Exhibit a trip through the freaky mind of Guillermo del Toro
TORONTO — For the next three months, the Art Gallery of Ontario offers a door into the complex, challenging mind of filmmaker, writer, visionary Guillermo del Toro.
It’s a world of freaks, Frankenstein heads, twisted bodies and bizarre creatures. But there is also beauty and not just in the lavish costumes and plush surroundings.
It’s literally home to the Mexican-born del Toro. Many of the more than 500 exhibits in the new AGO show Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters, come from his Los Angeles spiritual base called Bleak House.
Del Toro acknowledges the exhibit, which opens today and runs through Jan. 7, is a trip through his head. Or as close as you can get in a travelling show.
“Pretty much,” he said in an interview. “In order to get the head completely, you would need to have the books and the movies. I co-exist with 7,000 movies in the house, about 6,000 books, about 15,000 graphic novels and thousands and thousands of comic books and figurines.
“So it’s very hard to get the impact of the house, which is exactly my brain. It’s like an exploded view of my brain.”
The AGO exhibit, which previously had stops at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Minneapolis Institute of Art, showcases pieces from Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Crimson Peak and Cronos among other del Toro films.
His latest, the made-inToronto/Hamilton The Shape of Water does not figure, simply because of timing, he says.
While del Toro can whip up fear on the screen — the vampires in TV’s The Strain have projectile-like stinger tongues that disgust as well as scare — his works often are more like fables and fairy tales. Children frequently figure in his stories, their innocence shining a light in the darkness.
It is no wonder, he admires Disney — although he sees a more twisted side than most.
“Some of the scariest things you’ll ever be exposed to as a human being are on Bambi or Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White,” del Toro says with a smile.
Despite his astonishing array of art and movie memorabilia, del Toro says he is not a collector or hoarder. Instead, the pieces create a place where he can “activate” his imagination.
Still, he says he can do without them.
“Like if one day it’s swallowed by an earthquake or burned to the ground, I’ll be OK,” he told a question-and-answer session this week. “Because it’s all inside.
Bleak House was threatened years ago by a fire. Del Toro remembers the phone call that followed.
“The question was: ‘Which object do you want to save?’ And I said none, because if I save one I’d hate that object because it would remind me that I didn’t save any of the others. Let it all burn or let it all stay.
“It’s very hard to choose. When someone says what is the favourite object to the collection, I say the key to enter the house.”
Inside, del Toro welcomes the chance to make peace with his darker side.
“Most people try to negate or sanitize, demonize darkness in themselves rather than try to understand it and embrace it.”
He points to Todd Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, which is part of the exhibit.
“The normal people are horrible and the freaks have a loving, cohesive society that is accepting,” he said.
Del Toro understands. He is most at peace “when I am with the oddities.”
These days, he splits his time between Los Angeles and Toronto, where he has a studio.
At 52, he seems to still be coming to grips with the business of his art.
“The natural state of a movie is for it not to get made. It takes a huge amount of effort to get them made,” he lamented.
As befitting his resumé, del Toro says he’s a fan of the Halloween tradition, although more as an observer when the actual date rolls around.
“I used to get dressed as this and that. But the problem is I can be a fat pirate, a fat zombie, a fat something,” he said. “So it’s not very scary, it’s not very daunting. I don’t look very heroic. So I don’t make up myself.
“I don’t do much, because for me, Halloween is all year.”
So while he has a soft spot for things that go bump in the night, what scares del Toro?
“Politicians,” he said. “They’re the scariest thing there is.”
His rationale is that with a monster “basically, what you see is what you get. A well-dressed monster is going to still be a monster.
“But in reality, a well-dressed monster is on TV … And they lie. And they have the agenda not to serve us, but to separate us, to make us hate each other so they can control us easier. And that’s really scary for me. And very real.”