Little White Lies magazine

LWLies chats to producer Guillermo Del Toro about ghosts, soul-eating monsters and the freaky powers of children.

LWLies: Aside from the presence of AIDS within the plot, The Orphanage feels like a classic ghost story. What influences went into the making of the film?
Del Toro: The curious thing is that when you talk to (screenwriter) Sergio Sánchez and Bayona, they have different answers. Bayona is truly a film buff and can talk fluently about any film from Robert Wise’s The Hauntingto Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, whereas Sánchez is less the kind of guy to reference films that he’s seen.I think people who have no other point of reference will compare it to films they have seen recently like The Sixth Sense and The Others, that’s actually more lazy than what Antonio was aiming for, which was to root the story in Victorian ghost tales.

LWLies: Your previous films had a strong historical association with the Spanish civil war whereas this piece feels relatively timeless. What’s your feeling about that? Is the period setting not so important?
Del Toro: As a director, it is. As a producer I’m not trying to impose any particular period because one of the things that attracted me to the movie was the fact it was not my movie. It was a movie that shared a lot of things I tend to gravitate to, but it was the movie of a very brilliant guy called Bayona, who is very different from me – although we do share many similar concerns. If I had done this movie, I would have done it very differently. I would have done it from the point of view of the kid, more specifically in about a time and political setting. What fascinates me is to see a movie done by somebody else and try to interfere creatively as little as possible.

LWLies: This is Juan Antonio Bayona’s first full-length film. What drew you to working with him?
Del Toro: His short films showed a lot of talent and promise, and I thought it would be good to help him get everything he needed for his first feature. When you are making a film for the first time, you find that people almost feel they should punish you by giving you as little as possible. You have these stern-minded organisations who say, ‘What does he want? It’s his first feature!’, and then you have to be super-ingenious. I felt that Antonio was on the verge of not being able to tell the story the way it needed to be told, so I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s go to battle, get him what he needs’.

LWLies: As with The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage features an abundance of creepy children. What is it about kids that makes them so damn scary?
I think that as entities, they almost act as thresholds between the world that we know and accept as real, and the world of possibility – both bad and good. They almost act as portals: Children allow the magic to happen, and they become a very powerful avatar for an audience suspending their disbelief. At the same times, child characters are capable of experiencing the brutal and the sublime in a much more intense way than adults. That is one of the things that Antonio does it differently as he tells the story from the point of view of the mother. From an adult. Antonio seems very interested in the horrors to emanate from within the character. He makes it a blurry line between what could be real and what is imaginary which is very different from what I do. The monsters in Pans Labyrinth and the ghosts in The Devils Backbone I tried to make them as manifest as possible, but I tried to make them symptomatic and symbolic of the circumstances around them but they are definitely manifest. For me that is another difference.[Note: the following answer spoils the end of The Orphanage]

LWLies: What is it that attracts you to this genre?
Del Toro: I love the stories that are spiritual in a twisted way. Ethical, moral and spiritual in feel. I love the character of Milan in The Orphanage, Laura. She is an incredibly strong willed female character that wills the world to the way she needs it to be. At the end of the movie she does a very powerful thing. People tend to be defined by the way they live but it’s equally important to the way they die. When people die consequently with what they believe is a very strong manifest. Her last minutes are spent exactly the way she needs them to be.

LWLies: This was her first major role, what made her stand out when casting?
Del Toro: This is her first starring role. Antonio and I definitely saw eye to eye on this. One of the first conversations we had I said “We need to cast this movie with an actress people will not associate with the genre”. We both agreed there was only one actress and that was Valen. Fortunately we saw it the same way from the get-go because she is a genuinely strong and prestigious actress that validated the movie as something other than a screamfest or a gorefest or just an escapist horror movie.

LWLies: The Orphanage is quite subtle in the way it delivers its scares and is all the more disturbing for it. In the US, torture and extreme violence are the current flavours du jour. What do you make of that?
Del Toro: This is one area of horror that has always existed – you can really track it all the way back to the Grand Guignol theatre. It’s frankly a necessary component of the genre, because the genre needs to remain anarchic subversive and transgressive. But I do think it’s very symptomatic that American horror seems to be more concerned with the destruction of the body, whereas European horror is traditionally more concerned with the destruction of the soul. There are monsters that emanate not from the fear of being eaten, but from losing either your soul, who you are or your existence. That big concern is more rooted in European film, and the literary horror tradition.

LWLies: According to iMDB, one of your next projects is with the screenwriter of The Orphanage, Sergio Sánchez. Will this complete a rough trilogy that began with The Devils Backbone?
Del Toro: I would love to think it’s going to happen; we don’t have the screenplay now. In the near future I would hope to do another movie, one of the small perky strange movies I like to do between big projects. I don’t know where it’s going to come from, but I hope it comes from Sergio and a story we have together.

LWLies: Are you in post production on Hellboy 2? How is it going?
Del Toro: We have still three or four months to go. I love it. I love it because it’s great to go from one to the other, it’s like a breather. You go from one which is big and colourful and in a strange way lighter and then you go and do smaller darker films and enjoy both.

LWLies: Thank you for speaking to us.
Del Toro: Listen, where can I get past issues of the magazine? I really like it. I have about 5 or 6 issues I bought a year or so ago. I can’t get it in the states. What I love is it’s quirky but erudite; it’s a really good combination.