Beyond the LaByrinth
Cornelia Funke pays the Pale Man a visit in her adaptation of Pan’s Labyrinth
“I was absolutely sure nobody would read it,” Cornelia Funke tells Red Alert about her novelisation of Guillermo del Toro’s classic fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth. “This is the most perfect movie I know – how can anybody turn it into words?”
Funke had met del Toro while working on the Pan’s Labyrinth section of his book Cabinet of Curiosities – an in-depth exploration of his famously intricate notebooks – and from this moment on she was the only name on his list. So when the director approached her about adapting his fairytale, the task felt like its own epic fantasy quest.
It was a quest that she relished, because, “As we know from fairytales, we have to take on the impossible tasks.”
Pan’s Labyrinth’s journey from screen to page began with Funke realising what she didn’t want to do. “I decided to keep all the dialogue unchanged,” she says, “I also decided I wouldn’t add one beat to the plot, because I think it’s perfect.”
Despite del Toro’s insistence that she make the book her own, Funke remained faithful to the film, instead choosing to add her own voice to the book through “10 short stories about key elements of the movie” expanding upon the world of the film.
“I was nervous about those stories because they were the only parts of the book that were based upon backstory I made up for his characters,” she explains. “So I sent him the first one, thinking that if he likes it then he’ll know the tone I’m going for. He wrote back, ‘Fly on with silver wings ’, so I thought I must be on the right track.”
Their collaboration would continue to be seamless as the director passed over brief notes that, as Funke says, were like icing on the cake: “We see the world quite similarly. We both believe that only fantasy shows how bizarre this world is and how beautiful and terrible it can be at the same time.”
It’s in this bizarre and beautiful world that Funke would discover something special – something that bleeds through all of del Toro’s work. “Guillermo has compassion for every creature,” she explains, “especially for the weird and bizarre creatures. He has compassion for the weak but he has no compassion for the cruel.”
Like the director’s other work, Pan’s Labyrinth is a film that celebrates the beauty of its literal monsters while showing the true evil of its human monsters. That is the beauty of fantasy, Funke believes, that it offers us an entirely new way to see our own world. “If you give reality a cloak it makes it almost foreign. You see it far more clearly,” she says. On her quest to adapt one of her favourite movies Funke reaffirmed that the true power of fantasy is its ability to help us see beyond the limitations of our own reality, understanding that, just like Ofelia in the Labyrinth, “We need to step back and see the world through different eyes.” MT
Pan’s Labyrinth is published by Bloomsbury on 2 July.