I now have these alcohol markers, and they’re very quick. They are my favorite medium. Not only can I do a drawing fast, but I can start a drawing, put it aside, and then come back to it.

MSZ: Has that change in medium affected how you approach the notebooks?

GDT: Yeah, because now, with the markers, I can do a drawing in thirty minutes, whereas before, with acrylic, I would need, like, an hour. I’m self-taught, so the way I figured out how to use acrylic was to start with the darker shade and then add highlights. But with markers, you start with the lightest shade, and then you start adding darker, and darker, and darker colors. At the end, if you need it, you can put a layer of highlights on. It’s much faster.

MSZ: Besides experiments with color, how do you determine what you put in a notebook and what you don’t?

GDT: Honestly, I don’t think about it. If I’ve already given instructions to a sculptor, or I’ve already talked to the designer about a concept, I don’t put it in the book because it’s not a journal, really.

MSZ: What about the blood splotches and so forth, those elements that give the notebooks a sort of vintage quality?

GDT: What I was trying to do in the third notebook, in particular, was make it feel like a found object. I was doing these long, drawn letters, with long bottoms and flourishes. But it became very tiresome, and after a number of pages, I said, “Oh, screw this.” But during that time, I found the right color for the blood, and I thought it looked good to have it, so that it started to look like a found grimoire.

What is interesting is that I tried, most of the time, to do a little composition on each page. That’s why the blood helps now and then, or a little Lovecraftian symbol here and there.

MSZ: So your composition is really localized to a single page.

GDT: Yeah. And I actually try to do a composition across facing pages a lot of the time, although I’m often working with multiple projects at once. I don’t always succeed, but I try to make it coherent.

I like to say that we make only one movie in our lifetime—a movie made of all the images of all our movies. I believe this is true of Hitchcock, for instance. Hitchcock made a single, giant, symphonic movie. You can see Hitchcock trying a thing in one movie and cannibalizing it later. I think this is true of many great filmmakers that I admire. But I also think it’s true of guys that are consistent with themselves. Not that they’re good or bad; they’re just consistent.

I think these books are important to me because they narrate the story of that single movie I’m trying to make. So the composition in them, the colors, everything is important to me in the same way that Bleak House is. The house is in all of my movies—not only the ones I’ve done, but the ones I want to do if I’m lucky enough to survive a few years.

MSZ: Looking at Bleak House, your notebooks, and your films is like walking through your head.

GDT: Exactly. When you see a photo of Francis Bacon’s studio, for instance, the floor is thick with colors. You see not just the color, but the vigor of the brushstrokes. You go, “This is a single, forceful, incredibly precise beautiful brushstroke, or a passionate brushstroke.” In the case of Bacon, I think they should exhibit the studio and the paintings because you’re going to see just how much paint ended up on the floor. Or when you see a Van Gogh in person, the reason they are impressive is how thick with paint they are. You can imagine the guy almost unable to stop himself to get there with the next brushstroke full of paint.

MSZ: To get back to the notion of the single film: I really love the juxtaposition of projects in your notebooks, where you migrate inspiration from one project into another, or you’ll find a motif for one that doesn’t show up in that movie, but then you use it later.

GDT: Before I start shooting a movie, I read all the notebooks. They travel with me. I consider the notebooks a catalog, and that’s why I try to explain to people that these are not necessarily the organized notes of a linear thinker. They’re the opposite. The notebooks are a catalog—like a mail-order catalog of ideas that I turn to when I’m low on ideas.

I’ve always got five projects because, statistically, if you have a number of projects, one eventually happens. When I concentrate on a single thing, that’s when I get blocked creatively. The mental promiscuity of having four or five things going at once in the notebooks makes them feed off one another. So I go, “That idea is great for Mountains of Madness! That idea is great for—” And I can keep the ideas and the projects alive that way.

^{Del Toro embellished Notebook 3 (here open to Pages 22A and 22B) with splotches of fake blood and Lovecraftian symbols.}

NOTEBOOKS

^{Notebook 3, Pages 4A and 4B.}

^{Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when trying to find an American distributor for the film.}

^{Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) and Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) in Gris’s antique shop.}

^{The bottom of one of the original Cronos device props.}

^{A sketch of the aging Dieter de la Guardia by del Toro.}

^{Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) examines the statue of the angel while his granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath), looks on.}

CRONOS

WATCHING A FILM in a theater holds a unique power. Guillermo del Toro works and has worked in many media, but he prefers movies because in the theater the image is vast, all-encompassing, inescapable—forming the totality of the viewer’s experience in that moment. In a theater, the audience is propelled along a time frame that the director dictates. Unlike at home or in other contexts, viewers can’t pause the story, step away for a few minutes, read a paper, call a friend, and then return at their convenience. Guillermo is a maestro who insists on full attention and immersion, and this is what the movie theater provides. In addition, film allows Guillermo to unite all his artistic proclivities in one singular vision, and so movies became his medium of choice.

Cronos (1993) was Guillermo’s first foray into feature film. For many novice filmmakers, their first film is an embarrassment they want to put behind them. Commenting on Fear and Desire, his first feature, Stanley Kubrick once said that he didn’t want the film to be remembered or shown again because it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise… a completely inept oddity—boring and pretentious.”

Not so with Guillermo and Cronos. This astonishing film reveals an already-mature visionary. It is a personal, profound philosophical rumination on the choices unconditional love demands when faced with the facets of our nature we cannot control—sexual obsession, hunger, mortality. It forces us to ask where we draw the line on our actions.