‘The Devil’s Backbone’: the low budget gem Guillermo del Toro considers his real directorial debut
Question: When is a director’s third movie actually their directorial debut? Answer: When that director is Guillermo Del Toro.
In 1993, everyone’s favourite monster-obsessed Mexican filmmaker made his first movie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a gothic horror movie in which an elderly antiques dealer is bitten by an ancient insect that crawls out of an ornate scarab-like relic. He becomes young and vigorous again, but there’s a catch: he also develops a taste for human blood. Ain’t it always the way?
The film was rapturously received by critics in Del Toro’s native Mexico, and soon he was whisked off to Hollywood to make a big-budget horror movie. This time, instead of a slow-burn, unsettling indie horror featuring a small insect transforming a human into a monster, Del Toro was tasked with making a full-blown creature feature about giant mutant cockroaches hunting New Yorkers in the city’s dank, dark subway tunnels.
While Del Toro is proud of Mimic and believes it contains “a couple of scenes that are amongst the best I’ve done,” his experience making the film was torturous. He butted heads with his producers, especially Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly once commandeered the set and told Del Toro he was going to teach him how to direct a film. At other points, the notorious producer – who was known throughout Hollywood as a domineering asshole long before he was also exposed as a sex criminal – attempted to get Del Toro fired. “It remains one of the worst experiences of my life,” Del Toro remembered in 2018.
This is why, even though Del Toro had two movies under his belt in 2001, he still considers that year’s The Devil’s Backbone “basically what I call my first film.” During this period, he was already attached to make the Wesley Snipes action-horror sequel Blade II. Still, he couldn’t quite get the taste of Mimic out of his mouth, making him reticent to commit to another elaborate Hollywood endeavour.
Thankfully, a saviour arrived in the form of a ghost story set at a spooky orphanage in Civil War-era Spain. Del Toro had originally written the Devil’s Backbone script before he made Cronos, but after Mimic, he enlisted David Muñoz and Antonio Trashorras to help craft a new and improved draft. Del Toro knew he needed to make this film, a smaller and more personal project, before taking a second stab at Hollywood, and he was so insistent on this that he was willing to let Blade II go.
“If you want to take it away, take it away,” Del Toro recalled telling New Line Cinema and Marvel, “but I need to do The Devil’s Backbone before I do Blade II. I need to be completely in control as a director…before I go and deal with a star and all the action and all the big production.”
For the visionary future Oscar winner, The Devil’s Backbone was about proving to himself that he was the master of his own destiny again, while confirming that filmmaking didn’t have to be an infuriating, soul-destroying experience. “It’s my third movie, but it’s the first time I operate, protected and cared for, with Pedro Almodóvar as producer,” the director recalled. “I bring it to maturity. It was not advice, it was a liberation.”
Ultimately, The Devil’s Backbone – which many still consider Del Toro’s finest achievement as a director – is a testament to what can be accomplished if a creative partner says, “You have the reins, you are protected, and we support you.” In fact, it could be argued that if Del Toro hadn’t taken the time to go back to his roots, with complete creative control, at that point in his career, he mightn’t have evolved into the genius behind movies like Hellboy, The Shape of Water, and Nightmare Alley.
