Guillermo del Toro names his filmmaking father figures: “I was raised at different ages”
Despite maintaining a signature style since the beginning of his career, Guillermo del Toro wasn’t influenced solely by horror and fantasy. He was to a massive extent, but his inspirations stretch much further than frights, far-flung whimsy, and gothic tragedy.
Raised primarily by Disney’s Pinocchio and James Whale’s Frankenstein, those two seminal pictures have defined del Toro for the last three decades. Every one of his 13 features to date contains at least one strand of thematic DNA with the pair of classics he couldn’t watch often enough growing up.
The only filmmaker in history to win Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’ has always traded in the dark, dingy, and sinister side of cinematic fantasy, whether he’s adapting comic books, repurposing fairy tales, adapting the story that shaped him, or directing giant robots fighting even bigger monsters.
At this stage, it’s safe to say that del Toro isn’t going to helm an intimate, character-driven drama set in the suburbs, turn his attention to raucous comedy, or cast his gaze towards a biopic. Still, several of the auteurs who shaped him into the filmmaker he’d become were about as far removed from the genres that have dictated his filmography since 1993’s Cronos.
“I was raised at different ages by different cinematic fathers,” he explained to the Boston Globe. “Yes, I was raised by [Ingmar] Bergman. But I was also raised by Ray Harryhausen and Robert Wise, and Terence Fisher, and James Whale. I honour the images they created at least as much as the ones created by [Federico] Fellini, [David] Lynch, you name it.”
Obviously, some of those are more blatant than others. Harryhausen’s iconic creature designs, the influence of the classic Hammer figure Fisher, Lynch’s offbeat surrealism, and the fingerprints of The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Haunting‘s Wise speak for themselves: all of those names were synonymous with themes, imagery, and onscreen archetypes that del Toro has been utilising for his entire professional life.
On the other hand, Wise also won Oscars for West Wide Story and The Sound of Music, which aren’t films anyone would call del Toro-esque. Bergman is the most interesting case, though, if only for how disparate their work is. On one hand, it’s not unfeasible to imagine del Toro putting his own spin on The Seventh Seal, but it’s an understatement to say Bergman’s Pacific Rim would be a very different kind of movie.
He’ll always be a fantasy guy first and foremost, but del Toro has channelled the masters of multiple different offshoots of cinema to refine and hone his distinctive style. Some may be more pronounced than others, but what can’t be denied is that those filmmaking father figures mentioned above would make for one hell of an interesting dinner party at the Mexican maestro’s home.
