Guillermo del Toro’s favourite movie of the last few decades: “The movie is like a musical”
Not all auteurs want to talk about other people’s work, but a select few – Quentin Tarantino being the most obvious example – are just so passionate about cinema that they can’t help but moonlight as film commentators, too. Guillermo del Toro is one of them. The Mexican director made a splash with his third feature, The Devil’s Backbone, in 2001, and rocketed to international adulation with the 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth.
Set in Spain during the Franco dictatorship, it follows a young girl, Ofelia, who seeks wonder and escape from her tyrannical stepfather in an abandoned labyrinth that harbours fantastical creatures. Del Toro usually works in the realm of dark fantasy, flipping the usual conventions of humans conquering monsters in favour of villainous humans preying upon misunderstood magical creatures.
Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars, and his 2017 romance The Shape of Water won four, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. Based on his obvious love for the fantasy and horror genres, you might assume that del Toro’s favourite movies would be in this realm, but in reality, it’s the opposite. Over the years, he’s hailed filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, and he has even cited Ingmar Bergman as a key influence.
In a 2017 interview with Bright Wall/Dark Room, del Toro discussed all of the factors that make a film cinematic beyond its narrative. For example, he asserted that the rhythm of editing determines the ‘musicality’ of a movie. Some films, like Mad Max: Fury Road, are percussive, he explained, whereas others are more melodic. In this latter category, del Toro argued that no other director is as masterful as Steven Spielberg. “He is constantly dispensing three-minute, one-shot sequences in all of his movies that are amazing,” the Crimson Peak director said. “That’s why my favourite film of his in the last couple of decades is Catch Me If You Can.”
Released in 2002, Catch Me If You Can is a cat-and-mouse caper in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a young conman who successfully masquerades as a doctor, a pilot, and a lawyer before Tom Hanks’s FBI agent catches onto his cheque forgery and tries to hunt him down. According to del Toro, the film is all about rhythm. “That movie to me is like a musical,” he said. “You cannot choreograph a movie with more precision than that movie is choreographed.”
Every shot of the film, he explained, is a masterclass on how to create the perfect interplay between the actor’s movement and the camera. “Most of the time, you find discussions start and stop at content, at dramaturgy,” he continued. “What is it about, what the characters do, what does the story mean… or they talk about the cinematography, but the reality is, when you orchestrate a movie, you’re orchestrating everything—and only about a third of it is often discussed.”
When it was released, Catch Me If You Can was a hit. It even beat the likes of The Bourne Identity and Chicago to become the eleventh highest-grossing film of the year. However, for whatever reason, it has failed to maintain its stature. Maybe it’s been eclipsed by Spielberg’s formidable track record with action-oriented summer blockbusters or DiCaprio and Hanks’s never-ending supply of box office hits. Regardless of the reason, it deserves more appreciation.
