The movie Guillermo del Toro called “perfect in every aspect”
Just because a filmmaker trades almost exclusively in the realms of horror and fantasy, it doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy more conventional forms of cinema. Guillermo del Toro may have stuck to his nightmarish guns, but the Academy Award winner nonetheless loves the classics.
Of course, this is the guy who named Frankenstein and Pinocchio as being two peas in the same primal pod that helped form his obsession with the fantastical in the first place, a deep-seated adoration that won him his third Oscar when he put his own spin on the latter, with the second lifelong dream being realised now that he’s finally got his hands on the former.
Outside of the films that everyone would expect del Toro to hold dear, with Tod Browning’s Freaks and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu among them for obvious and clear reasons, The Shape of Water architect has also celebrated the influence of Federico Fellini’s 8½, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times on his personal and professional life as a devoted cinephile.
If there’s one title from del Toro’s self-curated list that stands out as an anomaly, then it would be Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, if only because it’s the most straightforward of the bunch. A sprawling crime story and one of the greatest movies ever made, it’s impossible to imagine the mastermind behind Cronos and Crimson Peak making his own hard-boiled gangster thriller, but he’ll defend the saga of Henry Hill – and the person who made it – to the death. Quite literally, in fact.
When Scorsese found himself coming under fire that del Toro deemed unwarranted, he stepped in and issued a rebuttal on social media, where he outlined in no uncertain terms that “if god offered to shorten my life to lengthen Scorsese’s, I’d take the deal”. Hopefully, things won’t come to that, especially when it would leave him with less time to revisit Goodfellas.
Based on the assessment he offered the British Film Institute, that’s an eventuality that would strike fear directly into del Toro’s heart. “A movie that can be rewatched endlessly and remain fresh and surprising” was his completely accurate assessment. “Perfect in every aspect, behind and in front of the camera.”
There’s barely a filmmaker working today who doesn’t put Scorsese on a pedestal of his very own, and that’s even applicable to those who don’t even work in the same arena. Del Toro’s back catalogue is defined by sumptuous production design, a penchant for the mechanical, the blurred lines between fantasy and reality, and, more often than not, Ron Perlman, but those aren’t conditions that make a director unable to adore the inarguable masterpiece that is Goodfellas.
It stands to reason that he’ll never make anything like it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t love it with every fibre of his being anyway.
