GDT: That applies to all the things in life that are important. That’s why I find it so hard to write dialogue. Dialogue is the most challenging thing for me. In Spanish or English, I don’t care. The rhythm of it is easier for me in Spanish, obviously. But really good dialogue, which eludes me most of the time, has to be about something while being about nothing. I don’t mean the ramblings that you find in brilliant pieces of work like Barry Levinson or Quentin Tarantino. But I mean really, truly, in the same way that body language tells you a lot about the person. It’s very hard, but dialogue needs to communicate things, but not the things the characters are talking about.

If I had to, I would love to have lived in the time of silent film because I think it’s the purest cinema. Chaplin said, when sound came, “Film has died.” At some point he was very, very reproachful about it, and it was because, right at that moment, the black-and-white film was perfect. I mean, you were getting really beautiful hues of gray, and the visual language of silent cinema was completely absorbed.

^{Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) strikes a pose reminiscent of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. In many ways, Cronos is indebted to silent film.}

MSZ: Cronos is very much like a silent film.

GDT: It is. I like writing silent. I mean, I can come up with stuff I like, such as, “In the absence of light, darkness prevails.” Or, “There are things that go bump in the night. We’re the ones that bump back.” Or things that I’m proud of, like in Pan’s Labyrinth where the Faun says, “I’ve had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce.” But that’s it. If I attempt to be naturalistic, I often fail. Most of the time I fail completely.

Some people develop their own style, like David Mamet, who has a rhythm and a style that is inimitable. I suspect—I may be wrong—that part of his writing style comes from the theater theories of Sanford Meisner, with their famous exercises in repetition, like where you go, “I’m okay.” “Oh, you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” “You’re okay.” It’s a rhythm that is meant to be about listening. I think that at some point maybe Mamet realized, if you really want the audience to listen to the dynamics, you have to hammer it three times. “I’m alone.” “You’re alone?” “I’m alone.” “Alone?” “Yes, I am alone.” “You are alone.”

But it’s funny because I always say a screenplay is almost like a partitur, but it’s missing half of the musical notes and annotation. Ultimately, when the director fills those in, he’s also directing the orchestra while completing the partitur.

I’ve always written my movies, but I have a real problem with writing them the way they should be written.

MSZ: In what way?

GDT: In the way that I read every screenwriting book growing up, but I couldn’t help but disagree constantly. Because I would always think of how many times Truman Capote, or Ernest Hemingway, or Saki, or Isak Dinesen, or so many of the writers I admire don’t follow or portray their characters through any of those devices. A lot of the stuff that we leave in as screenwriters—like the “rules of the game,” the antagonist’s plan, and finally, the character’s arc—is contradicted by majestic works of fiction that contradict and question those rules.

^{Concepts by Carlos Jimenez for the frescoes that array the Pale Man’s lair in Pan’s Labyrinth.}

This translates to difficulties down the line if you follow their examples. Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance, was a difficult movie to finance. Nobody wanted to give us the money. I remember a meeting where some producers said, “Well, this is a very interesting movie. But we can’t put money into it because we think it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of people.”

They gave me a few notes, and they said, “If the girl really loves books, we should see her reading more often.” But you don’t need that. I mean, I love books, but you never see me with a book on the street. I read them at night, or I read them in the morning. I didn’t carry them around. I said, “The way I show the depth and the breadth of her imagination is when she makes up a story to the baby brother in her mother’s belly.” Because she’s not reading the story, she’s telling it. So that tells you how much she has read, but without doing it directly.

MSZ: Let’s talk a little bit about your storytelling techniques. There is a great thing you once wrote: “The epic is a vital genre for humanity.”

GDT: A lot of people think that in epics one character almost represents an entire race; the whole race is imbued in one character. Borges does that a lot. Borges talks a lot about a man who is “the” man that represents Argentina at a certain moment. In a strange sense, for me, I Am Legend is an epic because it really represents both the rise of a new civilization and the falling of another one, becoming a legend.

MSZ: It’s the microcosm that speaks to the macrocosm.

GDT: Yes. But the interesting part of that book, for me, was the fact that Richard Matheson brings the urban into horror, revitalizing it. This is not Transylvania; this is not a castle. This is the streets of an American city. What was really incredible is that I Am Legend is a very metaphysical book, in the same way that his The Shrinking Man is a very metaphysical book. The fact that somebody we have empathy with is not the winner, historically, and therefore they become the monster, the loser, the legend: “If you’re not good, the human will come for you at night.” I mean, there is a whole society of vampires outside, which he manages to show us are the antagonists. But at the end of the book you realize, “Holy crap! We are the anomaly. We are the legend.” That’s fantastic! I don’t think it’s ever been done in the movie versions.

The ending of The Shrinking Man is almost like Albert Camus. The final notion in the book is that you abandon yourself to the cold embrace of the cosmos. It’s . really fantastic.

MSZ: In that regard, two interesting things about Matheson are that he has a very strong belief in an afterlife—a very strong belief in a larger reality than the prosaic one—and in many of his books he uses himself as the main character and his family is the family in the book. He’ll often name the wife Ruth because his real wife’s name is Ruth.

GDT: Well, everybody does that. I mean, everybody that writes. Anybody that doesn’t do it, I don’t understand how they write. The same can be said of most everyone. Borges, certainly. And in a strange way—very, very twistedly—I think all the children in Dickens are sort of him in a shoe polish factory thinking, I deserve better. I think Mary Shelley is in Frankenstein big time, and so on and so forth. That is beautiful. Roald Dahl does it. H. P. Lovecraft more than anyone. And Stephen King.

^{The almost hyperbolic depiction of violence against children hearkens back to a tradition of children’s storytelling that is not afraid of the dark side.}

King and Matheson are two writers I really love because they not only bring the urban and the suburban to horror, they bring in, brilliantly, family dynamics. This is interesting because horror, during the pulp years, was always about superlative characters: a professor, a reporter, an archaeologist. They were not regular people. Fritz Leiber does a little bit more urbane characters. But Matheson, starting with the family man in The Shrinking Man, is talking about the dynamics in a marriage, how they change. He becomes a child, a baby, and his desires are no longer acknowledged. He becomes a toy. The family dynamics in I Am Legend are gorgeous—how he loses everything, and how his best friend is every night outside of the house screaming his name. Matheson and King bring you people that go to the supermarket, fill their car with gas, take their children to school. And they put them in situations you can be absolutely scared shitless about.