Guillermo del Toro reveals the biggest regret of his career: “That’s the way it is”
Guillermo del Toro doesn’t deserve to have any regrets. As he enters his 60s, the filmmaker, author and artist has contributed so much to the landscape of popular culture. It’s not just that he’s made a long list of incredible movies by now; it’s much more than that.
The contributions made by the Mexican artist loom large. Alongside Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro G Iñárritu, they’ve become known as ‘The Three Amigos of Mexican Cinema’, helping to bring art from their country to the mainstream. Del Toro alone has already achieved so much when it comes to merging Spanish and English language cinema, which feels especially important in Hollywood right now, at a time when Donald Trump’s administration is especially targeting and attacking the Hispanic community.
But beyond representation, del Toro’s art alone puts him with the greats. From the gothic grip of Pan’s Labyrinth, to the tension of The Shape of Water, and into the recent success of Frankenstein, his career is so powerful and so utterly crafted from his vision.
Del Toro is one of those directors you could easily spot out of a lineup. He’s so successfully crafted and curated his own cinematic world that it’s become recognisable and beloved, merging dark gothic scenes with elements of romance, catholicism and fantasy.
Accolades aren’t the be-all and end-all, but he has a shitload of them, too. With eight Oscars, three Golden Globes and seven Bafta wins all under his belt, spanning his decades-long career, it puts him up there amongst the most celebrated directors of all time – rightfully so. However, there is one regret that haunts him. Is it a bad one? No, not at all.
“I wish I could have done double the movies I’ve done, but that’s the way it is,” he said, as his one simple regret is that he is only one man, and he can’t make more.
“Not only do I wish I could work faster, I actually would love to find somebody to help me do two, three things,” he said, as it’s truly the admin side of movie-making that holds him back. While the writer and director is prolific with his ideas and adaptations, it’s merely the logistical stuff that slows it down and keeps projects hidden.
He has plenty of them, as he told AV Club, “All of them went unproduced, so far. Between Mimic and The Devil’s Backbone, I wrote three screenplays, all unproduced. So I have eight to ten screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favourite stories.”
But when you’re a one-man machine, you can’t do it all. Time can’t be thrown into getting projects produced when he’s already busy writing another or directing something else. That’s why his big regret is not having a team to help him out there, to deal with that side of things, so he can focus on merely making stuff rather than battling to get it actually made.
