Early this year, I announced the publication of a new anthology on the trilogy, Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings. One of its editor, Harriet Margolis, was very hospitable to me during my research trips to New Zealand in preparation for The Frodo Franchise. We’ve kept in touch ever since.

This past week, Harriet attended a Q&A evening with Guillermo del Toro, held to support a local film project. Recording was not allowed, but Harriet took notes at a rapid pace and has kindly written up a blow-by-blow summary of what went on.

But first, a few explanations of things Harriet mentions.

48 Hours is a filmmaking contest in New Zealand. (It started out and remains an international project, but the enthusiastic Kiwis invented their own local version.) As the name implies, filmmakers or teams of filmmakers are given 48 hours to make an entire film. The results are shown in a screening at the Paramount cinema, and prizes are awarded.

DP stands for Director of Photography. The DP mentioned, Guillermo Navarro, has regularly worked with Guillermo del Toro, and he’ll be filming The Hobbit. “2nd unit” refers to a separate filmmaking team, under a different director, that shoots scenes without the main director’s supervision. As you probably know, there were a lot of units working on The Lord of the Rings, such as Geoff Murphy’s group filming the scenes on the plains of Rohan in Central Otago.

With that, I turn this entry over to Harriet, with many thanks:

Guillermo del Toro consented to an evening’s public conversation at the Paramount cinema in Wellington on 11 November 2009 as a benefit for One for the Road, a New Zealand feature to be produced by Bonnie Slater and directed by Sam Kelly next year.

Slater, who has worked with Richard Taylor at Weta Workshop, and Kelly, who has directed New Zealand’s top 48 Hours film three different times, have made huge progress toward putting together an independently funded feature film based on a successful local play. [Full disclosure: Sam’s a former student of mine.]

Much of what they have raised so far toward producing their musical takes the form of in-kind contributions and deferred payments, but they’ve recently gotten Angela Littlejohn and Kerry Robins on board as executive producers. One immediate result is a commitment for distribution. All this after giving up on funding from the NZ Film Commission because they say the process of getting funded that way makes a production drag on, while they’re already rolling on the momentum of past successes.

It’s not surprising, after hearing what del Toro had to say about his own beginnings in film, that he was willing to help Slater and Kelly reach their goal.

Jonathan King, director of Black Sheep (2006) and the soon to be released Under the Mountain, acted as interviewer. He and del Toro sat on stage in two large leather chairs with a screen behind them that featured looping clips from five of del Toro’s features.

Del Toro began by asking whether there were kids in the audience, in case he should tone down his language. Then he shrugged, said, “Fuck,” and we were off and running. He turns out to be foul-mouthed, but very funny. (Del Toro told us later that he taught himself English from age 7 on; only a slight accent suggests that he’s not a native speaker.)

His response to King’s first question was a reference to discrimination against Mexicans, saying he arrived here with Air New Zealand and was quarantined for a month. And the swearing was particularly evident whenever he was talking about Hollywood. Justifiably, it would seem, since at one point he mentioned a Hollywood executive who said, “Why would I want to hire a Mexican? I already have a gardener.”

Del Toro described his beginnings as a filmmaker, and it’s easy to see why the comparison between him and Peter Jackson comes up. Del Toro describes making a lot of short films, using each one to learn something new, eventually nailing all the technical components of filmmaking. He also worked on special effects, prosthetics, and other components of filmmaking, often for free or at discounted rates to other filmmakers, in order to practice these things and to meet other people involved in production whom he wanted to know.

One thing del Toro did that sets him apart is that he developed marketing campaigns for his shorts, printing T-shirts and posters for forthcoming films. His audience, he noted, was often annoyed to find out that they’d spent money on promotional items for a 3-minute film.

More seriously, because there was no film school where he did his undergraduate studies, he founded one, he claims, along with a film festival that is still going. As a student, he wrote The Devil’s Backbone, but his scriptwriting teacher wouldn’t read it because it wasn’t properly formatted.

He likes genre films, and he resents their negative status in aesthetic and cultural terms, along with the difficulties of getting funding because of that status. In fact, he says he threatened a Mexican funding administrator with physical violence if funding wasn’t approved for Chronos.

At this point we saw a clip from Chronos, which led del Toro to observe that he doesn’t like ugly monsters. He thinks their design should be beautiful. He connected this opinion with Ray Harryhausen’s words on the subject, to the effect that what looks nice can nonetheless be evil. For del Toro the importance of monsters is based in part on the fact that they were created at same time as angels. They represent a possibility for discussing issues that are difficult to raise in other genres. Even the language of fantasy is more fluid. In particular, he says he resents “PC” restrictions on language.

From here on out, del Toro’s comments were increasingly couched within a moral and political framework, yet still phrased and presented amusingly. For example, he explained his insistence on making evil look beautiful as being “perhaps the revenge of a fat man.” And he repeatedly made the point that content and form “are politics.”

Nor is his moral stance simplistic. While he hates stereotypes of Mexicans, he remains capable of playing off those stereotypes. Yet he grumbled about Hollywood’s assumptions: Referring to Hollywood’s offering him scripts about bullfights and such, he quipped, “Cronenburg is Canadian, but you wouldn’t give him a script about a moose.”

Talking about Chronos, del Toro revealed that he was personally in debt after making the film, a debt it took him 4 years to pay off. In fact, the film never made money for its producers. Meanwhile, del Toro wasn’t helping himself at the time through his ignorance of the ins and outs of pitching and of selling rights.

He was not only “always reluctant” to make American movies. He went so far as to say, “I want to make anti-Hollywood films.” Making Mimic was so awful an experience that he described it as “like dating Mike Tyson.” After that, working with Pedro Almodovar as his producer in Spain on The Devil’s Backbone felt like paradise.

At this point we stopped to watch a clip from The Devil’s Backbone, which he sees as a companion piece to Pan’s Labyrinth: “They are brother/sister films.”

This clip led del Toro to talk about personal relationships in film production. He did prosthetics on one film in order to meet Federico Luppi, who then starred in Chronos. He’s had a long relationship with the DP, Guillermo Navarro. Once again, del Toro describes doing what then was for him a relatively menial job of storyboarding so that he could meet Navarro. There was some immediate friction when del Toro told Navarro that the latter wasn’t using the correct lens to shoot what del Toro had storyboarded. Navarro challenged del Toro’s knowledge of lenses, del Toro proved he knew what he was talking about, and they now get along really well because del Toro does have technical knowledge of lighting and lenses.

It’s that sort of knowledge that leads him to hate using a 2nd unit, which he says he has done only once. The Lord of the Rings forced Peter Jackson to learn to delegate not just to a 2nd unit but even further, so The Hobbit is likely to pose a similar challenge to del Toro.

If the implication from earlier comments was that del Toro was naïve in his original dealings with Hollywood, by the time Hollywood offered him Blade II he had clearly toughened up. He saw the film as a steppingstone toward Hellboy, which he had wanted to make for many years, but he also made Hollywood wait while he went back to Spain to make The Devil’s Backbone.

Moving on to the action genre in the form of Hellboy, del Toro went to Jim Cameron for advice on shooting action films. Cameron told him to remember the basics of shooting any scene.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, famous for backstabbing, del Toro stood fast on loyalty, insisting on Ron Perlman to play Hellboy. On the other hand, he admitted, “I have a mancrush on Ron Perlman.” Still, he also said, “I try to work with the same people over and over again,” like Navarro, because they develop a shorthand for working together.

After we watched a clip from Hellboy, del Toro expressed his preference for physical effects, which he thinks are more important than CG effects. He predicts the loss of physical effect work within the next 10 years. In another indication of his fondness for earlier technology, he says he’s not that interested in previz whereas he does his own storyboarding, often working on it up until 2 hours before he’s called on set. It’s no surprise, then, that he gets along well with Richard Taylor, who has also expressed his preference for physical effects. They are like “two kids in the same candy store.”

Moving on to the next film, del Toro told us that the Spanish film industry tried to shut down Pan’s Labyrinth. Once again, this was a difficult shoot, and he lost a lot of weight. Throughout the evening, del Toro repeatedly referred to his physical size. At this point he scored points with the local audience by complaining that because of the “fucking pavlovas” (a local dessert), he’s gained weight while working here.

Still, when he was talking about how difficult it had been to shoot the scene of the boy in the closet in The Devil’s Backbone, which he said was the most difficult in the film, he wasn’t making a joke about his weight when he said the difficulty was that the space was so cramped.

For del Toro, children play an important role in his films. He’s especially keen on father/son stories. He likes working within genre structures, especially when he is mixing genres. Talking about the relation between fairy tale and horror stories, he says one connection is children. For children, as he sees it, the world is controlled by aliens called adults.

This led into a clip from Pan’s Labyrinth, after which he discussed the importance of H. P. Lovecraft. Del Toro says he’s most interested in the “cosmic Lovecraft.”

Talking about future projects, he says he’d like to make Frankenstein, but “like never before.” “There’s room to make the novel,” which he says hasn’t yet been done, although the James Whale films are “perfect.”

He concluded this part of the evening by telling us that he calls his producer Peter Jackson “Pedro.” This means that, with Almodovar, del Toro’s two favorite producers are “the two Pedros.”

In the Q&A that followed, del Toro revealed himself as a very moral and very anti-right wing thinker. Among other things he dislikes about right-wingers is that “they’re sore winners.”

A question about the importance of clock imagery in his films led to a discussion of the pendulum of right and wrong in the world, along with a reference to Tolkien’s world view. Not surprisingly, the next questioner asked how to get work on The Hobbit. Del Toro’s response was encouraging: “Don’t worry.” Speaking more generally, he said people can contact him, and to the extent possible, he’ll respond. The offer was a little less generous than a blanket statement. He’s not interested in seeing scripts; he is interested in seeing storyboarding.

Del Toro told us that he believes that things happen because they’re meant to. He said this more than once during the evening, but at this point it was with regard to whether he’d encourage beginners to enter the film industry. If people don’t have the commitment to pursue their goal, that’s an indication that they weren’t meant to succeed.

In response to a question about his contact so far with theonering.net, he said he’ll have something like a production diary, but nothing onerous. He doesn’t want to spoil the magic by revealing too much—but, he admits, he loves to talk about everything.

Del Toro referred enthusiastically to Ollie Johnston on Disney and the importance of silhouette. Justifying the significance of something so apparently simple, he said that “design needs to support the story, not because it’s bitchin’ .”

For his own part, he works on storyboarding alone, and not with his DP. He plans ahead so set design can be prepared. Then he can accept suggestions from actors on the day. Drawing on yet another cultural reference, he referred to bamboo, which is strong but flexible.

Del Toro has written and co-written 20 screenplays, some of which are “morality tales.” But he doesn’t know what projects he’ll work on in the future because the future is so unpredictable.