense of shock absorber, a joint, a gear moving.” ^[1]
• “I wouldn’t compare it to a Godzilla film. I told my crew we should not reference other movies. We should not go and re-watch Gamera or re-watch Gojira or War of the Gargantuans because we love them, right? So we said, let’s create the world that we’re doing. We should not be doing a referential film.”^[2]

General

• "My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican."
• "If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating."
• "When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it."

Filmography

Year	Film	Director	Writer	Producer
1985	Doña Lupe (short)
1986	Dona Herlinda and Her Son
1987	Geometria (short)
1993	Cronos
1997	Mimic
1998	Under a Spell
2001	The Devil's Backbone
2002	I Murder Seriously
2002	Blade II
2004	Crónicas
2004	Hellboy
2006	Hellboy: Sword of Storms (animated)
2006	Pan's Labyrinth
2007	Hellboy: Blood and Iron
2007	The Orphanage
2008	While She Was Out
2008	Rudo y Cursi
2008	Insignificant Things
2008	Hellboy II: The Golden Army
2009	Rabia
2009	Splice
2010	Biutiful
2010	Julia's Eyes
2011	Megamind
2011	Kung Fu Panda 2
2011	Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
2011	Puss in Boots
2012	Rise of the Guardians
2012	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
2012	The Captured Bird (short)
2013	The Hobbit: There And Back Again
2013	Pacific Rim

Videos

Pacific Rim (2013) - Pacific Rim (2013) - Comic-Con Interviews(03:35) 0 views

Pacific Rim Comic-Con Exclusive Guillermo Del Toro(02:23) 7 views

References