You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the subjectivity of human perception regarding humor, attraction, and fear.
Guillermo Del Toro emphasizes that individual preferences and reactions to humor, beauty, and fear are inherently subjective and cannot be regulated or controlled by societal norms. This understanding encourages acceptance of diverse opinions and experiences, reminding us that everyone perceives the world differently.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of comedy, one could use this quote to illustrate how humor varies among individuals.
I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.
As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don't.
If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call 'Hollywood' movies and truly bizarre, what you would call 'arthouse' movies.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.
When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You're the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.
We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.
You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.
The only boundaries we have are in form. There are no obstacles in thought.
No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.