Pan’s labyrinth
The untold story of Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy classic.
Spring 2006. Guillermo del Toro is travelling from New York to Toronto to oversee a colour correction on his sixth movie, Pan’s Labyrinth, ready for its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It’s been a hellish shoot, with del Toro’s quest to realise his most personal vision to date thwarted at every turn. The wretched luck that would contaminate each department during filming was foreshadowed in pre-production, when the director exited a London cab without his cherished diary containing the illustrations and annotations that would act as the building blocks of the film. But that was just the beginning.
Pan’s Labyrinth would subsequently be cursed with a forest fire, freak weather, budgetary woes, political backbiting and a couple of production-design miscalculations worthy of Spinal Tap. But now, finally, the pain is over – a couple of colour tweaks in Toronto and the movie will be locked and loaded.
“The hard drive of the film was stolen from my suitcase,” del Toro recalls, the chill still evident in his voice as he talks to Total Film a decade on. “I was so afraid someone would post it on the internet or make a pirate copy. But I felt, the moment I lost that hard drive, such a huge loss. And then I realised ‘I love the movie’. In spite of all the suffering, all the bad news, I felt that.” Thankfully, del Toro’s worst fears never came to be, and Pan’s Labyrinth premiered sight unseen at Cannes, with a
22-minute standing ovation starting a wave of critical and public adulation that has only grown to this day. “When it got vindicated by being essentially, along with The Devil’s
Backbone, my best-received movie, I felt so happy and so relieved,” remembers del Toro. “It was a hard one to make, but worth it.”
Innocence and experience
Pan’s Labyrinth was shot in the Guadarrama mountain range in central Spain between June and October 2005. But it began long before that; before, even, del Toro’s vivid imagination spilled onto the papyrus of his diary. “It started when I was a kid reading classical fairytales and exploring the underground sewer system next door,” he says, as if crawling through subterranean tunnels of waste is the most natural thing in the world. “I was really, really intrigued. I always dreamed as a kid of finding a whole kingdom down there. It became part of the seminal idea that shows up in my movies again and again, this idea of a world beneath our feet that’s accessible if you’re open to it.”
Fast-forward 30-odd years, and there is no place for the innocence of childhood dreams. Del Toro, like everyone else, is trying to make sense of the events of September 11, 2001, and “the way the world fell into place in an obedient way… When everyone got lined up against a common bogeyman.” Grimacing, he says, “After 9/11, there was stuff I was feeling – not thinking, but feeling – about war and innocence, war and peace, and the suspension of rights. I was really afraid of disobedience.”
Ideas and images started to swirl in his head: a woman married to a captain, but falling in love with a faun at the centre of a labyrinth. Swirling, shifting, cohering: Pan’s Labyrinth would be set in 1944, early in the Francoist era, with the Spanish Civil War concluded but bands of anti-fascist guerrillas still being mercilessly hunted down by the sadistic, narcissistic Captain Vidal (Sergi López). Pregnant and ailing, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), the captain’s new bride, and her young daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) travel to join Vidal at his forest outpost. Once there, a fairy in the form of a stick insect leads Ofelia to an ancient labyrinth presided over by a faun (Doug Jones), part man, part goat, part branches, earth and moss. This faun, who may or may not be trustworthy, informs Ofelia that she is actually Princess Moanna of the underworld, and instructs her that she must complete three tasks – including stealing an ornate dagger from the fearsome Pale Man (see boxout) – before the moon becomes full in order to acquire immortality.
The meetings between Ofelia (who is pure) and the faun (a trickster) are nothing short of magical to view. But they came at a price…
“I travelled to Madrid, and Guillermo and his wife greeted me in the taping room,” says Baquero, now a 21-year-old actress who can currently be seen in US fantasy drama TV series
The Shannara Chronicles. “I remember that, as I delivered the scene where Ofelia speaks to her pregnant mother’s belly, people in the room started tearing up. Upon finishing, I left the room and Guillermo followed, offering me a script and giving me the fantastic news that he wanted me to portray his Ofelia.”
One problem: Del Toro had actually written Ofelia as an eight- or nine-year-old, and so had to
redraft when Baquero, an 11-year-old Spanish actress with a handful of credits to her name, knocked everyone out. But that was small fry compared to the pains that had to be endured by Doug (‘Dougie’ to friends) Jones, the director’s go-to guy for playing fantastical creatures under a mound of prosthetics ( Mimic, Hellboy).
“The make-up for El Fauno took about five hours to apply, including glued-on latex foam bits and slip-on suit bits from the cheekbones down, along with mechanical bits that could be puppeteered from off-camera with heavy battery packs in the horns and servo gears in the forehead to operate the eyebrow and eyelids, along with the fluttering ears,” says Jones, still wincing at the pain of it all. And then there was del Toro’s idea of not using CGI to render the faun’s zigzag legs – it would prove far too expensive – but rather to attach the creature’s legs to Jones’ own after instructing the actor to “study the hind quarters of barn animals to see how their hoofs meet the ground and how they shake off flies”.
Jones laughs. “With the leg contraption, part of my leg was in green to be wiped away in postproduction, and part was either costume on my thighs or a prosthetic extension for the lower legs, all on about 10 inches of elevated stilts. Very complicated to put together, very heavy. I could barely see, barely hear, and it was very taxing to wear for those 12-hour shoot days, especially because I couldn’t fully recline in a chair during the day. [ Barcelona FX shop] DDT Efectos Especiales had to build a special bicycle seat with a bar I could lean forward on during breaks.”
Perhaps toughest of all, Jones also had to learn his lines in Spanish, and Baquero’s too in order to identify his cues. But it was worth it, del Toro assuring Total Film “I think Doug, along with Ron Perlman, is the best performer I’ve ever met in terms of transmitting an emotion through a suit or make-up.” Jones, meanwhile, proudly recalls, “About a week into filming, Guillermo sat in front of me between shots to say, ‘I know you have not heard much direction from me, my friend... That’s because you’re getting it right.’”
Disaster Movie
Unfortunately the same could not be said elsewhere. The problems had begun the moment del Toro started pitching, with every major and minor studio in Hollywood turning down the movie when he refused to make it in English and relocate the action to the Nazi regime in
‘Watching movies is a religious and intimate experience. I think that it speaks to the essence of who you are’
Guillermo del Toro
Germany. “They offered me $30 million, which is basically two times the budget, but I thought, ‘Well, that’s a completely different movie. I’m trying to make a companion piece to The Devil’s
Backbone.’ I most certainly said no,” he growls. A Mexican mogul who had co-financed The
Devil’s Backbone came on board, prompting del Toro to sell many of his belongings, rent out his home in LA and move his family to an apartment in Spain. A week later, the mogul dropped out.
Pan’s Labyrinth had to be sold to many territories “for peanuts”, and del Toro had to put up his salary as collateral (to this day, the film has not been profitable to him). Finally Bob Berney, who had distributed Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá,
También in America and who founded production and distribution company Picturehouse in 2005, committed to the project, buying the US distribution rights after viewing make-up photos and creature sketches during a dinner in Madrid. Then the real problems began…
“There was a huge forest fire, and they gave us permission to shoot in the woods, but they would not allow us to use blanks on the guns, and they wouldn’t allow us to have any explosions,” winces del Toro. “Generally, the movie was regarded quite badly by a group of producers in Spain. They looked at it in a very unfriendly way, shall we say. They were checking every day [ that] all permits were in order. I suspect there was a little bit of back-stabbing behind the scenes. We kept running into big scheduling problems.”
Catastrophically, there were internal issues, too. “Everybody on every department – wardrobe, production design, make-up effects – had, at some point or another, something big fail,” del Toro continues. “We lost an entire set because the make-up effects had miscalculated the weight of the puppet of the frog [ for her first task, Ofelia must retrieve a key from the belly of a giant frog]. The production design team had one entire set built for the interrogation of the stuttering guy, and they got the measurements wrong, so we couldn’t fit it.” He sighs, then ploughs on with his list of woes. “It was the driest summer in 100 years. The movie looks like it’s set in a green forest, but actually if I moved the camera half a metre to the right or half a metre to the left, it was completely dry. We were spray-painting dry plants, and planting ferns, and spraying moss – fake moss [ made] out of coloured sawdust on the trees. We were painting the grass green.”
Even before this cavalcade of calamities befell the production, the crew were unconvinced and, to use del Toro’s description, “uninvolved”. They thought it was madness to meld fairytales and fascism, and never mind the levels of detail and imagination that their esteemed director had poured into building his precious vision.
“I wanted to cultivate a very cold palette for the outside world, and a very uterine palette for the interior, imaginary world: blood red and sort of amniotic golden,” he says, pointing out how the tree through which Ofelia enters the labyrinth resembles not just faun’s horns but female reproductive organs. “I’ve read probably thousands of fairytales. I came to the conclusion that they can be neatly divided into two categories: one is about going out into the world, abandoning the womb, the safety of childhood, and fighting the monsters. The other is about reverting to the womb. Pan’s
Labyrinth was a mixture of the two.” Del Toro sighs once more. Be it from a lack of faith or simply
buckling under the barrage of
‘Guillermo had a very clear vision of what he wanted. He’s a genius’
Doug Jones
ill-fortune, everybody, at one point or another, surrendered. “My wife, my producers, my co-producers, my crew – everybody basically said, ‘Give it up. It’s too difficult. It shouldn’t happen,’” he says.
Thankfully he didn’t listen, making it to the finishing line fuelled by righteous stubbornness and unshakeable faith.
Happily Ever After
Premiering at Cannes on 27 May 2006, then debuting in the UK at FrightFest on 25 August and in the US at the New York Film Festival on 15 October, Pan’s Labyrinth received almost universal acclaim. Roger Ebert proclaimed it his number one movie of the year, Mark Kermode labelled it “The Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema” and it scored 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, 98/100 on Metacritic. It would go on to be nominated for six Oscars and to win three of them (Cinematography, Art Direction, Make-up) – a most unusual coup for a movie not in the English language. It also took an impressive $83m worldwide. Now, just a decade on from its release,
Pan’s Labyrinth is considered a masterpiece, with its 10th birthday set to be marked by a slew of events: exhibitions of del Toro’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Minneapolis Institute of Art; a musical based on the film, with music and lyrics by Gustavo Santaolalla and Paul Williams; two coffee-table books; and a screening at the Toronto Film Festival. Two people who aren’t surprised by its upturn in fortune are Baquero and Jones, who regard it with only reverence and affection.
“There are many memories,” says Baquero, “and not only of the shoot, but also of everything that followed: all the festivals, awards ceremonies and countries I was able to travel to for its promotion. It was all so magical. It was truly a blessing of a project: one that marked a before and an after in my acting career. Working with Guillermo made me feel safe and confident. He was my mentor and a rock for all of us.”
Jones shrugs. “Guillermo had an extremely clear vision of what he wanted,” he says. “He’s a genius.”
But the final word should go to the man himself. As ever, he has plenty to say, much of it from the heart. “Watching movies is a religious and intimate experience,” he begins. “I think that it speaks to the essence of who you are. When people dislike a movie, they dislike it because it doesn’t speak to them. It remains a foreign object. But when a movie is absorbed, it becomes as much part of the make-up of your world as a spiritual experience. I came out of Terry Gilliam’s
Brazil, for example, as if I had been washed in a holy river. I knew that that movie was going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Well, to this day, Pan’s Labyrinth is the film that I feel is the best of the movies I’ve made, and the one that people still come up to me [ about], genuinely moved. They tell me how deeply it affected their lives. There’s something in the spirit of this movie. Everybody that worked on it, every person that stood by it and never gave up, left a little bit of blood, a little sweat, a little tear. And you can feel it in the movie.”
Pan’s Labyrinth is out on DVD and BD now.