Perilous fantasy collides with harsh reality in PAN’S LABYRINTH, Guillermo del Toro’s astonishing mature fairy tale. Joe Nazzaro goes underground with the writer-director to find out more…

Fairy tales aren’t just for kids anymore. Just ask writer-director Guillermo del Toro, who’s spent most of his film-making career reminding people that the fantasy archetypes they remember from their childhood have just as much resonance today, even when placed in a realistic setting.

His latest film is Pan’s Labyrinth, a darkly beautiful fantasy tale about a young girl caught between the worlds of magic and reality. “Fairy tales can be neatly divided,” notes del Toro, “between some of the more anarchistic children’s tales like Alice in Wonderland, which is completely surreal and really has no moral instruction whatsoever. Then there’s the second type of fairy tales, which are morally instructive or at their worst, repressive. But one of the basic elements of fairy tale lore is the theme of choice and responsibility, which is very much the theme of Pan’s Labyrinth, where I’ve tried to present and expose it in a magical non-repressive way. It’s almost like a poem to disobedience.”

Nowhere is that theme more evident than a pivotal scene in which the young protagonist has to decide whether or not to eat any food from a fully laden table, despite dire warnings about the consequences of her actions. “You have to realise that it’s a trial by fire for [main character] Ofelia,” claims del Toro. “If her spiritual nature is intact, then it’s truly necessary that she eats the grape so that she can learn about the responsibility of her choices. That scene has been with me since Cronos, and it was particularly overt in Hellboy, where the character was essentially born to destroy the entire world and chooses to be as close to human as possible, not by appearance but by choice and heart.”

Set near the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth tells the story of young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil), who are taken to the Spanish countryside by Ofelia’s harsh stepfather Vidal (Sergí Lopez), a captain in Franco’s army. Faced with the tough realities of her new family life, Ofelia takes refuge in a crumbling labyrinth where she encounters Pan (Doug Jones) a mysterious faun who informs her that she is actually the long-lost princess of a magical kingdom. In order to return home, Ofelia must perform three difficult and dangerous tasks, all the while not knowing if her monstrous benefactor is telling her the truth.

The Weight of Choice

Key to the film’s success was finding the right actress to play Ofelia, and while del Toro has had great success with his young co-stars in previous projects, he believes then-11 year-old Baquero is the strongest child actor he’s worked with to date. “She was pretty new; she had done five movies before, but always in supporting roles or little cameos. What I did was teach her some techniques and theatre exercises so by the time we got to shoot the movie, we already had a shorthand.

“For example, I could tell Ivana, ‘Give me a blink-blink!’ which means that at a certain point in the phrase, she’s going to blink and look the other way, so it could be something as simple as that. Or we could have a very good session of drama where I knew what made her uncomfortable or agitated, so I could help her get into the zone by imagining something terrible or happy or sad, and she could play the reality of that memory.”

In the role of villainous Captain Vidal, del Toro was delighted to get Lopez, who was always his first choice for the character. “He was the only choice,” corrects the director. “I wrote the part for him and actually met with Sergí before I had a screenplay. I pitched him the movie, and he was sold over lunch.”

Del Toro was anxious for Vidal to embody some of the crueller qualities of fascism, pointing to a scene in which the captain tortures a captured rebel who has a stammer, agreeing to let him go if the terrified prisoner can simply count to three. “‘Don’t look at him, look at me,’” the director recites dialogue from the sequence. “‘Above me, there is no one!’ It’s the moment where this guy is essentially playing God; that’s where this guy gets his kicks. I’ve been exposed to institutional cruelty in Mexico and brutality on the street, so I can always see through that guise of macho nastiness. I can see somebody getting his kicks out of playing the big guy, which necessarily by definition hides a very small guy.”

As in previous del Toro films, the villain must always have one final glimmer of vulnerability before the end, although more spoiler-conscious readers may want to skip the rest of this paragraph… “I do that in the moment that Vidal hands over his son and says, ‘Tell my son how his father died.’ At that moment, he’s completely helpless and the way he reacts to the final phrase by Mercedes and the way she destroys him with a single line of dialogue; that’s the character at his most tragic.”

Pan’s People

Although Lopez has his own difficult moments in the film, the director’s award for most uncomfortable actor in Pan’s Labyrinth has to go to Doug Jones, who plays the faun as well as a blind monster nicknamed the ‘Pale Man,’ both covered in heavy prosthetics from head to toe. “In terms of gauging the actors in how heroic their performance is, Doug would take the prize because he was literally buried under a mass of servos and latex. He was also delivering 80 lines of Spanish language dialogue, some speeches of which were up to a minute and a half long, uninterrupted and he was practically blind and having to move around on the set, so he’s not only a hero, he should be canonised!”

The past few months have been incredibly busy for del Toro. In addition to promoting Pan’s Labyrinth at film festivals around the world, he’s also started pre-production on the long-awaited sequel to Hellboy. But while the director is currently enjoying some of the best reviews in his career, he’s had an even more enjoyable time showing his latest film to some of his heroes in the film and genre world.

“When I first released Cronos,” he reflects, “what I said in the first interview I did in Mexico remains true today, which is that these movies are essentially a way for me to meet and make friendships with the people I most admire. I’ve travelled the world like a chubby Forrest Gump, meeting all these great characters that I adore, like John Landis, Joe Dante, John Carpenter and Stephen King.

“I am a fan before a filmmaker, and I had never met Stephen King; I had never really grown the balls to show him my movies, but I felt that this was the right time to do it. I tried earlier on with Cronos but it was a crazy, bold attempt to show him a movie and he never got to see it. But with Pan’s Labyrinth, it was the time to try and get to meet the guy, because he was a seminal hero of mine, so it’s just been me, trekking the world in search of my heroes.”

This feature originally ran in Dreamwatch issue 148.