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First printed at www.movingpicturesnetwork.com

By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures For the Fans issue, spring 2009)

It’s 6:15 a.m. on a cold morning in Park City, Utah, and one of the most admired directors on the planet is sitting in a Prius waiting for us to open the Moving Pictures Media Lounge on Main Street. “I was early.” Del Toro has stopped in for a chat on his way to the airport. Remarkably relaxed, he jokes about his fluctuating weight and about living in New Zealand, where he’ll be for the next few years prepping The Hobbit, the most-awaited film since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Del Toro is a true auteur, one of the rare breed of directors whose involvement on his projects is all-encompassing, visionary. An ability to see, and to show us, worlds that normally exist only in the dark. The 44-year-old Oscar-nominee has formed Cha Cha Cha Productions with fellow Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and has brought their debut production to Park City.

Moving Pictures Magazine: Why did you decide to call your production company “Cha Cha Cha”?
Guillermo del Toro: We don’t remember. Alejandro and I came up with it in a phone call. Alejandro used to have an answering machine, and he used to say, “Cha Cha Cha,” and we all laughed – and then, all right, it made sense because it was three partners: one “cha” per person. [Laughs]

MPM: Since you are busy for the next three to four years working on The Hobbit, does producing other films enable you to have input into the other stories in your head?
del Toro: Well, the company was created as a very limited partnership. What we said is, “If this company’s become burdened by ambition… let’s produce Carlos’s movie. Let’s produce my movie, your movie, and his movie. Then, if we’re happy, we continue, and if not, we close the company.”

MPM: Your partners Carlos and Alfonso are brothers and are working on a film about two competitive brothers. Does this match their real life?
del Toro: There is [competition], I imagine, but they are collaborators. I’ve always considered Carlos and [Alfonso] to be collaborators. Very, very close, almost like conjoined twins.

MPM: How long have you known Carlos and Alfonso?
del Toro: I’ve known Alfonso [from] when we were working on a horror TV series together. I wrote. He directed. We were really just good friends.

[Y tu mamá también] came about and I was doing [The] Devil’s Backbone. We did Cronos and he did Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria).

We’ve known each other all our careers and a lot of our life.

MPM: Cronos was more than 15 years ago. Has that time gone quickly or slowly?
del Toro: You don’t feel the time. In retrospect, I can tell you there were some pretty rough years after Cronos. I went four years between Cronos and Mimic. And four years, almost, between Mimic and Devil’s Backbone. So those two long periods of wait were pretty difficult, but, other than that, the time flew.

After Mimic, my father got kidnapped, my daughter was born, I had to move out of the country. I had to start over. I declared bankruptcy. It was a big adventure – at 33, which is the right age to be crucified. [Laughs]

MPM: Now, you’re working on The Hobbit, and can dedicate your time to this one project. Is that the ultimate luxury?
del Toro: It feels like it. I’m obsessive about detail and I’m obsessive about design, so having about a year to design something, I’m incredibly happy.

MPM: Have you been keeping a progressive journal while making The Hobbit?
del Toro: Yeah, I am. I have been doing that, and I have prepared the journals for the shoot. Normally, I go and buy five notebooks of the same type, for the storyboards that I do every morning. For The Hobbit, I think I bought 12. I’m very fetishistic about notes.

I don’t believe in BlackBerries. I don’t believe in keeping notes in your computer. I believe that handwritten drawings is the way to go.

MPM: Is it true that you will be publishing your notebooks for the fans?
del Toro: I think about a year from now, a company called Palace Press is putting out a very beautiful, lavish coffee table book with all the notebooks that I have. I’m missing only one. It’s about 400 pages of notes. We’re gonna do that and then a very limited edition of a facsimile of one of the notebooks.

MPM: Still looking for a missing notebook?
del Toro: Well, Jimmy’s looking [smiles]. I gave that book to Jimmy [Cameron] in a drunken stupor around 1994, 1995, and now he cannot find it. He has a sort of a Citizen Kane warehouse where he keeps all the props, and it must be somewhere there.

MPM: Do you take props from every project you work on?
del Toro: Not every project. Some, I take more than others. What I do is I buy them at the end of a production because they sell them anyway. Fortunately, on Hellboy, I bought some of the key props: Hellboy’s jacket, Hellboy’s gun. And when Hellboy II came about, I rented the props to the company in exchange for more props.

MPM: Are you hoping to get any props from The Hobbit?
del Toro: I’m gonna get a lot of competition from Peter [Jackson] on the Hobbit doll. Now and then, I am on eBay and this mysterious person beats me to something. Then I go see Peter and he has it. So, I now know he beats me.

MPM: As a director, you know the type of relationship you’d like to have with a producer. Has that influenced your job?
del Toro: The rule is, “Do unto others.” You should treat the director the way you wanna be treated. No other way. It is the director’s movie. You cannot steer it any other way. You can be forceful with your opinions, but at the end of the day, the director can say, “Look, I see it this other way,” and you have to let it go.

MPM: Do you mentor anyone?
del Toro: I try to focus my career as a producer, if you wanna call it something, on first- and second-time filmmakers. I think when you produce a first-time filmmaker, like we did with Carlos, or we did with [Juan Antonio] Bayona on the movie The Orphanage, you are presenting a new filmmaker to the world. If you are producing an established filmmaker, there’s no adventure, really; it’s a safe bet.

Now by that same token, you produce, sometimes, first- or second-time filmmakers and you get disappointed, you know? But we’ve done it many times and we like it.

MPM: Knowing that Sony has acquired Rudo y Cursi, does that make Sundance a more relaxing experience?
del Toro: I would’ve had a relaxing experience either way, because the movie sold all over the world. It was just [in] America that it had not sold. We opened in Mexico four or five weeks ago, and we are on the way of becoming one of the top three grossing Mexican films of all time. Right now, we’re fifth or fourth, and that was the primary goal, whatever happened in Mexico, but I’m happy [that Sony picked up U.S. rights].

MPM: What motivated the use of Cheap Trick’s song “I Want You to Want Me” for the film?
del Toro: Carlos felt that it defined the character very well. He’s a character that wants to be wanted, that wants to be loved, either by football or by singing. He’s a very needy, very fragile guy, you know? And that song now, it’s a hit. It’s on the Top 10 pop charts in Mexico.

Photo courtesy of Sinfactory Media.