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.
Guillermo Del ToroRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the subjective nature of joy and art, allowing for personal interpretations.
Guillermo Del Toro highlights how different emotions and experiences, such as humor and fear, give rise to various genres in art. He suggests that the appreciation of these genres is personal and subjective, marking the boundaries of artistic expression as fluid and open to individual interpretation.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions on film genres at a panel conference.
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.
The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else
I offer my performance as prayer for someone I've worked with as an actor or someone who has died. The image that comes into my head as I walk to the stage, I offer that performance up for that person.
I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I'm blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.
I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.
I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself.
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