Top 75 Guillermo del Toro Quotes

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

I have a schizophrenic career. I have ‘Cronos’ and ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ on one hand, and then I have ‘Blade 2’ and ‘Mimic’ on the other.

If you give an actor a green screen, the shot may work, but that green screen will not inspire you on the set as a director or as an actor.

I love what many of my contemporaries are doing, especially people like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, P. T. Anderson, and Alfonso Cuaron.

If you want to know how to handle a crew, it’s great to be part of a crew.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.

I’m fortunate enough that my personal life falls into whack with my professional life. My kids love visiting the sets; they love the monsters.

I’d grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

I think we live in a culture that is actually hedging all of it towards comfort and immediacy, things that scare me. All the things that they sell us as a way of life scare me.

I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.

Ultimately, you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character.

Well I think effects are tools.

Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.

More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.

Love is love. And it’s much better than hatred and fear.

Every Sunday on Channel 6 in Guadalajara, where I lived, they dedicated most every Sunday to black-and-white horror films and sci-fi. So I watched them. I watched ‘Tarantula.’ I watched ‘The Monolith Monsters.’ I watched all the Universal library.

To me, the thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are. That’s the greatest act of love because you wash away imperfections.

For Devil’s Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was… an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act – the first third of the season – second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

They’re getting more and more experience on what to expect, and the Hellboy audience is such a faithful and fanatic audience as I am, and you have to really be very open about what you do.

The movie has to have some essence where you connect with it. The reason I’m doing ‘Blade 2’ and not ‘Alien 4’ is because I connect with the universe of ‘Blade.’ I don’t connect with the universe of ‘Alien.’ Besides, I already did ‘Alien 4’: It’s called ‘Mimic.’

I love to travel, anywhere in the world. Wherever it is… India… Tibet… wherever. I’ll go anywhere.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

I believe that we, every day, 24-7, all the days of our lives, we are, all of us, agents of construction and agents of destruction.

I don’t think that Argentinian cinema is well-known outside Argentina the way it should be.

What is scary to me is silly to somebody else. CG isn’t scary to me. It’s like comedy – comedy and horror are quite similar, in that there’ll always be somebody who’ll say, ‘I don’t think that was funny.’ And it’s the same with things that are meant to be scary.

The creature from the black lagoon – I drew that creature almost every day, two, three times a day, for probably my first ten years of life, you know.

I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books – thousands – and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements – the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists – you know, that I consult before I start every movie.

You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.

As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I’m not directing.

I’m always very, very careful when the movies happen and where they happen.

When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You’re the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.

As a craftsman, I bust my butt as much for ‘Blade 2’ as I do for ‘Devil’s Backbone.’

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

It is unnatural to deny effort, adversity, and pain.

It’s never hard to cast kids; it’s only ever hard to direct them.

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.

Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy – none.

The problem with ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ was that it was designed to be a PG-13 movie. It was literally a horror movie for a younger generation. I was trying to do the film equivalent of teenage, young adult readers, and when they gave it an R rating, the movie couldn’t sustain an R.

Mike Mignola’s ‘Hellboy’ was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft – like ‘Alien,’ which is almost an outer-space version of ‘At The Mountains Of Madness.’

I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.

I was very attracted to doing ‘The Wolverine’ in Japan because that’s my favorite chapter in the story of Wolverine. But I’m not a superhero guy.

When I was a child, I was raised Catholic. Somewhere, I didn’t fit with the saints and holy men. I discovered the monsters – in Boris Karloff, I saw a beautiful, innocent creature in a state of grace, sacrificed by sins he did not commit.

I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.

I’m having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.

As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don’t.

There is art and beauty and power in the primal images of fantasy.

Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.

I’m a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.

Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it’s out of your hands.

There is beauty and humility in imperfection.

I’d love to come back as the most annoying ghost ever.

‘Hellboy 1’ was such a huge, huge overperformer on Blu-ray and ancillary markets. It was one of the first movies on Blu-ray; it has multiple editions. All the ancillary markets overperformed everywhere. And the second one did good on all ancillary markets, which now do not exist.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.

I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.

I think love is the greatest force in the universe. It’s shapeless like water. It only takes the shape of things it becomes.

It’s only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism.

I don’t try to sanction other people’s joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy – you know, like fear, desire or laughter – create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films… The boundaries cannot be defined. It’s to each his own.

I would have killed to do ‘Beauty And The Beast’ at Warners, which went away. I would have killed to do ‘The Witches’ at Warners that went away. God knows there are many, many of them. All I can do is diligently do the screenplay, diligently do the design work, deliver a budget, and then await a decision.

I’ve been going through immigration all my life, and I’ve been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call ‘Hollywood’ movies and truly bizarre, what you would call ‘arthouse’ movies.

The great thing about Roald Dahl is he tackled the big questions of life without any fear of being shocking or brutal, because he knew the kids could take it.

I had nightmares as a kid. As an adult, I have very prosaic dreams.

I loved when the superhero genre crosses with horror. Morbius. Those are the guys I gravitated towards. Blade. So for me, to be interested in doing a superhero movie, it would need to be on the dark side or a Jack Kirby property. Kamandi, Demon, Mr. Miracle – I love any Kirby.

I love producing other people’s work, but presenting is a very serious business. It’s a marriage.

I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it’s a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.

I think that The Eye is a particularly Americanized take on horror.

I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn’t define you until the end… The way you end your story is important. It’s important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.

I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don’t think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.

I hope to continue doing TV, and I think that what I’ve learned on ‘The Strain’ will come in handy.

I’m a lapsed altar boy.

In that, Blade 2 is very much like a rock concert… if it’s too loud, you’re too old.