WHAT WENT WRONG - Pan's Labyrinth

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Once upon a time there lived a boy who loved monsters. This week, Chris & Lizzie head swap Jim Henson's Labyrinth for Guillermo Del Toro's, err... Pan's, err... the Faun's Labyrinth. They explore Del Toro's dark-fairy-tale of a childhood, his battles with real Hollywood monsters (the Weinsteins), and how an insult to Alfonso Cuarón's face led to arguably his most defining film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a childhood fantasy fairy tales slash nightmare, or is it for the ages? I'm one of your host, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winnerbauer and Chris, what labyrinth del fauna do you have for us today? The one and only Labyrintho del Fano, the one that has been misnomered, I should say, or marketed as Pan's Labyrinth, although there is no Pan in this movie. No. There's no character named Pan. There's no Greek mythology in this movie at all. Let's debunk that right now. I saw a lot of Reddit threads saying, oh, he's a god on this world.

Nope. Pan was just a marketing choice. So let's just get that out of the way right now. This movie is, yeah, Lizzie, a dark fairy tale in some ways. It's also a war film in many other ways. or a post-war film, a resistance film. Pan's Labyrinth, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro, Lizzie.

I'm assuming that you had seen it before this episode. What were your thoughts upon watching it for the podcast? I saw this at the Bird Theater in Richmond, Virginia. Shout out to The Bird. It's an amazing theater that plays a lot of independent and foreign films. There's a Whirlitzer organ that comes up out of the stage before the showing. And I loved this when I saw it. We were, what, probably 16, 17 when this came out,

would have been in high school. It really blew me away. but I remember thinking at that point in time, oh, it was clearly all in her head. Like, this is such a tragedy. This is just a child trying to understand how to deal with tragedy and how to deal with trauma. And like, that's what this movie is about. I don't think I had rewatched this until last night when we watched this for the podcast. And I was so surprised because on this viewing, I feel pretty strongly that it's all real. And it's not that it's not about the reasons that we create fairy tally. are the reason that, you know, children may need them to process trauma and understand it. But I felt like the two are not mutually exclusive in a way that I guess I didn't the first time that I watched this. But, I mean, this is just, this is a pretty perfect movie. It is brutal. I did remember the most violent moment in this that will always stick in my head is when he kills the guy with the bottle, which is just awful. And I can't look at it. But I was pleasantly

surprised by how great the effects look in this. I think for the most part, it all real. really, really held up. I think the girl who plays Ophelia is remarkable. Really all of the acting, and this is wonderful. To me, this is Guillermo del Toro's absolute best movie, hands down. I just, I think it's beautiful. And I got a lot more out of it this time, I guess. I loved the connection between, you know, the founder saying, oh, you have to just do what I'm saying and you can't ask any questions, which is, of course, what the doctor says to the captain when he says, you know, I'm not the kind of person who can just accept any authority without questioning, you know, whether or not it's right or wrong. And then it turns out that that was the Fawn's point.

And the whole thing was she was supposed to question what he was offering. So anyway, it's beautiful. It's sad. I hope she's living forever for centuries in her father's kingdom and not just dead post-Spanish civil war. But what about you, Chris? Yeah, I agree. I saw this in high school as well. I did see this one in theaters and remembered loving it. I was already a del Toro fan. I saw the devil's backbone, which we're going to talk about today, when I was a freshman in high school during Spanish class. So I have not seen that one. Oh, it's great. And we'll talk about it a little bit because it's really the sister film to this movie in so many ways.

But then I went and I watched all of his stuff because I liked Blade 2 a lot. I loved Hellboy. I went and watched Kronos, which we will also talk about, even something like Mimic. And one of the reasons I wanted to cover this movie is that Deltoro is a really, I think, rare, modern example of a director who sits at the intersection of studio movies and Art House. fair and not in that he's doing both at the same time necessarily, but he really weaves in and out of both of these worlds. And I was talking to Jesse, our researcher, and she was saying, you know, he refers to Pan's Labyrinth as one of the most, if not the most difficult

experiences of his life making this movie. And when she started going through the research and tried to figure out why, yes, the production was hard as we'll get to. But I think it more has to do with where Del Toro was in his life when this movie came out and where he was in Hollywood. Yeah, because I think I and David, when we watched this last night, we both had the assumption that this must have come earlier in his trajectory because this was such a sort of watershed moment for him, but it's not. There's so much before it. And I guess it makes sense because instead of this being him breaking out, it was him breaking out as the kind of filmmaker that I think he wanted to be. I agree. I think this movie is an inflection point in his career. So because we're

going to go through this roadmap. I'll just really high-level say it. So his first film, Kronos, early 90s, you know, $2 million indie genre film. We will talk about it in a moment. And then he goes to do Mimic and we'll talk about that, which is a Hollywood film. And then he kind of ping pongs back into Spanish language with the devil's backbone genre, very, very similar tonally to Pan's Labyrinth. Then back to Hollywood, Blade 2. I love Blade 2. Hellboy. Then back to Spanish language, Pan's Lavarance. So yeah, he was straddling two worlds, you know, very much by the time that Pan's Labyrinth comes along. I agree, I think this is probably his best movie,

although I do love the devil's backbone so much. And for me, this movie, for the first hour, I find myself wondering, every time I watch it, even though I know the answer, how is he going to tie the disparate elements of the resistance fighters and Captain Vidal and Mercedes and all these characters that are existing in a very brutal, real political resistance,

you know, sort of world under Franco's authoritarian regime going to blend with Ophelia and her relationship with the fawn and the tasks that she's doing. And it's like a magic trick every time. Every time we hit the third act, I'm just left speechless with how well it ties together. He does such a brilliant job of Captain Vidal is such a heinous person and villain, yet his motivation is so well drawn in this movie. Like, I find that I hate him so much for the violence that he commits, the scene you mention with the farmers, comes to mind. And yet at the end, the moment when he, you know, says, tell my son, you know, and then Mercedes, he will not even know your name. I think, again, it's not that you are sympathetic towards his character, but you

really understand his character. And it was reminding me of, we were just discussing Disclosure Day on this podcast. And I did not understand the villains in that movie very well. And Del Toro does such a good job. So I agree. I think this is an absolutely lovely movie. I think it's a triumph of so many departments. The Pan's Labyrinth theme that da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. The lullaby is absolutely gorgeous. I will remember it forever. Fantastic performers. And in so many ways, Lizzie, a movie that very nearly didn't exist. And so today's episode, we're going to spend a lot of time on Deltoro and how his creative being was formed because this movie is a crystallization of so many parts of his childhood and early career. It'll be kind of first half on that and then second half on the actual

production of this movie. Great. I can't wait. Before we get there, the details. So Pan's Labyrinth, There's a 2006 dark fantasy, although I would add historical war or resistance film. Yes. Written and directed by Girmel Del Toro. It was produced by Del Toro along with Bertha Navarro and Alfonso Cuaron. It stars Ivana Bakero as Ophelia, Doug Jones as Fauno, the Pale Man as well. Sergei Lopez as Captain Vidal. Maribel Verdue as Mercedes.

Ariadna Gill as Carmen, Ophalia's mother. Alex Angulo as Dr. Ferreiro, and many, many more. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Lizzie, on May 27th of 2006, rolled out internationally as it hit a number of festivals and then reached the United States in a limited release at the end of December and opened wide on January 19th of 2007. And as always, the IMDB logline reads, In 1944 Francoist Spain, an imaginative young girl meets a faun who tells her she's a princess and that she must prove her worthiness by completing three dangerous tasks.

Also, there are resistance fighters in the woods. The Spanish Civil War ended like maybe four or so years ago. Yeah. Because they do reference D-Day, don't they do? So this is post-Spanish Civil War. Yes, so the Spanish Civil War ran from 36 to 39. Right. And this is under the Franco military dictatorship.

Initially, it was a military junta, and then it was Franco came to power in 36, I believe. The Francoists won, and they were backed by Nazi Germany and the Italians, and they were ruling through 1944. As the war is coming to an end, the allies are landing at Normandy during this movie. They make reference to it. But there are still resistance fighters that are there. Yes, living in the mountains and whatnot. As we know, it's interesting because, like, we know they're not going to win. Like, that's the position you ran from the very beginning, and that's kind of lovely because it doesn't matter at the end. Because Franco obviously ruled until 1975. Is that right?

Yeah. And kind of similarly in the devil's backbone, it takes place right in 39 at the end of the Spanish Civil War. And the children in the orphanage are mostly the sons of the fighters for the republic. And so we know their parents are also, they're going to remain orphans, basically, obviously. Yeah. Sources for today's episode include but are not limited to. Germel del Toro's, Cabinet of Curiosity's, My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions, by Del Toro and Mark Zickri.

The Making of Pan's Labyrinth by Mark Cata and Nick Nunziata, that's a book. The film's DVD commentary and special features and many, many more articles, interviews, and retrospectives with those involved in the making of the film, in particular, Germon Del Toro. All right, Lizzie,

in order to tell the story of Pan's Labyrinth, we're going to set it up a bit like a fairy tale. Eredace one in a house grand and solitaire once upon a time, in a big, lonely house, there lived a lonely little boy who loved monsters. But it wasn't always that way. That boy's name was Giermo del Toro, and he was born, of course, in October. What other month

could be appropriate. October 9th, 1964. When he was four years old, his life changed forever. He sat down and watched an episode of the American Science Fiction anthology series, The Outer Limits, Not the Twilight Zone. Oh. An episode called The Mutant. The main villain was Lizzie. A mutant. Very good.

With huge bulging eyes. Del Toro was terrified. And then his brother decided to scar him for life. He put Little Germot in his crib, left the room, and came back with fake plastic fried eggs over his eyes. No. And his mother's stockings on his head, Del Toro immediately wet the bed. Oh, buddy. And from then on, all he could see were monsters.

The shag carpet in his bedroom looked like long green fingers, ready to pull him down into the floor. The armoire would mutate when the church bells rang, growing a hand, a goat's face, and a leg. Del Toro was terrified, and he kept wetting the bed. His mother would punish him with chores every time. Finally, he'd had enough. This was no way to live.

It was time to make a pact with the monsters. I'd like to play you a clip of how Del Toro approached. these fiendish friends. And one night I got up and I said to the monsters that I saw in the closet and all that, I said, if you let me go pee, I'll be your friend forever. And this was set in earnest and immediately something magical happened. I started what my therapist says is reverse, phobia. But basically, I bonded with them. I adore them. And I adore them. Today's day. Oh.

So Del Toro, just to go pee, said, I'll be your friend forever. And he went from being a scared little boy, Lizzie, to being a strange little boy. Yeah. For Christmas, he asked his mother for a mandrake root so he could perform a wican ritual to turn it into a living being. So she took him to a psychologist. The psychologist gave Del Toro a ball of clay and said, do whatever you want with this. I'll come back when you're done to assess. He left the room.

When he came back, Del Toro had turned it into a psychologist. to a skeleton. Okay. He was five years old. How did a five-year-old find out about a wick and ritual involving a mandrake route? There was no internet. We'll get to it. He may have had a familial influence that we'll talk about in just a moment.

Has to have, yeah. So in many fairy tales, there is a reversal of fortune that comes at the end of the story. So Hansel and Gretel find the witch's precious stones. The family's situation is improved. The circumstances that led to the child being abandoned in the woods is undone. Jack gets the giant's gold, for example, Jack and the Beanstalk. But for Del Toro, everything seemed to be happening backwards. When he was just a boy, Del Toro's father won the lottery.

$6 million. What? And so the strange little boy moved into a house so big that he and his family could go weeks and weeks without seeing one another. But he had something new to keep him company. Stories. So Del Toro's father was a self-made man who'd stopped going to school very young. He'd never learned how to read, but he was self-conscious about not having a proper library now that he was rich, so he had one installed.

And even though it doesn't sound like he used it much, Germel del Toro lived in that room. There was a medical encyclopedia that made him a mini hypochondriac. He'd diagnose himself with something awful, run to his mother and say, I'm dying, but he also learned how to diagnose art. There was a 10-volume set called How to Look at Art that introduced him to Edgar, Pablo Picasso, Monet, Germo read a book every one to two days, and not stuff for kids, heady stuff, surrealist, symbolist, gothic horror, obviously. When he wasn't reading, he was writing and illustrating his own horror stories. Now, Deltoro had made friends with the monsters,

but he wasn't completely fearless. His great-a-a-a-a-a-a-sure of that. Now, Deltoto's parents decided to use some of their lottery-winnings to travel the world, and in true Rol-Dolly in fashion, I'll say, D'Ototo was left behind with Josefina. Now, on the one hand, she liked to listen to his stories. They even hung up a sign at the house that read Monster Club Do Not Trespass. On the other hand, he said she made the mom in Carrie look like a party animal.

She'd read him the most disturbing parts of the Bible. She tried to perform an exorcism on him. She threw holy water at him. And she put upside down bottle caps in his shoes so he'd bleed to, quote, mortify the flesh and atone for the original sin. Well, she's just having a good time. Listen, you have to find some activities when you got a kid on your hands.

You can't just let them sit there. Absolutely. And you have to make sure that they appreciate every moment, which is why when they weren't living together, she'd end their phone calls saying, good night, I don't know if I'll wake up tomorrow. Honestly, a parenting icon. Now, like Ophelia in Elabino or Pan's Labyrinth.

Sorry, Chris, you have to do it in the Doug Jones voice. How does he do it? He just like with the Spanish... I'm sorry una fauna. But that's not Doug Jones's voice, to be clear. Okay, okay. That's dubbed. I thought he learned Spanish for this.

He did, but it's still not his voice. Okay, okay. Yeah. So like Ophelia, Del Toro's dark fairy tale of a life was surrounded by very real political violence. And he has spoken at times about witnessing real life horrors at a young age, seeing corpses of, quote,

people who had been shot or had accidents or even people burned alive. He was roughly four years old during the infamous Dlatololoko massacre and seven during Alcanazo or the Corpus Christi massacre. In the first of these, students have been protesting the ruling party of Mexico for not delivering on the promises of the 1917 Mexican Revolution. There was a demonstration.

And days before Mexico hosted the Olympics, the police and military, including tanks, fired into the crowd. Jesus. And the exact death toll is debated, but official estimates peg the fatalities at 32. Unofficial sources, I saw it go into the hundreds or even thousands. And lots of people were arrested and beaten. from this, a counterculture film movement was born, called Los Super Ocheros, or the Super 8s. Amateur artists and filmmakers started making Super 8 movies and documentaries.

The film was cheap. They could evade censorship. And Del Toro's family happened to own a Super 8 camera, projector, and screen. Not because he was countercultural or a cinema revolutionary, but because he owned multiple car dealerships now. What do you do when you win the lottery? You buy car dealerships. It's not a bad idea. And someone had given him the camera equipment as a down payment on a car.

So when Del Toro was eight years old, he made his first movie. It starred, his Planet of the Apes, figurines. It was an action film, but he quickly moved into genre with the killer potato, about a potato that wanted to take over the world. This sounds great. Yes. Then he saw The Exorcist, and he was blown away by Dick Smith's makeup effects. They're incredible.

He bought Smith's makeup kit in a toy store. He started creating his own effects. He and his brother would make full-size human-like figures filled with ketchup, and then they'd push them off the roof of the house to watch them explode. It's great. Sounds fun. Now, mainstream Mexican cinema was undergoing a bit of a revival. Despite the fact that Mexico was under authoritarian rule, several more left-leaning directors were making movies that, quote, broke through the barriers of satire and farce to tackle the problems of contemporary Mexico more directly and deal openly with previously taboo subjects such as sex, violence, and politics. One of the few films on this list that I was familiar with is called Canoa, which is about another

political uprising slash massacre of intellectuals. And one of these directors that was part of this movement was Jaime Umberto Hermosillo. He was openly gay. He explored gay relationships through his films and often criticized what he saw as hypocrisy in Mexican cultures. And when Del Toro was in high school, Hermosio moved to Del Toro's hometown of Guadalajara. Now, in fairy tale parlance, the faun of Pan's labyrinth is sometimes referred to as a donor or a mentor. These are creatures that appear in liminal spaces. They test. They help the hero. A fairy godmother, Lizzie, would be a classic example. Obviously, the fawn is a little bit more mysterious than that. We can't tell, is he good? Is he nefarious? Oftentimes, they're a talking animal. And sometimes they're a director looking for students

to help on their next film. Now, unfortunately, Guadalajara did not have a film school. So Hermosio made one. He co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival and Center for Cinematographic studies at the University of Guadalajara, and Del Toro started working on his films, first as a PA, and then as a producer. In fact, as he rose up the ranks, he not only produced one of Hermosio's most enduring films, Donia Erlinda and her son, about a gay couple, but Del Toro's played the lead in that movie. And like any good donor or mentor, Hermosio installed in Del Toro a crucial lesson. If a road is not presented, you build one. Del Toro grew up obsessed with Universal Monster movies and Mexican men.

melodramas. He wanted to take the genre mixing stylings of the Mexican horror films he'd grown up on, but combine them with Hollywood quality special effects. He wanted to do melodramas with monsters. Nice. The only problem, nobody was doing this, at least in Mexico. There was no road. So we'd have to build one. And it was going to be bumpy. So in the mid-80s, he strikes out on his own, and he founds a stop. motion animation and makeup effects company called Necropia. Do you want to know their slogan, Lizzie? It's really compelling. Yes. We're not the best. We're the only ones. Hell yeah. We're the only ones.

Great. He wrote to Dick Smith, convinced him to be one of his mentors. He eventually traveled to New York to study Smith's work. And in the late 80s, he's working on a Mexican science fiction anthology show, La Oro Marcaada, which means the witching hour, something very much in the vein of Twilight Zone or the outer limits, for example, and he meets, he actually around this time meets two very influential Mexican directors. They're influential now. They were coming up at the time. Do you know who these other two people are, Lizzie? One's got to be Alfonso Quaron. Alfonso Quaron, that's the important one we're going to talk about a lot today because he's very involved in Pan's Labyrinth. Do you know the other one? No. Alejandro Iniarito. Ah, okay, of course. Yes, the three amigos, as they would later become known,

but let's focus on Guaron because he is crucial to this story. So, Quaron had just directed his first episode of the series. Avesis regressam. This is based on Stephen King's short story of the same name. Sometimes they come back. Although they never officially credited Stephen King on it, I think they did the whole thing, bootleg. That's fine. According to Quaron, both he and Del Toro were in the production office waiting room. And Del Toro says, you're Alfonso, right? You directed that episode based on the Stephen King's short story. And Quaron knew who Del Toro was. Quote, he designed corpses, mutilated hands, bullet wounds for a couple of people I knew working in film. Deltora's reputation, according to Quaron, was as being generous, smart, funny, and very, very

strange. So Quaron confirms, yes, I just adapted the Stephen King story. And Del Toro follows up with, well, if the Stephen King story is so great, why did your episode suck so much? Nice. Nag him a little bit. Yeah, Quaron bursts out laughing and then says, well, why did you think it was so bad? And then Del Toro just very calmly explains everything that was wrong with it.

Quaron realized that he was right, and so began a beautiful friendship. And if you ask, Alfonso Quaron, Pan's Labyrinth, because one of the episodes that Del Toro wrote and Quaron directed was the, quote, story of a little girl living with her abusive alcoholic father and the child-eating ogre that was haunting her. But there are three feature films we need to talk about briefly before we get into our labyrinth. And the first was never made. Lizzie, did you know that Germel D'Otoro's first attempt at a feature film was an epic, claymation prehistoric masterpiece called Omnivore,

about a lizard man in a land where everything is savage and trying to eat everything else. Let me tell you, it sounds like a hit. It maybe could have been, but we will never know because even though they made 120 puppets, several sets, shot and animated the first minute, someone broke into their studio and destroyed everything. What? Did they take anything or they just murdered the puppets?

Not only did they murder the puppets, they then pooped and peed on everything, too. Why? Unclear. You know, I got to say, anytime there's like a crime that involves someone taking a dump, I'm like, how do you do that? How do you do it on command? How do you do it under pressure? I don't understand.

I'm not saying I support this. I don't. I'm just saying I'm a little impressed. Twist, it was Quaron for trashing his first episode. It was not. Del Toro decides, not a great start, I should probably pivot to live action. So, he's going to do a ghost story. He writes an early draft of what would eventually become the devil's backbone,

and he takes it to his mentor, Hermosio, for feedback. And Hermosio throws it in the trash. He says, it's not formatted properly. If you're not going to format it properly, why am I going to read it? So Del Toro says, well, okay, that's not a great start. I could rewrite that, or I could start over again. So he says, I'll put that away. and he writes another movie. That's a vampire movie. Have you ever seen Kronos?

I have not. Kronos is very fun. It stars a very young Ron Perlman or co-stars in it. It is about a vampiric device, basically, that clamps onto you. I believe it hints that there's actually an insect deep inside of it that's causing the powers. And it gives you youth in vitality and turns your skin into marble, but it also makes you bloodthirsty. What if vampirism was less a disease and more a mechanical device in this world. Got it. It was unusual. It was genre. It had to do with ideas of life and death. It also has a very fun central story around a young girl and her grandfather, kind of buddy comedy element to it. And it has an American in it with Ron Perlman, for example, speaking English.

It's very much a mash-up kind of movie. And the government regulations that pushed for social criticism that had helped his mentor, Eremosio, hurt del Toro because they weren't really interested in genre movies. It took him four years to get the Mexican Institute of film to Greenlight Kronos. Del Toro pulled together $2 million, apparently which included $500,000 in bankers fees, which if I'm reading that correctly means of the $2 million, $500,000 was just going to the banks for generating the money to begin with. So he really had a $1.5 million. That's a terrible deal. Yeah, exactly. It's basically taking out a loan from the mafia where the VIG is 25% right up front. And it's around this time that he starts keeping journals with notes and drawings.

And some of these made it into Kronos. But others, like a torture scene with a sadistic captain, would appear in a later movie. Now, Kronos was an enormous critical success. I do think we'll cover it at some point on this podcast. It won nine Adiel Awards. These are the Oscars of Mexico, including Best Picture and Best Direction. And it was nominated for four more. And it was a bit of a big-time flopper.

It can't be really considered a big-time flopper because it was such a low-budget movie, but it flopped. Del Toro was broke. He had taken out a mortgage on his house and sold his car just to pay for the vampire device seen in the movie. Oh no. But over in the United States, Kronos caught the eye of Nina Jacobson, who we've discussed before,

senior vice president of production at Universal. She brings in Del Toro and she says, I want to give you a development deal. And he says, oh my God, you're going to give me money to make movies? I've only ever lost money on movies. This is amazing. And it was a dream come true.

until he met two very real monsters. I bet I can guess one. I bet you could guess both. I'm guessing Harvey Weinstein for one and Bob Weinstein for the other. Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing! Very good, Lizzie. They hired Germo to direct Mimic, a creature feature that would be his English language debut. The IMD-B Logline reads, three years ago, entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler, played by Miro Sorvino,

genetically created an insect to kill cockroaches carrying a virulent disease. Now the insects are out to destroy their only predator, mankind. Have you ever seen Mimic Lizzie? No. Pretty fun, B-movie, 90s. Bugs have become giant bugs, and they can mimic people with camouflage, bust their faces in the subways of New York City, I believe. Don't like that.

Yeah, it's an elevated B-movie. I actually quite enjoyed it. You can see hints of what Deltoro is interested in it, but it definitely does not feel entirely like him. And to be clear, he did not write it. He technically co-wrote it, so I'm guessing he rewrote it, and he was also based on an existing short story. Just know that it was hell for Del Toro, mostly because of the Weinsteins. He later said, quote, they would hire you for who you are, then they didn't want your personality on the film.

Yep. They wanted to suffocate every instinct you had as a filmmaker. Yeah, I mean, we've seen this. Anytime we have encountered them, they, you know, obviously, Harvey is horrible for a whole laundry list of reasons, but they, like they were just creatively crushing a lot of the time, unless they were dealing with, you know, a Quentin Tarantino, someone who they just had to give money to and back off, basically. But that was the exception to the rule with them.

Yeah, if you guys remember our coverage of Lord of the Rings, for example, they were suffocating Peter Jackson before he ended up hooking up at New Line. I think the difference is Quentin Tarantino put them on the map to a certain extent. So they didn't have the same power with him that they then would have with every subsequent director that they are doing this to, where they're like offering you this golden opportunity, but then what it really is is they just strangle you. Del Toro is getting a firsthand experience of what a destructive machine Hollywood can be and how monstrous people can really be in this business when it comes to protecting their financial

investment, at least from their perspective. They basically could not understand why Del Toro, quote, wanted to make an art film out of a bug-based bee movie. Midway through production, they tried to fire him. The cast then walked out. Wow. So Del Toro was brought back. Remember when somebody destroyed his first feature by pooping and peeing all over it?

Looking back, Del Toro said the one silver lining was that, quote, it prepared me for the Weinstein. Very good. Then, after shooting Mimick, Del Toro's father was kidnapped and held for ransom. But guess what? Del Toro later said that working with the Weinsteins was even more harrowing than his father's kidnapping.

Great. Silver linings everywhere. Quote, at least the kidnapping had a certain logic. They wanted money, and we wanted my father. With Mimic, I didn't know what they wanted. Yep. End quote. Del Toto's father was returned home after being held for nearly two and a half months. James Cameron actually helped with that.

We can sidebar on that later. We've got to keep moving. Mimic flopped. Del Toto disowned the theatrical cut. He was haunted. Not by what Mimic was, but by what it could have been. So he made a decision. Success is fucking up on your own terms. His next movie would be a ghost story on his terms. Therefore, he would not make it in Hollywood. So he dust off that old idea

that Hermosio had rejected, the devil's backbone, follows a young boy living in an orphanage haunted by the ghost of another orphan. And at this point, it took place during the Mexican revolution. But Del Toro decided to change the setting to the Spanish Civil War, in part because it made it less ambiguous from his perspective. There were so many factions and betrayal and changes of power in Mexico, that it was hard to pinpoint two clear sides, I get the sense. And the Spanish Civil War could be boiled down more to the Republicans versus the nationalist rebels. I will say it is more complicated than that. I was looking into it a little bit. And it's really the left-leaning popular front government of the Second Spanish Republic.

And this includes, you know, socialist, anarchist, communists, separatists, and they're supported by the Soviet Union, I believe, broadly. And then on the nationalist side, you know, phalangists, monarchists, conservatives, traditionalists, and they're supported by Germany and fascist Italy at this time. So again, big coalitions, but you can say, we understand Franco over here, we understand the Republicans over here. Well, there's also a pretty clear bad. I understand that there is nuance to it. There's, you know, I'm sure issues with the other side as well, but there's a very, very clear villain in that one. Absolutely. Now, it should be said, we think that location was another factor. So he had reportedly pitched the project to the Mexican Institute of film, but they thought it was, quote, too big.

So he reaches out to Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, who had told him after Kronos, if you ever come to Spain, my brother and I would like to produce a movie for you. What's interesting is Hermosio, his mentor, is often compared to Almodovar for both doing similar things with pointing out the hypocrisies of culture through sex comedies, et cetera. You know, it's interesting that he's moving, you know, between these two directors who are contemporaries in so many ways. I've not seen Hermosio's work. I have seen a lot more of Almodovar.

And he does lean into fantasy quite a bit in certain ways. Absolutely. And a lot of Mexican cinema, I think, the time did. A movie that I love that it's not super well-known, it's called A Poison for the Fairies, about two little girls, one of whom is exerting power over the other by pretending that she's a witch and taking credit for weird things that are happening, like the death of a teacher, for example, and trying to, you know, it's a twisted story of friendship.

But it uses religion in Mexico at the time as, you know, sort of a... playground for childish desires and whatnot. And then there were some later that I really liked, like Herod's Law and stuff that are very satirical and outlandish and explorations of the complicated, hypocritical, like, Mexican political history and whatnot. Does make sense. I mean, magical realism is such an enormous part of, I believe, Mexican literature as well. So. Absolutely. Think of something like water for chocolate or something like that. Now, with the devil's backbone, unlike with Mimic, Deltoro had complete control.

And he was thinking about making it a trilogy with the devil's backbone. as the first installment. He starts playing with an idea. A story of a pregnant woman who arrives at a big mansion in the north of Spain. Her husband is working for a fascist captain restoring the mansion.

The woman falls in love with a faun in the nearby labyrinth. They make passionate love and then the fawn asks for the blood of her firstborn in exchange for opening the labyrinth and taking her to the magical kingdom with him. In the end, she sacrifices her son

to go with the love of her life. It's very dark. Obviously, you can see Pan's Labyrinth in here, I also think you can see the shape of water. The devil's backbone is released in 2001 to critical acclaim, but like Kronos, it fizzles financially. So Del Toto returns to Hollywood to play with the financially bankable monsters, Blade and Hellboy.

He directs Blade 2 and then he directs Hellboy. Fun fact, he wanted to make Hellboy, and the deal was he had to make Blade 2 first. Oh, interesting. In order to make Hellboy, yeah. They're both fun. I enjoy both of those. I do too, and it's interesting.

I think it was actually a really good thing because Blade 2 did really well. And I think helped secure him more control on Hellboy because I think you can feel more of Del Toro in Hellboy than in Blade 2, for example. Well, that makes sense. He's establishing the on-screen world in a way that you couldn't with Blade 2 because that had already happened with the first one. Exactly.

So Blade 2 makes $155 million against a $54 million budget. And heading into production on Hellboy, Del Toro's getting offers Lizzie to do a lot more IP work, including The Fantastic Four. Say no. It's 2003. He's 39 years old. He knows he can make dark, melodramatic creature features,

but he doesn't know if they can make money. He also knows he can make big studio movies that make money, but I don't know if he thinks they can make him happy. Does he make the Fantastic Four lock-in financial security, ride the superhero wave of the mid-aughts? Lizzie's shaking her head. Just say no. We know how that one turned out.

Or does he make the sequel to the devil's backbone? A movie that made half at the box office what Blade 2 did on its opening day. So Del Toro has a decision to make, and he's in London. He steps out of a cab, lost in thought. I get the sense he is often lost in thought. The man is very thoughtful. He is thinking a lot. And he realizes he is missing his journal,

the journal filled with all of the sketches and ideas and story points that he has been accumulating for years, for what would become Pan's Labyrinth. He runs for the cab, and he can't catch it. He then jumps into another cab and says, follow that cab, and they can't catch it. He goes to the police. They can't find it. He calls the cab company. They can't figure out which one he was in. The notebook is gone. He goes home and he cries. And he wonders, why did I lose the notebook? And he realizes, it's because I was about to lose myself. I'm going to do Pan's Labyrinth. And according to Del Toro, at that moment, the phone rings. It's the cab driver. It's been two days. The driver had noticed the journal, found Del Toro's hotel using a scrap of stationary that had its logo,

but no name and returned it. That's amazing. Del Toto was going to make Pan's Labyrinth, and then he gave the driver a $900 tip. Yeah. To go to that length to bind him. And 1% of Pan's Labyrinth's profits. No, he just did $900.

It's very generous. So Del Toro strips out the love story and decides to focus on the perspective of a young girl. And I have a quote here that I think is very important to understanding his work. I find midlife a little dull. I like old age and childhood, because in both stages of life,

you become invisible. People write you off like a thing, an idea, and therefore you become an invisible observer. And if you were to watch Kronos, for example, it is very much about the perspective of this older man and his granddaughter. If you were to watch the devil's backbone, not only is it the boys in the orphanage, but also their protector, the older man who's running it and the older woman who runs it with him. And the villain, played by Eduardo Noriega, wonderfully, is the man in midlife who's seemingly vital and young. Yeah, and same thing here. The villain is midlife. The mother is sort of at sea for this entire thing. I mean, Mercedes is active, but yeah. But the doctor, for example, the reason he goes unnoticed, right? He's older and nobody thinks he has it in him maybe to, you know. I think same for Mercedes. Yes, I agree. There's a class element to that that I really like. So, Deltoro pitches the movie to Quaron, who says, okay, let's go into pre-production. Let's start financing you and me and see what happens. And Deltoro backs.

this up. He says that he called Quaron and said he was bootstrapping it with $100,000 of his own money. And Quaron said, screw that, I'll put in half. Meaning of the $100,000, not of the final budget. Del Toro replied, you realize if the film doesn't go, we'll have a bunch of really expensive drawings. And Quaron says, yeah. So in the summer of 2004, Del Toro moves his family to Madrid and the roughly year-long pre-production process began. And to be clear, Lizzie, they don't have funding. Wow. Everybody turned us down. He also said that a number of people offered double the budget if they do it in English. But Del Toro said no. Quote, I hate those movies that people should be talking in their native languages and they're speaking in English. I agree. Completely agree.

I would always rather have them speaking the languages they're supposed to be speaking. Producer Bertha Navarro, who was Del Toro's longtime collaborator and part of the tequila gang with him and Quaron, great name, and sales agent Rosabash, she was also part of the tequila gang. They said it took two years to come up with an agreement with Spanish co-producer Telecinko. In June of 2005, just before production was going to begin, Del Toro wrote in his journal that he was being offered X-Men 3, I believe Men in Black, Thor, and the Chronicles of Narnia. Wow. I will say there's one of those that I actually think he could have done a pretty interesting job on. Chronicles of Narnia.

Yeah. He has said that Pan's Labyrinth is kind of his Chronicles of Narnia. Yeah, that makes sense. It bears a lot of similarities. There's a fawn in both. Yeah. Now, he was broke by his stand. He later said, quote, it was a moment where money-wise, I was tight, and I thought, should I leave pans to do that and then come back, and I chose to stay?

The budget was set at 14 million euros, roughly 19 million U.S. dollars at the time. Wow, that's not much. Not for what you see on screen. No. He estimates that this was roughly the same as the effects budget on Hellboy. Yeah. So Hellboy's budget, I think, was around $65 or $70 million. I think if you were to say VFX, meaning CGI, but also makeup effects, meaning cost.

and whatnot, yes, that makes sense to me because the prosthetics work in Hellboy is so extensive. I will say, this movie is so economical with its settings. Yes. He's so smart about the way. So that number makes more sense when you think about the fact that they're clearly shooting. Farmhouse, labyrinth mountains. That's it. And you're shooting what looks like around a real farmhouse.

That was actually a build. The exterior was built on location and the interior is a soundstage. But your point stands, one big location. You've got the labyrinth, which I'm guessing they built, but that's a set that's actually pretty contained. And then everything else that's extraneous to that looks like a soundstage. So that's like pretty good other than the mountains. It's a smartly contained story much in the way that the devil's backbone was, which entirely takes place at this one orphanage. Now, the plan is to do as much in camera as possible, but they would need some visual effects, obviously.

So he hired a California-based studio Cafe Effects. Now, I read that they estimated that they would need a million dollars to do everything that Deltorto needed, but they took on the work at a much lower rate so that they could get an associate producer credit on it and since they were launching their own production company at the time. Let's keep in mind that they already came in low when we get to some overages later. For makeup effects, he hired a Mexican firm called DDT Effects Especiales. Henceforth, we shall call them DDT.

I like to think that they are these spiritual successors to his prior necropia, for example. Great. Also, don't confuse DDT with GDT, which is sometimes what people call Germot del Toro. So, the key design is obviously what character, Lizzie? The faun. The faun. The faun. El faun.

I just love the way he talks. I love it, too. It's like half goat, half ent. Yeah. It's great. And it changed a lot. So there was a cute, fat, old goat man version designed by American fantasy artist and illustrator William Stout, who has incredible credits. And you guys should look up his work.

William Stout. Lizzie, for reference, he designed the big bug villain Edgar in Men in Black. Great. There was also a younger version. There was an adult version that was more human with goat legs and more hunched over, less upright. Which is more of a traditional fond design. Yes, it is. But it was Del Toro who came up with a design that would allow the actor to puppeteer his own leg.

Oh. It was simple, so simple that apparently DDT laughed at him when he first proposed the idea. Basically, the actor's legs would sit in front of and above the fawn's legs and feet wrapped in green fabric and then they could remove them in post. Lizzie, can I show you a photo? Yes. Really quickly. I have seen this before, I think, but let me see it again.

Yeah. Yeah, it's so cool. We will put this on our Patreon for you guys. God, that's so cool. I mean, it looks horribly uncomfortable, but it is super cool. Yeah, that is amazing. That's one of my favorite parts of this movie is the way the fawn moves, the way that he is able to, like, shake out a leg, you know, the way that a goat might. And it's just, obviously, it's Doug Jones. Well, we'll talk about that. That was very specific and also a very specific direction from Del Toro. It's so good. So he brings on a bunch of the crew from the devil's backbone. I mean, he is making the sister film in so many ways to the devil's backbone. So cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro, set decorator Pilar Revuelta, composer Javier Navarrete, set construction company, Constructions Moja, casting director Sarah Bilbatua and editor Bernat Vila Plana.

But there were also some fresh faces. So Lizzie, he landed famed costume designer Lalaueeta. She'd won three Goya Awards, which is the Spanish Oscars, for costume design. And he had a newcomer with Eugenio Caballero, who came in as the production designer. He was recommended by producer Bertha Navarro, who'd just work with him on Chronicas, and Del Toro said that he liked his inexperience. These Del Toro quotes... He seems like the best.

He seems like the best, but also he cannot have... help, but turn it into something epic. It's great. So here's the quote. In his eyes, burned the death wish of the novice, the limitless hunger you have when you don't know boundaries or budget, end quote. It's great. It's just everything's a story. So then Deltoro puts his own office in the middle of the art department so he could quote, torture caballero all day. I love that. Deltaro read all the Celtic lore he could find, plus anthropological, psychological, and sociological studies of fairy tales and myths and folk stories from around the world. And the results, in my opinion, is this kind of lovely improv's riff on Iberian paganism that touches on

fairy tale lore, you know, never eat fairy food, for example, with the pale man. That's the thing. The Celtic influence makes a ton of sense because, you know, frequently those fairies are underground. There's the whole thing with not eating the food. There's this idea of them taking children. Like, there is a lot there. And coming in threes, and there's so many elements of classic fairy folklore. But then I think there's also kind of equal measure. Catholicism in here as well. I think there's a lot of Latin Catholicism in this movie. He also worked in real accounts from the war into the script. So the priest's speech that was based on a priest at a concentration camp who used to tell prisoners, remember my sons, you should confess what you know

because God doesn't care what happens to your bodies. He already saved your souls. And as you think, Deltoro is very interested in souls, especially through the idea of something like a ghost, but he is so interested in the human body and the damage that can be wrought to the human body. And you see there are certain motifs visually wounds through the armpit. Captain Vidal being shot through the optical nerve, like through his cheek is something that is repeated almost exactly in Crimson Peak, for example. So he locks in on certain forms of violence and really explores them again and again. Also, apparently other stories he was pulling from the rebel getting shot through the hand, and then elements of Captain Vidal killing the farmer with the bottle. And I read that that was also based on a fight

that the Torah had been in. I don't know if that was, I'm assuming that was when he was older, But he had actually been in a lot of fights when he was a kid. He tells the story how he got bullied a lot because he was really thin and he was really pale and had blonde hair and blue eyes. And he actually started eating a lot more trying to gain weight so he could defend himself in these schoolyard scraps. And there was some fight where the bottle didn't break and it either surprised him or it surprised somebody. And that's really the most horrifying part of the movie. Yeah, it is. Production designer, Eugenio Caballero, studied the Franco era, obviously.

He visited the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. and Del Toro, quote, storyboarded, designed and planned everything to a tea and then marched straight into hell, but he wouldn't be going alone. So for the role of the fawn, Del Toro knew there was only one man for the job. One tall, slender man. Six foot three and 140 pounds. Jesus Christ. Actor, mime, and consortist, Doug Jones. The two had met on Mimick. I love this pair so much. I love this friendship. I mean, it's just your classic visual pair. It's an Abbott Costello-style pairing. Yes.

So Jones had been called in on Mimic to do last-minute pickup shots of one of the giant bugs. The actor, I believe, who had originally played the bug was Canadian. There was a hold-up with immigration visas. And so they brought in Doug Jones. He actually also had a small role as a ripper on Tink Girl. Lizzie, we didn't talk about him because it was so minor. Yes, I saw his name in the credit. Five years after Mimic, Deltoro calls on Jones for the role of Abe Sapien and Hellboy.

I'm sure you remember. I feel like very much an influence on, obviously, the shape of water later. And in 2005, he gets another email from Deltoro that basically says, I'm working on a film in Spain. The title character is a fawn. Nobody can play him but you. And at first, Jones is intimidated. This is a lot of pressure.

It's the title character. And then he reads the script and he loves it. And then he re-reads the email and realizes the entire movie is in Spanish. Yeah. He tells Deltoro, I think you've got the wrong guy. But Deltoro knew he didn't. He told Jones, look, we'll dub your dialogue. It doesn't matter what you say you can count to 10, for all I care.

But even though they did dub his dialogue, Jones learned all of it in Spanish so he could deliver his real lines while shooting. Oh. He did it out of respect for the other actors and to make the dubbing process smoother. Wow. And I am sure it made the dubbing process a lot smoother.

And I'm sure it was helpful for Ivana Bakero as Ophelia when they were doing that together. Now, dubbing meant that they had to bring in another actor, which was another expense. But I think they made up for that because Jones was going to play another role. Who else does he play, Lizzie? He plays the slenderest slender man.

Oh, the creepiest depiction of a non-slender man, slender man ever. The pale man is... A skin bag slender man with little toothpicks for sticks. Oh, the toothpick legs are probably the scariest part of this whole thing. They are. It's horrifying. It's truly horrifying.

I mean, I will say, though, I love his little eyeball hand. His eyeball hands are great. When he popped up this time, I was like, there he is. His finger lashes? Yes. I was like, there's my guy. I missed him. Yeah, don't take my food.

He's so skinny. He needs it. So, the fawn and the pale man would be played by an American. but the rest of the principal cast was from Spain. Del Toro's a Mexican director, and he's casting Spanish actors in Spain, and it presents some challenges. Del Toro wants to cast against type,

at least against the type that these actors were best known for in Spain. So, Lizzie, broadly speaking, Cerzi Lopez, who plays Captain Vidal, was best known as a comedic actor. Interesting. Maribel Verdoux, who played Mercedes, had recently done an Alfonso Quaron film. Do you remember which one?

No. And do Mama, too. Oh, yes. Of course. And she was known a bit for playing like sex bombs and acting in like comedies. She's very beautiful. She's great in this movie. Yeah.

Ariad Nagil, who plays Carmen, usually played bigger parts, more fully fleshed out characters. As you mentioned, she's a little absent. I think, obviously, necessarily so for the story. Yeah, I think she's great in this. She's fantastic, yeah. Alex Angulo, who plays Dr. Ferreiro, had recently played a lot of villains. Hmm. And obviously, he's doing a heroic turn here.

Deltoro even said that he had dinner with a Spanish producer who told him, you don't understand you're casting these roles wrong because you're Mexican. And Del Toro replied, no, it's not that I don't know them, it's that I don't give a fuck. Nice. I can cast them how I want because this is a Mexican co-production. The producer then waved him off and said he'd regret it. Some of the actor's careers were already over and that Del Toro would end up firing them. Obviously, he did not.

But for the role of Ophalia, they went with an actress whose career was just starting. So they screen tested more than 300 young girls. This is very standard. Yeah, for kids. You know, we talked about short round when we were doing. Temple of Doom recently, and they had casting calls at six major cities and saw thousands of boys. But casting director Bilbatua saw her photo and froze. And when Bakato did her screen test, Bilbatua's hair stood on its end. She's really, really good. So Del Toro had actually

written her as a younger street urchin type. So a bit less innocent, I think, a little more street smart, resistant. I think it's so smart the way that they changed this to fit her personality. I think her innocence is so necessary for the final twist of the film to work. I'm curious if you agree. I agree. And I also think her look is so good. She looks like a little girl. Like sometimes they... She's 11 years old. Right. But sometimes even when they're casting little or girls, they'll choose ones that have sort of more mature features or expressions. And also the way that they're dressed often can be to almost make you a little bit more comfortable and make them look a little older. Yeah. Prococious. Right. They don't do that with her at all. She's very soft. She's very sweet.

she looks like a little girl and the way that they've dressed her and everything and her hair. She's so beautiful, so cute. And yeah, it does. It makes it all the more heartbreaking. I also think that subtextually, and I'm curious if you agree with this, it reinforces the idea of Carmen's character being someone who is so desperate to protect her child from the horrors of the war and what has happened, so much so that she is willing to marry Captain Vidal, right, in order to survive, right?

That's what she's doing. She's surviving here. you know, she's found this person. And I see Ophelia as presenting as sheltered as the wrong word, but she is, she's innocent. And her mother has maybe helped to protect her innocence and she's escaped through fairy tales, et cetera. Yes, I maybe have a slightly different view on the mother. I think the mother is perhaps more selfish than you're giving her credit for. And I don't know how much of it is protecting Ophelia and how much of it is protecting her own experience and herself. Because in reality, like this is not a good position to be putting Ophelia in, going to this place is a dangerous.

No, as we learn. Everything about this is not somewhere you should take your child or that you should go when you're pregnant. I wondered how much of that might be Vidal lying, not lying to her, but selling her this idea. I'll protect you, come with me, come live here, right? And then the true self is revealed when you arrive at the, you know, creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, etc. Totally possible.

I guess my read on this was, while I understand Carmen, I do think that she's a pretty selfish character at the end of the day who is less capable of taking care of anyone other than herself than I think maybe it appears. I also think she's very important. They draw her nicely opposite Mercedes where she embodies obey and we will survive, right? Right. And Mercedes and the doctor and obviously Ophelia in the end embody, no, I must do what's right, even if my blood must be spilled in order to do it. Right. And he does such a nice job of aligning these characters along that. philosophical axis. And so, anyway, it's a great movie. Who knew? So when Baceto auditioned,

Del Toro decided to rewrite the role for her. And Bacchetto says that when she went in to do her callback, her performance made Del Toro's then-wife cry and Del Toro offered her the part that day. And so they brought her in. Production began in the summer of 2005. It lasted three months, and the money was tight. Del Toro apparently almost immediately forfeited his entire salary. and I don't know if it was all of his points or some of his points, but points is the quote, to make the budget work. Oh, no. But there were things beyond his control.

So two months before filming began, a massive forest fire broke out. The area was already dealing with a drought. The production had a, quote, Moss squad that was dressing the dead, dried out forest with pigment and sawdust. I do wonder if I think the color correction is pushed particularly green at the beginning of the film, and I wonder if they are fighting that a little bit. They built an irrigation system around the mill where they were shooting. And they planted grass and ferns. But in order to protect the forest from more fires, the Spanish

government said, you can't ignite anything, which meant no blanks in the guns. And Lizzie, no squibs on the actors. So can you explain what a squib is very briefly for our audience? Sure. A squib is a little pouch of blood, essentially, that does have a tiny little explosive in it that causes it to explode when someone is shot so that you get the blood appearing underneath someone's, you know, shirt or whatever. Famously, James Kahn and the godfather had like hundreds of scripts all over him. Which must have hurt because it is a little explosive, like, you know, getting shot with a paintball or something like that, I would imagine.

Yeah. So, Del Toro said that this was one of the most difficult parts of shooting. Quote, I had literally the actors pretending that their guns were working, like children playing cowboys and Indians. Poo! They were moving their hands as if their guns were shooting. I remember Sergei Lopez, who played the captain, in the first or second take, he was going through the take saying, bang, bang, bang. Because he just didn't know what he was doing.

So the gunshots and the bullet wounds would have to be done digitally. Wow. The VFX company already took a cut rate to do the movie. And now they're going to have to add in the work. There are a lot of gunshots in this movie. And I think they look really good. They do. I didn't really notice when I was watching it.

I think it holds up. No, and the blood looks. great, like when the doctor gets shot and you see it just sort of blooming up underneath his shirt. It really looks awesome. Yeah, that scene always gets me. Yeah. The gunshots were going to be fake, but Doug Jones's makeup and prosthetics were obviously very real. It took five hours for the fawn and six hours for the pale man to get ready to shoot. So if you think about it, if you have a 12 and a half hour a day, five, you're not going to get a shot off before lunch, basically, unless you pre-call your whole hair and makeup team, which I'm sure they did, and Doug Jones, and maybe you keep him longer, but there are

turnaround time restrictions on how much time an actor can have between rap and starting the next day. It creates a really tough logistical puzzle that you have to figure out. It also didn't help that as the Fawn, Jones could only see through the creature's tear ducks. Oh, God. And as the pale man, the pale man, Lizzie, wear his eyes. His eyes are in his hands, palms. So he could only see through his hands. No, he could only see cross-eyed through the nostrils. Yeah. The tiny little nostrils at the front. Plus, the Fawn costume was extremely heavy because the horns were filled with battery packs to operate the remote puppeteering on the face. Wow. By the way, incredible work. Yes. When they were switched on for the remote puppeteering, they would buzz so loudly

that Jones could barely hear Bakero delivering her lines in the scene with him. He also had a little tail, a little faunt tail, that made it so he couldn't sit on a regular chair. Oh, good. He needs his own little fawn chair. He'd have to lean over a modified bike with a T-bar that he would lean over between takes. Jesus. Now, Lizzie, you mentioned farm animals for his performance, and Del Toro did tell him to, quote, study the back end of barn animals, which I think he does very well in this movie, how they shake flies off, how their hoofs meet the ground. But he also said, channel rock stars like Mick Jagger and, and a shout out to OG labyrinth, David Bowie. Yeah, that makes sense. There is some funny behind the scenes footage of Jones in the pale man suit eating subway. And as we later learned, Jared is basically the pale man. So that makes

sense. At some point, Jones got sick and they lost one of the five days planned for the pale man sequence. Basically, because of the time that they needed in the makeup chair to prep and remove the prosthetics, Jones was only going to get three hours of sleep between two shooting days. So he wore the pale man suit back to the hotel. Oh my God. He didn't tell anyone outside the makeup team, not even Del Toro, because this is a very expensive prosthetic suit. Yeah. They took the head and neck off, to be clear, and they took off the hands, but they left on the whole arms and torso. They then saran wrapped all of that and then put his clothes on top of it so that the prosthetics wouldn't stick to his clothes. It really reminds me of Robert England getting Thai food with

Johnny Depp dressed as Freddie Kruger when we were covering Nightmare on Elm Street. That is disgusting. That must have smelled so bad by the time he was out of it. That was a stanky pale man. It smells like what we would expect him to smell in the movie. Yeah. Now, Makeup Effects House, DDT, was under enormous pressure. You mentioned the Frog Lizzie earlier in this episode. So the scene with the frog was actually supposed to be very different. It was supposed to take place in a massive domed set and the frog was going to jump around. This makes sense to me and I'll pitch you Y in a moment. It would be a mixture of practical effects and CGI and in the practical version, they would need to puppeteer the frog from the inside.

One of the co-owners of DDC would basically go inside from underneath the set like a Jim Henson situation and puppeteer it. And Del Toro said ahead of time that he didn't think it was going to work. The puppet was going to be too big and too heavy to move, but DDT decided to go for it anyway. They ultimately had to outsource some of the construction of the frog because their mixing machine and oven were too small, and when they got done with the puppet, the puppeteer climbed inside and couldn't move. So if the frog couldn't move and jump around, it suddenly looked really small relative to the enormous set that they'd built. So Del Toro scrapped the set and rewrote the scene to take place in a narrow root tunnel. And then most of the sequence had to be done with

cg i instead of practical effects he later said that they worked and reworked the frog vomit shot more than any other scene i have to say in my opinion this is by the standard set by the rest of the movie this is the weakest scene visually and narratively i agree and yet it still looks pretty good i agree i think it's still fine it doesn't bump me but when i read this it made sense yes it made sense because the challenge it feels too simple ultimately right that frog is just there and she shoves the rocks It makes more sense that, oh, it would be jumping around. She might have to try to figure out how to catch it, you know, or get its attention. Right.

So this did make sense when I read it. But I don't think it hurts the movie ultimately. It doesn't. Now, before production wrapped, two members of DDT walked off the project, and it sounds like DDT co-partner David Marti came close. He later called Pan's Labyrinth the worst experience of his movie-making life. He clarified, he said it's a very good movie, very bad experience. Oh, quote, we went bankrupt.

I cried three times. I got into an argument with Guillermo, the only one in my career for the now 11 years I've known him. If I have to do another Pan's Labyrinth, I will die. We have a saying, we always have the ghost of Pan's Labyrinth behind us. Wow. To be fair, Del Toro was struggling to, Lizzie. He claims there was a group of Spanish producers who wanted the project shut down, perhaps because his team was basically entirely Mexican and they were coming into Spain instead of using local hires and local producers. Del Toro also said that this group had, quote, spies among the crew who created a blog and message board to post about mistakes and problems from the shoot. One of his friends had access to the

site and told him every couple days to be careful and, quote, make sure all your paperwork is impeccable and up to date because if they can, they will shut you down. Who has the energy for this? The Spanish. Okay. Okay. Now, according to Del Toro, they only ever went 15 minutes over schedule. but he was stressed out of his mind. He was sleeping three hours a night, losing three pounds a week, getting immigration permits and passports for the crew, dealing with the extremely tight budget,

pushing DDT beyond their limit, VFX overages, and quote, most of the crew thought we were making a strange, silly movie, end quote. But they made it through production, and ran out of money. Oh, no. According to Del Toro,

this is why you can still see the shadow of Jones's real legs in some of the scenes with the fawn. They just ran out of VFX money. at a certain point in time. Del Toro, we never saw it, we never noticed it, it's fine. He and editor Bernat Villalplanah had been editing throughout production. That's very normal, although to what extent this might have been more extreme, we're not sure. And they've been sending sequences to composer Javier Navarrette so he could start composing. Del Toro then showed an early cut to James Cameron, Lizzie. And if you had to guess, and you're never going to guess, but just guess.

What do you think James Cameron's concern was about the film? He had one concern, one element of the movie. The women are not holding enough guns. He was fine with that. It was the violence. I mean, it's pretty rough. It jarred him because it was established as a dark fairy tale. Yes. He said that, quote, that type of torture probably took place in the Spanish Civil War and felt too real for me. But that's also what's important about it, because this is a film about dissociation of escaping from horror into fantasy, end quote. Yes. And the other reason I really like it is that in many ways it harkens back to before fairy tales were sanitized because they...

Oh, yeah. When they were grim. Yes. If you've never read some of the original, both Hans Christian Anderson and grim fairy tales, they've been quite a bit modified in the years since those came out. Famously, it's the stepsisters trying to cut chunks of their feet off to fit into the slippers in Cinderella as one example. Go read The Little Mermaid and see how it really felt to have human legs. Yeah. Now, Del Toro has a separate quote in which he says he showed the film to a very famous Hollywood director or producer who said,

It's great. If you could only cut the violence out, then children would go to it and it will be a success. We think that's probably James Cameron based on their two quotes, but we don't know. On a happier note, he had an early screening with Stephen King and his son. And Del Toro called it the best screening of his life. He said, watching Stephen King squirm during the pale man's sequence was a quote, to an Oscar. Oh, that's so great.

Sound mixing and design was happening in Mexico. Color correction was taking place in Toronto, so Del Toro was traveling between the two. And of course, at one point, the travel hard drive with the color correction for the whole movie was stolen from Del Toro's checked suitcase. Oh, my God.

To be clear, I don't think any work was lost, but that was obviously an expense. They had to ship another drive, et cetera. So in January of 2006, Picture House, home of indie marketing guru, Bob Bernie, who we just discussed on my Big Fat Creek wedding, who had handled the U.S. marketing, I believe,

for Itumama Tambien for Alfonso Coron's film, picked up the North American rights for Pan's Labyrinth for $6 million. So, Lizzie, the budget for this movie was $19 million, and I think this sets up an important set of parameters. To me, that indicates, obviously, what the value of the film from a U.S. or North American distribution perspective was. So one-third of the budget, $6 million is what they're spending. That checks out.

I was looking at some other big foreign films, successful foreign films in the United States from a couple years prior to Pan's Labyrinth. Kung Fu Hustle. I don't know if you ever saw it, 2004, 2005. Yeah, did 20% of its business in the United States. City of God did a little more, around 25%. And Hero with Jet Li, 2003, did over 30%, almost a third of its business in the United States, $53 million of its $177 million.

But to be clear, that's an action movie. I know it's a historical epic, with a recognizable star coming hot off the heels of of, you know, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yes. The point is, I think the expectation is, uh, this movie will do, you know, maybe a third of its business at the high end in the United States, as opposed to international.

It's a foreign film. It's a Spanish language film. So Pan's Labyrinth at Cannes on May 27th, 2006. If you guys are interested, it apparently received a 24-minute standing ovation. At a certain point, people forgot why they were clapping, and they just kept doing it. I just don't understand these ovations, but I've never been.

I know. The ovations at Cannes at Cannes are ridiculous. Maybe we'll go, Lizzie. and we'll get swept up in it and we will understand someday. Chris, maybe you'll get your own 25 minutes standing ovation at Cannes, and then you'll like it a whole lot more. When I make, Spams Laverance. About a killer potato and a can of spam.

It would be cheaper. Spam is very moldable, yeah. That's true. So Warner Brothers picks up the international distribution rights. I think it's interesting that a big studio picks up the international rights, and it's Picture House, the smaller company that picks up the domestic. I'm reading the tea leaves here a little bit, but to me it suggests the expectation is this will perform better internationally than domestically. Well, and also, it sounds like Bob Bernie picks them up prior to

KAN. Yes, but I'm sure I would expect that they screened the movie for a number of potential distributors. It was not simply, you know, Bob Bernie gets the pick of the litter. Yes, but you see a reaction at Kahn and that may change. That's exactly right. Yeah. U.S. critics loved it. In fact, it was later named Best Picture of 2006 by the National Society of Film Critics. Now, Deltoro might have anticipated this. I know he comes off very modest, but he's obviously a very confident person. Chronos was a critical darling. The Devil's Backbone was a big critical hit. He always said, though, that he thought he was doing Pan's Labyrinth for a small audience. Both of those films had been, relatively speaking, for a small audience, especially relative to Blade 2 or Hellboy, for example.

He said he's never pitched a movie and had someone go, oh, wow, which makes sense. I do think when I was thinking about his filmography of all of his original movie, I could see people more saying, huh, as opposed to, oh, wow, just on the concept, and then obviously they turn out great. So there's a fish man and she's in love with the fish man. And you said she masturbates in the first scene in her bathtub? And I'm sorry, he's a fish man. Okay. And then Michael Shannon just holds his wife's breast.

I really like shape of water. It's an odd film, but I love it. Now, Bob Bernie knew he had to overcome this exact problem. What's the short sales pitch for the movie? The tricky thing is getting audiences to view the film as anything more than a niche foreign film. you blow this thing up beyond art house cinema? They didn't have endless resources. So according to one source, Pans Labyrinth's initial P&A, Prince and Advertising Budget, was $8 million. Lizzie, we've talked about the general rule of them, one half of the production budget tacked on as marketing. That makes sense,

$19 million, total budget, $8 million P&A. But Pan's Labyrinth was about to go on a pretty cool run. It was courting the high-profile film festivals like Toronto and the New York Film Festival, but also genre festivals. Its first premiere in an English-speaking country was the London Fright Fest Film Festival in August of 2006. So it opens in Spain in October of 2006, where a lot of people involved in the production thought, this is where we're going to make most of our money. Makes nearly $2 million. It's opening weekend. It would end up being the fifth highest grossing film in Spain that year. Mexico follows nine days later. Makes a lot of sense. Then a lot of European countries, South Korea, Russia. And then finally, it opens in the United States and Canada in a limited release on

December 29th, and then it goes wide on January 19th. It makes $4.5 million its first weekend wide in the United States, and then Lizzie, the nominees for the 2007 Academy Awards are announced on January 23rd, and everything changed for Pan's Labyrinth. It was nominated for five Oscars. Wow. Original screenplay, foreign language film, not Spain, Mexico. Uh-oh, that's going to piss some people off. Art direction, cinematography, makeup, and original score. Now, I think Del Toro was robbed by not getting a nomination on the direction front. I agree. But he did get screenplay. He did get nominated for screenplay. I will read you the other nominees. Alejandro Ingerito, so another compatriot for battle,

which I think is exceptionally well directed. Martin Scorsesey the departed. No problems there. Yeah. Clint Eastwood letters from Iwo Jima. Stephen Freer is the queen. No, I'll leave that one in. It's good. But to me, that one honestly deserves screenplay more than anything else. Sure. Paul Greengrass, United 93. Hmm. I think the one I would take out is probably Clint Eastwood.

Probably me too. Pan's Labyrinth made more in its second weekend of wide release in the United States than its first with an Oscar bump. And the marketing campaign all the sudden became an Oscar campaign. Now, I've often thought to myself, what's so important about the Oscars? It's just a little stamp of approval from a silly group of people. Money. Yeah, money. The marketing budget cares.

According to One Source, the marketing budget for Pan's Labyrinth grew from $8 million to $35 million as it rounded the corner to the 2007 Oscars. And all of the sudden, Del Toro has some real muscle behind one of his dark fairy tales. On February 25th, 2007, Pan's Labyrinth won the Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and makeup. Very well deserved. It lost original screenplay to Little Miss Sunshine, Michael Art. Tough.

I love Little Miss Sunshine, but Pan's Labyrinth is so good. It is really good. Michael Arndt, you're a genius. I would never take anything away from you. But that's a close one for me. Original score, it lost to Babble. I don't remember that score well enough in context to comment. I just love the score in Pan's Labyrinth so much.

Pans Labyrinth is incredible. It lost best foreign language film to Germany's The Lives of Others. Which, I love that movie. That movie is incredible. I know. That's a good year. It's a good year. That's really good. Good year at the Oscars. I think I saw both The Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth in theaters. Yeah. This was a year where I remember the foreign films in particular being heavily marketed. And Babel was not technically a foreign film, but it felt a bit like a foreign film with its structure.

Foreign director. Oh, what if we did Crash International Good? Yeah. But good this time. Well, or better. We don't need it. People have dunked on that movie for too long. Lizzie says no. She says the donkey must continue. Listen, I thought Crash was good the first time I saw it. I was probably 12. I did too. Now, Del Toro was actually relieved that he didn't win best foreign film. Quote, the day I didn't win the Oscar for foreign film for Pan's Labyrinth, I was happy.

Any prize that I don't win fuels the fire, and every prize I win quenches it. Picture House, I'm sure, was also very happy. Pan's Labyrinth made $84 million worldwide. 45% came from the domestic market. Wow. The United States alone. I believe if you include Canada, it hits 50%. So that one-third number we were talking about earlier, they blew right past it.

It remains the seventh highest-grossing foreign film in the United States. Wow. I think at the time it was released, it was the fifth, and it has since become seventh. But not everyone is happy, Lizzie. The producers have said that there was negative feedback about the violence and perhaps some resentment from people in Spain, that it was a Mexican production, effectively telling a Spanish story. And then there was frustration amongst Mexican film critics who felt that Del Toro was part of, quote, Mexican cinema and exile.

We talked about Christopher Nolan, for example, getting a somewhat similar reaction from some British film critics with the release of Memento back in the early 2000s. Still, in Mexico, the movie won nine Adiello Awards, including Best Picture and Best Direction. It was nominated for three more. Del Toro had plans for a third film, 3993 was the working title. It was set in Spain in 1939, which obviously would make it a prequel or spiritual successor to this film. But instead, Lizzie, he moved on to... The Shape of Water? Crimson Peak. Hellboy, too.

Hellboy, too, obviously. Sorry. He's made a lot of movies. He has. He returns to studio work, and he has since balanced that studio work with his darker, fantastical impulses. In Pacific Rim, right? Shortly after this. He did then Pacific Rim, yep.

And then he did finally win both Best Picture and Best Director with... The Shape of Water. The Shape of Water. But, Lizzie, interestingly enough, Pan's Labyrinth remains Del Toro's last film. shot in Spanish. Wow, yes. You know, we talked about this a little bit when we covered Frankenstein for all of the Oscars, but I miss him working in Spanish. There's sometimes, not always, obviously, I think he's an unbelievably talented writer and director, but in Frankenstein, one of the things that bumped me is sometimes the language can feel at times more generic or a little bit more

ham-fisted in a way that it does not in his Spanish language features, which makes sense. It's It's your native language. Like, there's going to be a different ability to handle it and manipulate it, I think, if it's the language that you grew up with. Not saying that his work in English isn't incredible, it is. But I would love to see him return to a Spanish language work. I'm curious if any of our listeners, especially ones that are patrons, because you can comment, I'd be curious to know from Spanish speakers, specifically Spanish as a first language.

I'm curious if they agree with us or if they feel differently. Yeah. Because we're reading with subtitles, which is very different. and obviously the translations are usually pretty good, but they're not always great. It's always an approximation, yeah. It's an approximation and oftentimes condensed slightly so you can fit it on the screen and you can read it more quickly. And I'm just curious if our Spanish speaking listeners feel that Del Toro has a way with dialogue in his Spanish films that feels more naturalistic than what they perceive in the

English language, or if they actually feel the same way we do, you know what I'm saying, on the flip side. It's not even that it's more naturalistic because it actually still feels very heightened and elevated, but it's that it feels to me like there is a different mastery of it than there is when he's trying to do the same thing in English. Yeah. And he speaks, obviously, he speaks very good English. Of course. No, I would imagine, though, that it's his native language, obviously, so he would be more comfortable. Yeah. And that concludes our coverage of Pan's Labyrinth. Well, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right? My God, so much. This was really fascinating. I love Guillermo del Toro. I mean, I knew that, but I didn't know how sort of magical his own life has been. It's really crazy.

I mean, there's so many things that went right, but I think what went right was that he read the signs and listened to them. That, you know, he didn't just lose his journal in the taxi cab. He thought, no, I've lost myself. And I love that. I love that he sees magic in the real world, it seems, just as much as he does in his movies. And I'm so glad that he took that as a sign and listened. Yeah, I agree. I think what it indicates to me is in his heart, he knew what he wanted to do.

Yeah. And I think he could have interpreted it. Here's my guess. If that phone call had come in 30 seconds earlier before he'd made the decision, it would have been obviously the same decision. But it would have been, my notebook has been returned to me. I'm supposed to do Pan's Labyrinth. Right.

And I guess my point is like, I like that he has a romanticism to the kismet of the way that his life works. It's very fun. Yeah. I agree. I would like to give mine to composer Javier Navarrete. I love the score. It's incredible.

So much. It's so beautiful. The main theme is absolutely gorgeous. It transports me into the world of a child that is surrounded by danger, as we know in this movie. Never feels like it overwhelms the movie in any way. No, they really don't use it as much as I thought that they had. I think it's used very sparingly and to great effect. So I think it's an amazing score.

And I hadn't seen this since I was 17 years old and I still hummed that lullaby to my daughter when she was a baby. That's right. It's absolutely an earworm. in the best way. All right. Well, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, can you let them know how they can support it? You can tell a friend or family member that what went wrong, it's pretty good. If you liked Pan's Labyrinth, give this episode a listen. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. That really, really does help us. You can now, on both Apple and Spotify, you can subscribe and you'll get at least one bonus episode every month.

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All right Thank you Chris Well next week We're gonna venture into the dark underbelly of Chicago. Excuse me. Gotham. Because we are covering one of my favorite movies ever made, which is, I know not an original take, but it is a fascinating story. Is this one of your favorite movies?

It is. It is. It is. I really love it. It's wildly entertaining. It's the dark night, in case anyone's wondering, in which we will encounter... What if you're just... It's the Garbage Pail Kids movie. No. In which we will encounter, obviously, the Nolans, but also the Weinstein's. And of course, Heath Ledger. Yeah. I'm very excited to get into this.

There's so much more behind the scenes to this movie than I realized. And it's a fascinating journey into the reinvention of Batman, but more specifically, the reinvention and I think crystallization of the Joker. So I can't wait, and we will see you for the Dark Night next week. I can't remember the score. I almost did the Terminator. Boom! Yeah, I almost did the Terminator score.

I was like, don't, don't, da, don't. No, that isn't it? Oh, is it? Isn't that when the Batmobile is going down? But then I was like, no, that's the Terminator score. Yeah. Well, I am so excited. I don't know.

He's a little weird laugh that he does. I'm very thrilled. Thank you, Lizzie. We look forward to seeing you guys next week. In the meantime, come back on Friday because we're doing a bit of a Heath Ledger double feature. We are doing a new format called a featurette, which is just a shorter, more conversational version of a regular what went wrong episode about a movie that doesn't have quite enough to discuss for a regular episode format.

So we are talking about 10 things I hate about you, and we have a special guest joining us for that. It's a Heath Ledger kind of week, which is a nice kind of week. So come back for that and then come back for the Dark Night on Monday. Until then. Bye. What went wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.