Guillermo del Toro Quotes

When I was a teenager there was no video in my country. Betamax came to Mexico very slowly.

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.

In a world where we are so pragmatic and materialistic, fear is the only emotion that allows even a sophisticated person to believe in something beyond.

You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.

The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.

If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It’s like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it’s gorgeous. You feel very exposed.

I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple...when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate.

You have to believe the magic to see it.

"What makes a man a man?" a friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

When you see something or experience something extraordinary, you can't go back to normal... I think that that's the way I see the supernatural-as happening in mundane circumstances or to people who are unprepared.

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness.

I think video games are going to completely take over storytelling in our society. Video games are not a fad.

There is beautiful in the grotesque.

There's nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue

My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.

You can't explain success in retrospect. The moment you leap into the void, that moment is impossible to negate, after success.

...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.

I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film.

I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.

Your heart is uncomplicated. It knows what it knows and acts accordingly. Greater wisdom is hard to find.

In real life, what scares me is politicians, corporations and people that think they know what the world should be.

I was an altar boy, a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary, I was a choir boy but then at the age of 14 I discovered masturbation and all that went out the window.

You give yourself to the world for people to either praise or destroy.

People tend to think that big things only happen to big people ... I think that is not true. The small decisions we make every day define who we are and define the world around us. ... But I bet to you there is a decision every day in your life where you affect somebody else.

You may occasionally be hurt by the sort of cavalier cruelty of commentary if you go into online forums, so there’s definitely a maturity about not seeking validation from everyone, every single time.

I try to find inspiration in books, paintings, illustrations and the one thing I try to avoid is just being inspired by other movies, because then you just are talking about movies in movies. I try to talk about movies that are culturally and spiritually a little more diverse.

As a child that was disenfranchised from everything, and that was in a world that was the wrong size, run by the wrong people, the wrong morale and the wrong rules, I felt completely outside of that, and I wanted some measure of control, and the measure of control I found was through fear.

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".

I'm the freaky version of that superhero who says, wherever there is injustice, I shall be there. Whenever there is a difficult project, I'd like to be there.

I absolutely am a big Call of Duty fan. Every time a new Call of Duty comes out – I never play the games online, but I play the solo version super fast. My family knows not to interrupt me the day they come out, they know it's a sacred date for me. I think my favorite visually, of all of the Call of Duty games -- even if it's not as sassy and high tech -- is World at War because. That game has some really incredible episodes in Berlin and the Japanese fields. It's really quite arresting for me, visually, and it was very immersive. But I love Modern Warfare, too.

When I see a short schedule, my question to the director is, are you really comfortable with this, or are you doing it to be a good boy? At the end, you only win the medal if the film is good, you don't win a medal if the movie is on time.

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

Movies that look safe are less interesting.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

Frankfurt, discussing a stuntman: He missed being killed in that shot be literally half an inch.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others

What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.

You can always go back to not making any money, and then you get the freedom. And I'm going to continue doing it, because it really is a fantastic sense of liberation.

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with cinema.

When you work with a great director, you can have a great partnership.

I love the creation of these things — I love the sculpting, I love the coloring. Half the joy is fabricating the world, the creatures.

They're getting more and more experience on what to expect, and the Hellboy audience is such a faithful and fanatic audience as I am, and you have to really be very open about what you do