For a visual guy, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has a way with words. During opening weekend for “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters,” the exhibition at Mia exploring GDT and the origins of creativity, he sat for a Q&A with Mia director Kaywin Feldman and curator Gabe Ritter. He was thoughtful, profane, and hilarious, managing to fold art history, social commentary, and confessional humor into a full-throated defense of his creative vision. He seemed to enjoy it at least as much as his audience.
“I am a recluse, and I am misanthropic in my personal life, and I am religious about my writing,” he said. “So when I meet people, I enjoy people. Because it’s a rarity—hey, people!”
Here, five insightful gems he dropped on the lucky folks who kept him company for a couple hours, and what they say about him.
1. Despite living in Los Angeles for decades, the sensibilities of the Mexican-born director remain south of the border.
“I come from a culture of arranging. In Mexico, you give us five objects we’ll make an altar. We communicate by arranging all these complex things. To the point where the Baroque [style] was just Baroque enough for Europeans, but when it came to Mexico we made the Baroque of the Baroque, which is Churriguera. Which means, when the Europeans came in with their excesses, we said, ‘It needs more shit.’ That’s me.”
2. He doesn’t know if his vision is connecting or not—and he’s okay with that.
“A career is an accident in slow motion. I’m bouncing against the wheel and going back and snapping my neck and then going through the windshield—in very slow motion. So you’re watching me doing this and thinking, Ehh, he could have not hit the wheel. But I’m in the middle of that synergy, so it’s very hard me to gauge if it works or not. But what can I do? I’m like a tree, I give a certain type of fruit. You don’t like the fruit, f-ck off. You like it, come and get it.”
3. Horror is not just a genre for him, it’s self-knowledge.
“To know what we fear is to know who we are. It illuminates the negative space within us.”
4. He will never criticize your taste—for ethical reasons.
“I will never say, ‘That’s a terrible movie.’ There is no such thing. When we have a kinship with a work of art, it’s completely intimate. When you defend what you love, it articulates who you are. And when you defend somebody else’s rights, it defends what you think it means to be a good human.”
5. Monsters matter.
“It’s so easy to objectify, to use any ‘ism’ that you choose, to say no to the other. The greatest blessing we can bestow upon each other as humans is to look at the other. To really gaze upon a person that is not an idea in your head, an idea of race, but a person—complete. That’s why I embrace monsters, because monsters are ultimately the patron saints of otherness—everything people say should not be.”
