Guillermo del Toro talks about writing, inspiration and commerce

The Tavis Smiley show on PBS some time ago featured an interview with film-maker Guillermo del Toro. Here are some tidbits:

About the inspiration for Pan's Labyrinth: "...when I was a kid, I was very given to lucid dreaming, which essentially meant that I would – I hope it was lucid dreaming – I would go to sleep and start dreaming I was in the exact bed I was in, in the exact room I was in, and things would come out in that room. Monsters. And in one of the dreams, at midnight I would hear the chimes of the church at midnight, and I was in that bed, in that room, and a faun like the one in the movie would come out from behind my grandmother’s armoire." [Note: his grandmother had him exorcised twice...]

On the little notebooks he carries around: "I make notes all day long. I do drawings…Each project is sort of, each book is an artistic project for me. So what I do is I try to make it different. My writing changes on each of the notebooks. This sounds completely like the, this is my seven writing, (laugh) like the psychopath in "Seven," really tight and neat. Because I have a finite number of these books, and I said, “Well, I gotta start writing smaller (laugh) or I’ll lose it.”

On mixing art and commerce: "I came here first in 1994, essentially to pay off my debt from “Cronos,” which left me broke for the first time. I've been broke three times. And that’s one of the ways to keep from being corrupted. I go do something like “Devil’s Backbone,” and then I go do something like “Blade” or “Hellboy.” And then I make it a point, spiritually and personally, and it’s artistic survival to come and do “Pan's Labyrinth,” which, financially, for me, not for other people, but for me, it’s a catastrophe financially. (Laugh) But it’s spiritually amazing to do. I need it as much as one would need to breathe. So, I recommend going for bankruptcy a couple of times. (Laugh) And it’ll keep your spirituality intact."

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