Tragedy is tolerated only by a cohesive society.

This not just as a genre hut as an event. With the Greeks, the state didn’t guarantee citizenship hut rather one’s status as a human being.

SHOCK doesn’t matter, only its consequences.

STORYTELLING

^{The Book of Crossroads prop from Pan’s Labyrinth.}

MSZ: Let’s talk about your screenwriting teacher.

GDT: Two teachers were important for my love of cinema: Daniel Varela in high school, who was my film teacher and a dear friend—a very visual and sophisticated guy. And Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, who was a very literary, script-minded director. In America he became famous for a really brilliant gay comedy called Doña Herlinda and Her Son, which I produced for five thousand dollars. It starred my mother, which led to some very interesting and fun speculation in my homeland.

The decision to cast my mother came from jaime Humberto when he saw my short films and said, “Your mother is a pretty good actress.” He also saw what I was doing with my short films for very little money, and he said, “Would you like to be the line producer?” So one of my best friends and I were the producers, and they gave us five thousand dollars. I didn’t know anything about anything. I had never seen that much money at once. I was twenty-something, nineteen, I don’t remember.

I said to the producer, the guy who gave out the money, “What if I give you change?” And he said, “Well, if you give me change, I’ll give you a bonus of five hundred dollars.” So, in order to give him change, I ended up driving the grip truck and the electric truck on my own, back and forth, between Mexico City and Guadalajara, and then taking the bus back. I was like a thousand dollars under. So the guy gave me five hundred dollars, which I immediately put into my next short film.

MSZ: That’s great. Your screenwriting teacher, from what you say in some of your audio commentaries, sounds like he was really smart and didn’t say, “Well, you have to hit plot point one,” and all that nonsense.

GDT: Right. Let me make a good point about why people who say things like that are full of it. I won’t name any names, but I have read their books, so I’m not talking blindly. Some of them, they take a published screenplay and they say, “As you can see, character so-and-so does this, and plot point one, etc.” And then you realize, they are actually talking about the movie, the finished movie. They are not talking about the actual document that is the screenplay. With 90 percent of the movies that are made, 20 percent of the stuff that was written ends up on the cutting-room floor. Twenty-five percent of what was shot ends up living in a different place than it was written. And that is why, I always say, analyzing the movie is not analyzing the screenplay.

But that is now institutionalized. People talk about these things like they’re talking about Aristotelian theory, and even the Aristotelian core is valid only in Western storytelling. Eastern storytelling jettisons most of that stuff.

Jaime Humberto was a really good teacher. He encouraged us to read James, Chekhov, Tolstoy—not just “biz” books on screenplay writing. Some of his rules were very simple. He used to say, “You can’t write what the character can’t describe with actions or looks.” So when I open a screenplay and it reads something like, “Jack enters a room. You can see that he is a man to be reckoned with. He has the world on his shoulders, but he will take it by the throat and shake it until its end,” I say, “This is a terrible screenplay writer because the only thing that the camera can do is show Jack coming in. That’s it.” Humberto used to say, “If you put an adjective on the page, a qualifier, you’ve got to prove to me how you’re going to shoot it.”

The second rule he gave us—and I think he misread something somewhere about how every draft of a movie is different colors—is the first draft of any screenplay had to be on pink paper. That was him going completely wrong with the color paper theory. But the reason he used to do it is because you cannot photocopy pink paper. And back then, if you wanted to distribute a screenplay, you had to photocopy. He used to say you never, ever, ever show anyone, or distribute, the first draft. He would say, “If you like it so much, you type it again on white paper, and then you distribute it. And if you are able to type it again and not change anything, that means it’s really, really good.”

Now, this was misguided and all, but it was really good discipline. He was a really tough guy. I always tell the story of how back then, you didn’t have even word processors, and he made us typewrite everything by hand. So formatting became an act of discipline. Take The Devil’s Backbone. Before I did Cronos, I wrote Devil’s Backbone as a feature. It was a very different screenplay. He took the screenplay, which was pink, and he flipped through it. He flipped through it, and he threw it in the wastebasket, the original. He said, “It’s badly formatted. If you cannot take the trouble to write it well, why should anyone take the trouble to read it well?” It was too Mr. Miyagi for me, so we kind of fell out of contact for several years after that. That’s when I wrote Cronos. I said to myself, “I can retype Devil’s Backbone by memory, or I can start over and do Cronos.”

MSZ: You’ve mentioned that he used to say, “If a road is not presented, you build one.”

GDT: Yes. He always said that. He would give you rules that you understood immediately. One of those things he used to say was, “Look, it’s bullshit that a character needs to change through the movie. Sometimes the greatest character is the one that doesn’t change.” Like Candide, or Forrest Gump. Those are characters that, whatever they do, they stay the same. It’s not like Forrest Gump becomes smarter in the end. Sure, there is a journey, there is a pilgrimage, but there is not necessarily what Hollywood understands as an arc.

^{As a screenwriter and director, del Toro is able to identify with all of his villains, even the menacing Vidal (Sergi López) in Pan’s Labyrinth.}

Another thing that Humberto used to say was, “In writing for a film, there is the star of the film and the main character. And sometimes they are very different things.” For example, the main character of Fight Club is Edward Norton’s. But the star of Fight Club is Brad Pitt. Or take The Shining. Tom Cruise said to me that Kubrick told him he cast Shelley Duvall because he found her irritating, and he knew that the star of the film, the main character he was painting, was Jack. So all the big moments, they all go to Jack. Kubrick said, “The only way to make people understand him is to share some of his darkest emotions in spite of themselves.” So if he made Jack’s wife grating enough, the audience would enjoy him going insane because they dislike her. I find that misanthropically fascinating.

In my own films, in Pan’s Labyrinth and Mountains of Madness, I identify with the assholes as much as I identify with the good characters. Why? Because we are all assholes, many times, during the day. You have to write them all from inside. Both of them have to contain things that you would be ashamed to discuss publicly, aspects of your own person that you can socialize only by fictionalizing them.

MSZ: In your work, one consistent theme that runs throughout is that your characters triumph if they hold true to themselves when put to the test. And often, they are silent victories.