Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an exploration of childhood experiences through art and storytelling.
Guillermo Del Toro's quote suggests that his works, such as 'Pan's Labyrinth' and 'Devil's Backbone', are deeply influenced by his own childhood memories. This highlights the importance of personal experiences in the creation of art and how they can shape narratives filled with nostalgia, wonder, and sometimes darkness, as seen in his films.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of personal experiences on creative works.
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.
A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.
Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture.
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here.
I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.
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