PAN’S LABYRINTH REPRESENTS Guillermo at the crossroads, “trying to redefine my life, creatively,” and choosing the right path—one of his own devising that led to a movie he needed to make. At this point in his career, he was turning down many top Hollywood offers, films that would have netted him millions of dollars. Instead, he chose financial struggle and artistic triumph.
In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), everything Guillermo had been working toward came together in a grand panoply that is by turns brutal, gentle, intimate, and majestic. The notebooks he kept during this period reveal his consuming passion for the project. As he evolved the storyline and visual world of Pan’s Labyrinth in the notebooks, he laid bare all the specifics of the film, like a photograph emerging in a developing tray. He reflected on casting, historical background, specific shots, dialogue, sets, characters, costumes, and creatures. In these pages, Pan’s Labyrinth comes alive in glorious detail.
As Guillermo notes, paraphrasing and building on Heraclitus, “One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice.” He considered possible variations of every element of Pan’s Labyrinth and struggled to determine “which would the public understand more readily?” In this, Guillermo clearly grasps the difference between presenting mysteries that intrigue and beguile and simply failing to communicate one’s intent and confounding an audience.
“It’s only through art that you’re able to glimpse otherness,” Guillermo wrote, and everything we see in these detailed sketches and notations serves the goal of helping us see the alien as personal, familiar, and meaningful. In our daily lives we often insulate ourselves from what is unlike us, viewing otherness as threatening and ultimately rejecting it. But safe in our homes and theater seats, Guillermo’s art encourages us to consider the repulsive and the rejected with compassion and empathy—to expand our definitions of ourselves by encompassing the range of human (and even inhuman) experience.
In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo ruminated on plot motifs drawn from folk and fairy tales and classic children’s literature—enduring rites of passage that help children make sense of strange and unfamiliar things. Some of the imagery this evoked, such as the mandrake root that comes alive, remained virtually unchanged from notebook to film. On the other hand, the loathsome, terrifying Pale Man morphed from a wooden doll in a tree to an old man with eyes floating queasily in liquefied flesh, to the figure’s final, unforgettable state as a visionless face with eyeballs snatched off a plate and inserted into stigmata wounds in its palms.
Lost along the way, but captured in these pages, are such tidbits as children “that the well swallowed up,” a changeling brought by elves to replace the baby they’ve stolen, gold rather than food arrayed on a tabletop to lure Ofelia, and perhaps most disturbing of all, “the dead children who eat fairies.” Any of these items might have worked individually, but the totality would have presented a storyline that was “ungainly,” as Guillermo puts it. His goal was to craft a film of elegance and inevitability.
Even in his marginalia we see his concern over making “the other” intelligible, as Guillermo grappled with translating the title of the film into English. He strove for more recognizable and compelling wording for an American audience and eventually settled on Pan’s Labyrinth—although Pan is nowhere to be found in the film.
Everything in Pan’s Labyrinth is rich with multiple shades and layers of meaning, including the main character’s name, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), which hearkens back both to Hamlet’s dreamy, doomed lover and to the daughter of Roald Dahl, one of Guillermo’s favorite writers. Taking shape in these pages are such iconic images as the ominous dead tree with its “fallopian nature”; Ofelia’s dress, like Alice’s “but with different colors”; and the Faun, who at first looks like a muscular, goatish variation on Hellboy before becoming the lean and lyrical being in the film. Indeed, throughout these pages, Guillermo was also hashing out Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which he was writing at the same time, while “working on deadlines, juggling projects.”
When jotting these notes, Guillermo continually reminded himself to take courage, to stand for exactly what he wanted in all things. This included selecting American actor Doug Jones, previously Abe Sapien in Hellboy, as “the only guy to play the Faun” (Jones also played the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth with equal brilliance). Only their collaboration could have created the Faun, but that decision meant paying more than a Spanish actor would have cost and dubbing all Jones’s lines in Spanish with another performer’s voice. When Jones was offered and turned down films in the X-Men and Men in Black franchises, choosing instead to complete Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo triumphantly wrote: “2007 . . . It’s my year: Guillermo del Toro.”
Even the briefest notations in these pages lends a deeper insight into the finished work, as in the passage, “Faun has a flute made from a thigh bone.” Again, here is the beautiful and the grotesque in a danse macabre, blurring together, becoming one and the same. Elsewhere he jotted one of his finest epigrams: “I believe in two things: God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind.”
Guillermo’s obsessions and grand themes are rendered in his notebook with masterful control and consideration. As in Cronos and later in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, clockwork mechanisms figure prominently, in this case the workings of a pocket watch mirrored in the oversize gears of a mill. “We ended up using them in the mill to represent the captain being trapped in his father’s watch,” Guillermo observes of this man obsessed with remembrance. “But I find gears really fascinating,” he adds. “They represent, I think, the mechanism of the universe, cyclical nature, the inexorable.”
In Pan’s Labyrinth, as everywhere in his oeuvre, Guillermo’s villains appear in vivid detail—evil, real, dreadful. No detail is too small to escape his scrutiny, including a description of what the villainous captain wears: “coat on his shoulders, gloves, glasses. . . hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes.” Finally, the watch, the glass of which he shatters to preserve his time of death so that he can be remembered by his son—an action that ultimately proves futile. Taking pains to show us his villains’ longings and their scars, both emotional and physical, Guillermo does not mean to excuse their terrible actions, but rather to reveal the human in the monster and the monstrous in the human.
Disrupting expectations, juxtaposing opposites, contrasting the fantastical with taken-for-granted reality: This effort to illuminate both what we refuse to see and what we blindly look past drives Guillermo’s work. The most profound juxtaposition in Pan’s Labyrinth is between the very notions of fantasy and reality. Guillermo took great pains to design visual metaphors that differentiate these two worlds. He noted in his journal: “The real world is made of straight lines, and the world of fantasy is curved. Reality is cold. Fantasy is warm. The fantasy world should feel UTERINE, INTERIOR, like the subconscious of the girl. . . .” Guillermo’s film gives audiences intimate contact with an interior life—the world that must be believed to be seen.
The Pan’s Labyrinth journal entries also include another startling juxtaposition—the presence of someone else’s handwriting in these most personal pages. This guest contributor provided Guillermo with the film’s first review, letting him know how the great gamble of Pan’s Labyrinth had turned out. Written when the film was completed, on the day Guillermo screened Pan’s Labyrinth for his favorite living writer and that man’s son (another writer of note), the note says simply: “WE HAD A BLAST!! Steve King.”
Mr. King and his son were not alone. Pan’s Labyrinth was lauded far and wide, both within the industry and among audiences. The film won Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and makeup, netted an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and became the highest-grossing Spanish-language film ever released in the United States. Most satisfying of all, this acclaim rewarded Guillermo’s fidelity to his own values and aesthetic, or as he concludes: “I didn’t have to do a serious piece about Edwardian drama to be nominated for an Oscar.”
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 5A
Del Toro drew inspiration for the main building in the film from the chimneys characteristic of the historical architecture of the Pyrenees.
–“Don’t get me wound up, animal. . . don’t push me”
–They use the binoculars to spy on the police officers who arrest the fighter from the train. They can make them out perfectly.
* Julio Vélez, a good actor to play a civil guard. Thin.
–Hellboy calls the new agent “Lil’ fella” or “squirt.”
–Abe has “insight” that they are very weird “Kidney.”
–When I was a boy, I could feel them in my bones. My hand.
–The spotlight doesn’t work. Would there be electricity?? In the middle of the countryside??
–High Relief Portico, LEDGE, CORNICE, Pillar, Post
–Chimneys in the Pyrenees.
–One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice. Memorable TRUEBISMO #1
–Ofelia has: a very slight hunchback DDT or a lame leg (?)
–Take your hat off when you speak to me you goddamn son of a bitch!!
–Production Designer: Martin Childs for HB/MoM.
–Maria Portalez Cerezuela is the name of B.’s mother.
–What Vidal keeps in his safe must be SEEN (dry sausages).
–Crown/how much, sleeps, fire in the window, the house awakens, labyrinth. enter (stable-ish dynamite). It’s you. It’s you. Here we go.
–The wooden man instead of the ghosts
–They prick her cheeks to give them color.
–Art Director: WOLFGANG BURMANN
–In some stories, elves replace people with wooden logs that turn into human beings the next morning.
–She has a shoe catalog that belongs to her father.
–Don’t open your mouth or make a sound or you’ll remain there with them forever. Forever.
–The old, blind man’s name is Benigno and he’s the girl’s father.
–Benigno knows the house and labyrinth inside out. He tells Ofelia about the children that the well “swallowed up” and about how nobody ever saw them again.
–Mercedes and the old man need to be seen doing “what they do” without it having anything to do with the plot.
–I had a dream and I know I’m not his daughter.
–Vidal has a gold cross or a rosary hanging from his neck.
This reference was carried through in the design of the mill seen in this production artwork by Carlos Jimenez.
GDT: I did a lot of research on the architecture of northern Spain while working on Pan’s Labyrinth because the north of Spain is very peculiar. It has sort of a fairy-tale feel, both the northeast and the northwest. Whether you’re in Galicia or on the border with France, either way you get these lush, cold forests.
And I just made the house they lived in out of the chimneys of the Pyrenees because I thought it needed to feel crooked, or needed to feel like straight lines going wrong, like a motion detector.
Then [opposite] it says, “In some stories, the elves replace people with wooden logs that turn into human beings the next morning.” That is the changelings. I thought, at some point while creating Pan’s Labyrinth, that there would be elves who would take the baby into the labyrinth. I obviously changed that.
“One never bathes in the same river or sees the same film twice.” This is a reference to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, who said that about rivers, but it’s also true about film. You never see the same film twice.
Then it talks about Ofelia having a limp leg. I wanted her to not be completely normal, but then I thought what is great is making her physically normal, but making her different in other ways.
Del Toro gave Vidal (Sergi López) stiff leather boots so that he would creak when he walked.
GDT: There are some notes here [opposite], like I’m playing with what the movie would be called in English because I knew that “The Faun’s Labyrinth” would be bad.
And then it says, “Coat on his shoulders, gloves, glasses, and silver cane.” Everything but the silver cane is the captain. And it says, “Hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes, beige scarf.” No scarf, but the shoes and the gloves were very important for me with the captain because I needed him to creak.
MSZ: What is this house? Is it something you invented or remembered, or did you come across it?
GDT: It’s actually the house where Luis Buñuel lived as a kid. I thought it would be great to use it as the model for the house in Pan’s, but I abandoned it because I thought the mill was a better thing.
I went to the cinemathéque in Spain and read a lot about Buñuel for Pan’s Labyrinth. He’s one of my two favorite filmmakers of all time, along with Hitchcock. Formally, they’re polar opposites. But, content-wise, they are very similar, and there are traits of their personalities that are interesting. As a friend of mine put it very brutally, “The only difference between Buñuel and Hitchcock is that Buñuel was handsome.” Which is a big difference. But they were both guys that lived very bourgeois, very middle-class lives. They lived like gentlemen. You went to Buñuel’s house, and he was very rigid. He was very much a male, a very macho guy with his wife. It was like old-school gentlemen, but in their imaginations, they were anarchists. Buñuel was a huge fan of the Marquis de Sade, and he was obviously a man with many, many twisted ideas and an iconoclast. Hitchcock was the same. The curious thing is that they lived these guarded lives and had completely unguarded imaginations.
So for Pan’s, I was very attracted to the idea of making some kind of reference to Buñuel.
Del Toro sketched the house where Luis Buñuel grew up in his notebook, using it as an inspiration for the film’s main building, conceptualized by Carlos Jimenez.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 5B
–FOUNDLING: Abandoned or consigned to an institution
–CONSTRUCTION: MATEO MARIOTTI (Madrid/Barcelona).
MAKEUP: Gregorio Ros/ Hair Stylist: PEPITO JUEZ.
–In the Labyrinth/ In the Labyrinth/ The Faun’s Labyrinth.
–Boston, Bostonian furniture, vertical in the entrance.
–Coat on his shoulder, gloves, glasses, and silver cane. Hair parted in the center, patent leather shoes, beige scarf.
–There are runes on the stones around the well (name of God).
Luis Buñuel’s house
–Man may acquire grace directly from the world and not through public/ charitable organizations
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 13A
The tunnel full of roots below the tree began in del Toro’s notebook and was developed by Raúl Monge
–A watch instead of liquor. He/she tells them the story—
–I believe in two things: God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind—
–For the coffin with blurred “edges.”
–My mother taught me how to live. My father taught me how to die. To die with courage. The only decent way to die. That’s where the broken watch comes in.
–The doctor is going to help him “DIE WELL.”
–Why do you smile when you say it. . . this? You call this a smile?
–Ramon Fontserè for the role of the priest in P.L.
–Kate Corrigan drums her fingers incessantly on the table
–We have gained arrogance instead of Wisdom, gained cruelty instead of intelligence and made the world a cruel, cold place.
–Abe, you look like a woman when you laugh like that.
–Devane’s Speech in Marathon Man to explain the BPRD.
–Abe to HB: You should have a “blurb” a one-liner, a signature piece that people remember you by, like: Crime is a disease and I am the cure. Later HB tells him, Aw, crap.
–Use Abe Sapien in the programs with the Hannusen model
–Hellboy versus the GIANT PIG MAN/flaming skeletons.
–Good punch, HB!! K.C. says, “Somehow I think it’ll take more than that, Red responds. Abe makes his “AOL” impersonation.
–Manning explains his “BALL OF GAS” theory to the press.
–1/23/05 Carmen gives clothes to my daughter./Better life/She believes in weddings.
–You cannot deny that your soul has been touched by fire.
–You don’t Diddly-squat about us.
–For the ghost VFX it would be worth it not to use a conventional [?] but instead to use a CH [?].
–STOP MOTION instead of CGI.
–Hellboy flicks away a fairy with his finger.
–She puts the mandrake root under the bed. Explosions. Pitched battle. A wounded man. Theft of the antibiotics. They’ve captured one of them. Mercedes and the doctor speak to one another. The antibiotics are the same. Torture, the deaf-mute’s suicide.
GDT: At the top [opposite], I have the captain’s watch, broken. This came, actually, from a Fascist movie. There’s a Fascist movie called Balarrasa, which is a movie that was done during the Franco years, so the heroes are Fascists. And one of them hits his watch right before he thinks he’s going to die, and he says, “I want people to know the time of my death.”
And I thought that was a really arrogant gesture, and I took it for the captain’s father, who says, “Let my son, like his father, die like a true man.” And he’s ready to do that at the end. He pulls out the watch and he’s ready to say, “Tell my son—” And they say, “We won’t tell him shit. You’re gonna be forgotten.” And then he says something I feel very much about the Old World right now, and it’s very much the theme of Hellboy II: “We have gained arrogance instead of wisdom, we have gained cruelty instead of intelligence, and made the world a cruel, cold place.”
And then it says, “She puts the mandrake root under the bed. Explosions. Pitched battle. A wounded man.” This is pretty much the way the movie is. “Theft of the antibiotics. They’ve captured one of them. Mercedes and the doctor speak to one another. The antibiotics are the same. Torture, the deaf-mute’s suicide.” And I made him a stutterer instead of a deaf mute. But at one point I thought, “Well, what if the guy survives, and they find he’s a deaf mute? And they have to interrogate him, but he can’t speak. So he starts writing, and as he is writing, he commits suicide.” I thought he would grab a pen and stab himself rather than talk. But, as it is, they tortured this stuttering guy.
Eventually the tunnel full of roots becoming the site for the scene in the final film where Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) confronts the frog to retrieve the gold key in its stomach.
Then, on the right hand side [below], we have almost exactly the shot that I have in the movie, in which Mercedes turns around and her umbrella covers the frame. And then, when she turns back, the captain is there.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 13B
–IN HB II, Abe: You’ve been listening to Barry Manilow. —No, I most certainly am not (and he hides the CD) The book Remains
–Later you’ll both listen to him together and you’ll break into tears
–Abe is delighted by all the jokes Kate Corrigan tells
–FACE REPLACEMENT in the case of the faun.
–Do you haunt this bridge?
–How much does it cost to support HB?/annual.
–The Spanky method to disappear in the river, use it in HB II
–Cloak of invisibility/ring.
–Prison Break/MAXIMUM SECURITY area.
–The inside of the mill is RED.
–I’ll need something small in return: your seed.
–You can SEE the forest from the valley, but not from the forest.
–As soon as the self ceases to exist. The world exists.
–Criticism gives one the illusion of participating in the act of creation by way of an autopsy. The act is there and it exists and moves and challenges you while criticism fights to approve and validate.
–EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF.
IT’S ONLY THROUGH ART THAT YOU’RE ABLE TO GLIMPSE OTHERNESS.
–One door is made of gold, another silver, another wood.
–Signed by the lawyers at GUILFOYLE & GUILFOYLE.
–SCARLET dress for the girl during the episode with the toad.
–Story of the fox and the [?] pigeons.
–Stuart Baxter: LOCATION SCOUT and professional PHOTOGRAPHER.
–The guests are DRY and DEAD: A SOUL SUCKING PIG.
–Use a THORN FOREST for HB with a sword.
–Sequence in the rain in which Liz or RC is kidnapped.
–Anything you want to tell us about your foes: Well they have great fancy-pants names “Lord of this-that” and they smell.
–How much do they owe? Don’t worry about it—a hand gesture would be better
–Look at me you, BASTARD. The captain in the cantina.
–There are a thousand ways to kill a man, only one way to give him life.
–He who has nothing but feet will contribute his feet.
He who has nothing but eyes will contribute his eyes.
For this great spiritual project. “The finger and the moon” A. J.
For the unrealized Mephisto’s Bridge, del Toro drew on the iconography of archangels to design the demon called Spanky.
HOW DOES ONE WRITE about a true magician? It is quite a dangerous task, as a true magician can’t be summoned or captured by words. And Guillermo del Toro is one of the greatest magicians of our time. Under his spell, words whisper and spread burning sparks over the silver screen to explode in a thousand archetypal images, so old and so new at the same time.
Guillermo del Toro takes “Once upon a time” and wraps it into black and golden yarns. He weaves the truth about the world from images and words until the shimmering fabric tells us all about the darkness and the light—the shadows that haunt us and our most secret wishes and dreams.
The labyrinth of the human heart . . . Guillermo knows all about it. And like every true magician, he dares to lose himself on its winding paths. He explores even its most frightening corners, just to bring back the truth.
He hunts for creatures and tales between its hedges, ancient remnants that have guarded our secrets since the very first story was told around a fire to fight the fear of what hides in the dark.
Guillermo brings back the treasures of myth and fairy tale and feeds them with the fears and hopes of our time. That’s what makes his storytelling so powerful and unique—he deciphers our modern age with tools from the past. He uses the oldest language to reveal what we try to hide—all the desires of the human heart, all its weakness, fear, anger, and cruelty. Fairy tales never lie about human nature, and neither does Guillermo del Toro. His art proves that nothing is more realistic than fantasy. He paints the political reality of our world and times on the screen using the colors of our subconscious.
But he doesn’t just reveal the demons. Guillermo also knows about the angels. And maybe it is that quality that makes all his work so unforgettable and profound—he looks at us with such tenderness although he knows about our dark side. Guillermo’s haunting screen landscapes are deeply humane, and even his most nightmarish horrors know about love. That’s something only a true magician can do—summon all the demons and, despite their growls and screams, still let us hear the angels’ footsteps in the dark.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 16A
Del Toro wanted to embellish Ofelia’s bed with carvings of owls, an idea developed further by Raúl Monge.
4/07/05. M. Frost’s betrayal breaks my heart. He gave Lo7 to B.P for them to control without even mentioning to me. Becoming a man means being left on your own.
–Anno Domini: “In the year of our Lord” 2005 A.D.
–The Celts entered Hispania from the Northwest at almost the same moment they entered Great Britain, circa 500 B.C.
The LA TENE period. Sophisticated sculptures
4/10/05 Yesterday F. Trueba, Cristina and David Trueba had dinner with Lorenza and me: a couple of names were suggested: ZAY Nuba and Joaquín NOTARIO from S. of G. for E. L. d. F.
–This group was the most feared of all since their words confirmed the prophecies.
–VISIT the R. Dahl Museum in Buckinghamshire.
–Her last name was “STREGA,” from the Italian for witch
–Patricia [?] and Gerardo [?] on Eve’s list.
–DEVICE to flood and demolish the entire temple and make the army disappear.
–I’ve heard about you. You’re one of us.
–The grandmother in The Witches was inspired by R.D.’s grandmother, whose name was Sophie.
–He loved the bull’s tail soup.
–Galicia, the cave of the cathedrals, looks like a landscape in the north of U.K.
Ofelia’s bed.
–Manolito at the cave’s entrance.
–Try to use a little animal that falls in love with Liz Sherman and that H.B. despises
–H.B. to Manning: “It’s time to pimp ma’ ride.”
–4/22/05 After the [drawing] we’re having dinner with L.D.
–IN CONSILIIS NOSTRIS FATUM NOSTRUM EST.
–Sunshades for the mill. Bread in little bags, suitcases, soldiers with measurements they use for rationing. If anyone asks for more, bring him to me.
–Abe tells HB that there’s a lot of annoying things about him
–The legacy of a gone era. Handed down through time.
Iñigo Carlos Raul M. Raul [?]
–In the Spanish village of Tronchon, there is a relic of a mutilated hand that once belonged to one of the Innocent Saints and that prevents the rain from falling.
–A king with only one eye and one leg whom we recognize when he appears, now much older.
Carlos Jimenez and carried out in the film’s production design.
MSZ: Let’s talk about the images on this page [opposite]—the mask and the owl.
GDT: If you watch the movie closely, the owl is carved in the bed of Ofelia. And owls, in occult lore, they are birds that represent many, many things—among them awareness and awakening. I thought it would be really nice to have those in the bed, ironically. Her awakening comes at that moment.
And then I wanted to carve the face of the Faun everywhere we could. If you watch the movie again, that face is in the banister, and that face is in every doorframe in the whole movie, but it’s very, very subtle.
GDT: At the top of this page [opposite], it says, “In the labyrinth, gigantic gears grind someone to pieces.” We abandoned that idea, with good reason. But we ended up using them in the mill to represent the captain being trapped in his father’s watch. We made it more pertinent.
You can see the fallopian nature of the tree and the reference to the Alice dress for Ofelia, but with different colors. And a note for the eye of the Pale Man, which we ultimately didn’t follow.
There’s a note that says the Faun has a flute made of thigh bone, which he does. You don’t see him use it, though.
The tree as depicted in the final film.
The ruined tree as developed by Raúl Monge.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 16B
The ruined tree and the Alice in Wonderland-like dress Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) wears were other strong images that originated in del Toro’s notebook.
–In the labyrinth, gigantic gears grind someone to pieces.
–“Please forgive me,” the princess says to Abe Sapien.
–He/she can make his/ her skin as hard as steel whenever he/she wants.
–Johann is a “gizmo guy.” HB hates him because he’s German.
–You get these in the third-century black market. Tooth fairies, illegal, very hungry and not very nice.
–Liz and HB go to Brooklyn, Abe & Kate go X.
–HB pulls the head off a stone idol.
–Faun has a flute made from a thigh bone.
–Abe rescues the princess from the prince’s bloodhounds and falls in love with her while she’s in a coma
–The first time that Abe sees the princess it’s nothing more than a look, there’s no physical contact between them.
–They fight to obtain the third piece of the crown and the fairies, who are nothing more than dilettantes, help them.
–The prince can turn into different animals.
–They obtain the crown and lose the princess. Abe steals the crown by himself to free the princess from her prison. Manning wants to arrest him.
–Dye Ofelia’s dress for the funeral.
–Pale Man’s eye: Red
–After finding an empty lot where we could build our main sets in Navarra, the humble old man who told us about it calls his nephew, a rich jerk from Donosti, who charges us a quarter million (€250,000) to use the lot for four months. This sets our preps back 2 out of 10 weeks
–Silence for the soundtrack. Then one or two notes.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 17B
From an early age, del Toro has been obsessed with mandrakes, a mythological creature he was finally able to bring to screen in Pan’s Labyrinth.
–The army goes crazy and indiscriminately kills [?].
–Please. Let’s stop fighting. We can work it out.
–She has him. He looks at her. HB at his hack/it goes right through him.
–Abe is furious with HB because of what happens to the princess.
–It is in the nature of a warrior to wage war. Is it not??
–The cabin could be connected to a system of mines in which a mineral that gives them light and energy is extracted.
–Hut with gear system that needs to be passed through to reach the underground world in HB II
IXX Mandrake root [?] harvested in 1944
Mouth for food
with blood.
Deformed limbs.
XVII Partial movement in the “fingers” if possible.
Exposed roots resemble human limbs.
XVI See illustration in code V
–The dwarf in charge has created a series of automatons to keep him company. The army he created, he admits, has no Achilles heel at all.
–HB is given an object as a gift to use in the final duel. It gives him the advantage over the prince—
Storyboards of Ofelia nurturing the mandrake by Raúl Monge.
MSZ: Tell me a little more about the image of the mandrake [opposite], which seems to bring together a couple of themes that run through your work—fetuses, artificial life.
GDT: The mandrake root is something that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a kid. I don’t know where I read about it, or where I heard about it, but before I was seven years old, I was asking for a mandrake root for Christmas. There is a tape recording of me asking in a tiny child voice, “Can I get a mandrake for Christmas?” Because I wanted to turn it into a living being.
It’s one of the legends: that you can nourish the mandrake into becoming a baby, like a living, small person, like a homunculus. I really obsessed about the mandrake. I obsessed about the fetal, baby-like quality of it. I thought it would be really disturbing for it to have a tongue.
Ivana Baquero (Ofelia) posing with the mandrake root prop in a publicity photo for the film.
A page from The Book of Crossroads, rendered in the style of a medieval manuscript and echoed by del Toro with an illuminated drop cap on a page in his notebook.
This page also houses del Toro’s first drawing of another important prop–Vidal’s phonograph, which was developed by Raúl Villares in this concept of the captain’s office.
MSZ: So this page [opposite] is from the beginning of the notebook that covers Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II. What was it like starting a new book?
GDT: I was starting a new notebook and I remember where I began. It was in a little hotel near the Gran Vía in Madrid. I remember exactly how full of hope and joy I was.
The movies would change rapidly through the notebooks. Some of the stuff survived—like the little phonograph at the bottom for the Fascist captain. But you see the elements that didn’t, too. For example, this little “nerve ghost,” which is what I call this little ghost with all the nerves exposed. They ate the fairies, which eventually the Pale Man does. I had this idea, which is on the next page about a wooden puppet that lives in the roots of the tree, which holds a chestnut that contains the key. Eventually that became two separate tasks for Ofelia, and he became the Pale Man instead of the wooden doll. I just thought it was really creepy to have a wooden doll coming to life.
MSZ: Here you say to use the stick bug instead of the fairies to guide Ofelia to the labyrinth at the beginning, and you mention a blind man. Blindness seems to be an issue that you deal with in a lot of your work, even with the Pale Man, for instance, where you’re obliterating the eyes.
GDT: The idea was there was a blind man who can traverse the labyrinth by knowing it, but not by sight. It was sort of a silly metaphor about real knowledge or faith, like faith being blind, and the girl believing in herself. At the beginning of Pan’s Labyrinth there were a lot of good ideas, but not necessarily in a shape that I found “gainly.” It was very ungainly.
MSZ: These places where you seem to be struggling to get things to cohere, and seeing which things to retain and which things should be jettisoned, are very interesting. You also mention them hanging the grandfather instead of the granddaughter. There seems to be a grandfather character in this, as well, hearkening back to Cronos and Mimic.
GDT: I decided that the blind man was the grandfather to the housekeeper, and then I decided I liked the housekeeper better with a brother than a grandfather. I thought she needed to be more active and less passive.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 2B
In “The Labyrinth” use the stick hug instead of the fairies at the beginning. Use it as a “guide” to lead the girl to the labyrinth. The blind man tells her the story while putting out bird traps.
–They hang the grandfather instead of the granddaughter
–Create a man made of wood instead of a toad.
–In L.M.L. use a voice-over, as if it were an instrument.
–In H.B.2., the burly agent is the troll brother.
–The grandfather was left blind from gunshot wounds, but what side was he on?? Vidal, what does he make of him?
–The doll with the nut licks up a drop a blood
–The trials are: (1) The nut, the one found in the hollow tree at the edge of the labyrinth. (2) There is a key inside the nut that unlocks the secret room in the Library. It opens the door where the dead children who eat fairies appear to her. (3) Using the tools she has gathered up, she “harvests” the mandrake root and hides it under her mother’s bed. (4) Kill the little one.
–If I switch 2 and 3 around, I achieve a bit more visual variety and can make use of the little phials filled with sleeping medicine
–Look at this drawing. The contrast between the blue and the intense reds is a bit risky.
–What key could be more interesting than the insect (??) and how could it be found?
–Will the wooden doll have a nut (??) Will his voice (the doll’s) be heard through a gramophone?? If so, make it a cylinder gramophone.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 2A
The Pale Man was originally associated with both the tree (where the frog dwells in the final film) and the color gold, representing temptation.
–Starting a new notebook. I met Steven Spielberg and he told me how much he liked “Hellboy.” Unreal.
–Flexibility defeats rigidity
–Bulbs.
–Seeds.
Inside the chestnut are 5 seeds that need to be planted beneath the branches of the ancient tree when the moon is full. Gifts to [?] The wooden doll with the secret key.
–Gold plays an extremely vital role in European fairy tales. In our tale, I would put gold and not food on the table of temptations. Which of the two would the public understand more easily? (??)
–8/9/04
We found a flat near El Retiro on J.J. street
–Watch Walter Murch’s Return to Oz again for its sound effects
Red food replaced gold, and the Pale Man (Doug Jones) was given a more disturbing lair for Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to visit.
MSZ: You have a note here [opposite] about gold playing an extremely vital role in European fairy tales, and you were playing with the notion of putting gold instead of food on the table as a temptation, which of course was an idea you abandoned.
GDT: Yeah, I abandoned it and, unfortunately for me, I cut a phrase in the editing room. That is the only phrase I regret cutting in Pan’s where you are reminded that the girl, no matter how strong her convictions, has not eaten in more than a day because she was sent to bed without supper. Then her mother bleeds, she’s horrified, she doesn’t eat. The line I cut was where the maid tells her, “You haven’t eaten all day.”
But the way I brought together the two ideas of the food and the gold was to make everything in the banquet red. I thought, “If gold has a uniformity of color, then it would be great to give that uniformity to the food by making everything red—the gelatin, the grapes.”
MSZ: Stylistically, in previous notebooks, it looks as if you were dealing with calligraphic elements, with typography. Here it looks more as if you’re throwing stuff down. There’s not as much of the tricks and musings. There’s more of a sense of, not haste, but of definitely getting on with business.
GDT: Yeah, yeah. I think that more and more the books became more and more practical. So there was less of a sense of design. Curiously, I like these pages more than the old ones, because they’re complete—they’re not looking for anything. They’re just me looking through myself, in a way.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 11A
An early drawing in del Toro’s notebook depicted the Pale Man with eyes in his head.
The comics, like the pulps before them, didn’t speak for the social elite. Their point of view was that of the man in the street. Perhaps for that reason, their hatred of Nazis or “foreign enemies” foreshadows the U.S.’s posture toward WWII. The 30’s and 40’s see an explosion of heroes of all sorts: The Spider, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Captain America, Superman, The Avengers, etc. etc. Hellboy is a child of the pulps, Kirby and Sgt. Rock (1959, Kanigher).
–Charles Fort (1874–1932, New York) Blind, like J. L. Borges.
–From the moment we’re born, we begin a long journey toward death. It’s called life, and you catch on in the end.
–Go from the last piece of the crown to the auction.
–A piece of the sword breaks off inside H.B. It “moves” if they touch it and will kill him when the “bad guy” returns at the end
–One eye, One arm!!
–There’s no hope left. There never was any. I know.
–Relic/Auction
–I pity the fool.
–It’s like walking in on yourself.
6 wings for the fairies. —
–Hellboy fights with “Iron Shoes” at some point in the film.
–The point of the spear reveals Hellboy’s location
–Tim Curry for the role of one of the U.M. professors.
–Hellboy finds the Golem in Prague and Johan reanimates it with his ectoplasm.
GDT: Here [opposite] we have a possibility for the Pale Man.
MSZ: This one still had eyes in its head.
GDT: The idea was that the eyes were in like a liquid space. Like, the flesh was moving, so the eyes would gently float in the sea of flesh, and they would never be at the same height.
MSZ: They’re reminiscent of some of the portraits by symbolist painters.
GDT: Proto-symbolist, actually. It’s older, but it’s a very strong influence on that. Eyes are very important in fairy tales, and there’s a great story called “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes,” about three sisters. One of them is born with one eye, one is born with two eyes, and one is born with three eyes. And they think that the one with the two eyes is the freak, the ugly-looking one. When you go back to Greek mythology, too, there are so many images of eyes being absent or singular—the cyclops, the gorgons, for example.
Here I wrote about comics for some reason. “The comics, like the pulps before them, didn’t speak for the social elite. Their point of view was that of the man in the street. Perhaps for that reason, their hatred of Nazis or ‘foreign enemies’ foreshadows the U.S.’s posture toward World War II.” These are notes about Hellboy II, or just notes to myself. I remember clearly that Marvel and the pulps and the comics were using Nazis as villains before it was a popular posture.
Displacing them to the creature’s hands created a much more disturbing being, seen in these storyboards by Raúl Monge.
The final performance by Doug Jones.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 17A
Occasioned a change of course with DDT while it was in the middle of sculpting the creature according to an approved concept that included more of a human visage.
–Blue dolphin to Big Red, Yes, Abe? Not Abe, Blue Dolphin, abide by the security code, Brother Red. Procedure comes first.
–These days, whenever people talk about a “good screenplay,” they’re thinking about plot. They assume that the actors are the ones who create the characters, who improve the action and dialogue.
–Does the prince have a double agent?
–When he’s going to scold Hellboy, he asks everyone to step out of the room.
–And you stole a six-pack!!
–6/1/05 Today I’m getting the email from AA offering me XB, along with HPB and MIB and C of N, decisions that will follow me for the rest of my life.
5/30/05 Based on DDT sculpture.
Read: Connor McPherson.
–I’ll create a sword for you.
–SMOKE for light columns.
On the plate: eyes that fit in his palm.
Ofelia puts her hands on her head and walks BACKWARD, I talking with Mercedes.
2007/41 It’s my year: Guillermo del Toro.
–Broken mirror. Created by a tiny demon. When it was shattered, it launched shards into the air that got lodged in the eyes and hearts of human beings
–Why does the BPRD airplane crash? Because dozens of harpies attack it
–Double Load bullets. DRILL
–An enormous library at BPRD to which only Abe has access
–The book contains every possible destiny, every possible future, which your decisions could create. It was made just for you, written in your father’s blood, and will reveal its secrets to your eyes alone. Infinite and limited
–Your role in this story will be determined tonight.
–He closes the book and taps on the cover 3 times. Open it and your fate, and yours alone, will be revealed to you. It will show you only what you need to know at that particular moment, that time.
Concepts by Raúl Monge show that, up until very close to production, the Pale Man was more of an elderly figure with eyes in a humanoid face.
The final concept first came to del Toro while working in the notebooks.
GDT: This [opposite] is a very important page for me. This is where the movie starts to take more shape. On the left, there is a drawing of the Pale Man, and what I did is, originally that figure had a human face, and it was sculpted by DDT. This was my drawing of that sculpture with the face removed. I did a rougher drawing of this and I mailed it, faxed it, to DDT.
It’s one of the two times we’ve had a disagreement, because they had worked so hard doing that sculpture. It was an old man sculpture. And they loved it, and they said to me, “Oh, this is really ruthless. We were doing this.” I said, “Listen, trust me, it’s going to be worth it.”
The reason I insisted on changing it was because I was having dinner with my wife, and I had seen the sculpture, and it was great. It was a great sculpture of an old man. I had a picture with me, which was more or less the picture as it is in the drawing here but with a face. I was looking at the picture and I was telling my wife, “I have two options. One of them is you have this old man with stumps for a hand, and then in front of him there’s a plate with two wooden hands that he puts on and they move. Or, I take off the face and I put two eyes on the plate, and he puts the eyes on the face.” And she said, “I like the plate with the eyes better.” Then I thought, why don’t we do the stigmata, since he’s supposed to be the church. And it just all fit together.
MSZ: Removing the eyes of the Pale Man and doing exactly what you did, it took guts. There’s the challenge of coming up with something new, something fresh that will resonate with an audience, but also the challenge of sticking to your guns.
GDT: I was very sensitive about telling the guys at DDT because I was a sculptor, and I know what it takes, and I know they’d done a fantastic job, and there’s no way of rejecting it and not sounding glib. “Take it off,” you know? It’s like, “Let them eat cake.” But it was necessary. Sometimes, as a director, you have to be an asshole. Even if you’re trying not to be, you’re going to come out as one in the short term. But if the movie is worth it, it’s worth that.
MSZ: And then there is this drawing and note about Ofelia talking and walking backward. Where does that come from?
GDT: It’s just something I saw my daughter do. I didn’t do it in the movie. Then it goes, “Today, I’m getting the email from AA offering me XB.” I got an email, yes, I got an email from Avi Arad at Marvel, and he was offering me some big, big, big movies. I was very broke at that moment because the money for Pan’s Labyrinth hadn’t materialized. They were offering me X-Men 3, and they were offering me Fantastic Four, I think. He offered me Thor. Anyway, it was a moment where money-wise, I was tight, and I thought, “Should I leave Pan’s to do that, and then come back?” And I chose to stay. So, again, this is an important page for me.
The storyboard panels by Raúl Monge show how the design for the Pale Man returned to a much older concept that had been haunting del Toro for years–a figure he calls the “Shadow Man”.
GDT: Funny enough, here [opposite] is an early version of the Pale Man, in a way. This time without the eyes. At the time, I was calling him the Shadow Man, which was a soul eater. But if you look at his teeth, they are larger, but they are exactly the same shape of the teeth of the Pale Man, which are very thin and blunt.
BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 66
S.M.**** Montage with smoke in dissolves which create Spirit images
S.M.**** Shadow-man, the one who eats souls.
M/M G* Is he dead? someone asks
BAM! BAM! BAM! Now, he is. . .
S.M. **** The duel between Q and Carl begins in a physical way and then it becomes mental. Q poisons him, climbing onto his chest and fucking him up until Carl bursts.
S.M.**** Q is the way he is because of something that happened to him during his childhood (Flash back)
* Dorian’s session is telemetric
S.M.**** Hemorrhage in their eyes when Q or Carl use their powers to the maximum.
* Ernie’s ancestors were big shots, war heroes.
Del Toro, here on set with Sergi López [Vidal] and Maribel Verdú [Carmen], was able to understand Vidal, having created him.
While Vidal is obsessed with being remembered, the film and these storyboards by Raúl Monge underscore that Ofelia is the one who makes the difference that matters to the world.
GDT: Here [opposite] it says, “My life is halfway over. Forty years and I barely have a thing of my own to leave behind. I made captain, imagine that. But my name, the only thing I have left to pass on is my name.” This was part of the speech the captain gives in Pan’s, musing about age.
On Pan’s Labyrinth, frankly, I was thinking about these things. I don’t write the bad guys in my movies without knowing what they feel, and I understand the captain. I don’t like him—I wouldn’t want to hang out with him—but I understand him.
I thought it would be interesting if posterity will remember the girl through little details, but no one will remember the captain because he’s so obsessed with being remembered.
In that sense, I was also writing for Ofelia. I always go back to this quote by Kierkegaard that says, “The reign of the martyr starts with his death. The reign of the tyrant ends with it.” And I thought that was the clash at the center of the movie: a guy that is obsessed with his name being remembered, and a girl that doesn’t care. But she makes the right choices.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 45B
As the idea for the Faun evolved into a more delicate creature.
–Not with bullets, which cost too much. We’re going to make a very clear statement about what we’re doing here.
–The father smokes cigars while listening to the radio.
–My life is halfway over. Forty years and I barely have a thing of my own to leave behind. I made captain, imagine that. But my name, the only thing I have left to pass on is my name.
–They talk while she cooks rabbit for dinner. She tells him that she comes from a family of 5. 2 brothers, 3 sisters, and her parents. Her brother died at the front (PAUSE). And the other brother? Him, too. He hears the hesitation in her voice.
–There are 3 doors in the library.
–You leave the dirty plates in the sink on Friday and find all the crap stuck to them on Monday. That’s what I’m here for.
–MARIA BOTTO. MARIA.
–I saw you in the window. What do you think of me? Sir, you don’t need to know what I think. You aren’t interested in what I think, I’m sure. That man wasn’t guilty. But I’m not here to dispense justice. I’m here to bring peace. When it comes to peace, one dead man is as good as any other. The best offering for peace is what’s hanging from that tree. everyone understands that. sooner or later I’m going to hang someone that they’re.
Del Toro recruited Doug Jones for the part, here seen performing with Ivana Baquero [Ofelia].
GDT: This [opposite] is the restaurant bill for an Indian lunch with Joe Hill and Stephen King on the day I showed them Pan’s Labyrinth. It was one of those cheap thermal papers, so it faded, but I glued it on my notebook with the little note that Stephen King did, “We had a blast!! Steve King,” and a smiley. Because I think he is my favorite living writer. I think he is one of my favorite writers of all time. And that day I still didn’t know if he was going to like it or not, but I had just shown my movie to Stephen King, you know? So I drew the Faun on the empty paper of the faded receipt. And then beneath is a sketch for Abe Sapien’s new glasses.
MSZ: This also speaks to the design evolution of the Faun. Earlier, it was almost like a Hellboy kind of thing—muscular with big horns.
GDT: Definitely. And it evolved a lot even after this. DDT made an exquisite creation. I was making it bigger to hide the mechanics, and they said, “We think we can really sculpt it so that it can be the actor’s mouth. We can do that delicate a sculpture.” And I must say, without them, the Faun would not be what it is. They are masters of their art. I knew Doug Jones was the only guy to play the Faun, because his sensibility in playing Abe Sapien is amazing.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 21B
To design the Labyrinth in the film, del Toro’s drawing.
–Screenings P.L. WB, FD, M.P. & S.S. they need to clean it!!
Feeling a little afraid is normal when facing something new, in a place or in a way you’ve never experienced before. But to learn something it’s necessary to surpass that fear completely.
–Luke Goss for the role of the prince, but will need to work his eyes, forehead
–We need Johann for something that is not the final gag?? And I know that it would be Abe who would appear before the B.P.R.D. and is loved by everyone and makes Hellboy jealous? If it was so, then Johann could be introduced in the Eurospec portion of the movie.
–I have an irrational fear. A superstition. I fear that a terrorist act will take the world one more time. As was the case on 9/11 during Backbone.
–Bring me BIG BABY, but Manning said—he said, to be discreet!! HB: And the silver please—and B.B. (watch out!) it’s enormous.
–Sometimes (Abe says) with feeling an extraordinary desire to cry.
–I know—yes??!!—Yes!! Oh God!! Oh God!! Silence—give me another beer.
–Perhaps in the place of Goggles. Abe with new Goggles. Abe uses CONTACTS or glasses.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 14A
–It’s impossible to find the beautiful without first exploring everything that is terrible. 2/14/05 Madrid.
–They CHANGE the princess into a
–The nano-robots are called CELLBOTS.
–I GUESS I’M OUT.
–He’s just about to step outside when they insult him. He closes the door quietly and turns around with a smile on his face. The camera makes a push . . .
–We are—you see?—the fallen. HB II
–The point of the sword moves toward his heart
–For how long? Until you can stand on your own two feet.
–I know what I am but I didn’t know the name others have for it. What to call it.
–You can go up and see her. She’s resting right now.
–A biography’s lucidity is the result of the man, the journey he takes in his final days as he unknowingly approaches his own death.
–Thin. in front.
–Or the proportions could be even more extreme:
–The prince slices off Johann’s hand/arm. Protoplasm escapes out.
–IRON SHOES.
–Wheelchair Ghost.
–HB imitates static while talking with Myers over the radio.
Well.
–Keep the mushrooms for the Toad’s lair (fig tree).
–The real world is made of straight lines, and the world of fantasy is curved. Reality is cold. Fantasy is warm.
–The fantasy world should feel UTERINE, INTERIOR, like the subconscious—of the girl/photo.
GDT: Here [opposite] it says, “It’s impossible to find the beautiful without first exploring everything that is terrible.” I think this is true. I mean, this is probably a conclusion I reached there. But it’s true.
“The real world is made of straight lines, and the world of fantasy is curved. Reality is cold. Fantasy is warm.” These are Pan’s Labyrinth ideas for the initiation pit in Portugal.
The pit is still pretty much the same in the movie—the composition is almost the same; the labyrinth corridor in front of a pit. There are these pits in Portugal that have great alchemical and occultist symbolism, and we reproduced that shadow in the pit where the Faun lives. These are little things—details that are important for me or for my designers.
MSZ: And what are all these little doodles? One of the figures looks like Abe Sapien smoking a cigarette. And the pig?
GDT: Some of those are for Hellboy II—ideas that were abandoned. The guy with the cigarette is the captain, lifting weights in his undershirt with dark glasses. And the pig? They make those pigs in Mexico. They come with a little tape that you put a fly on. You put it inside, and as the fly dies, it animates the pig.
Raúl Monge’s illustration made reference to prehistoric monuments in Portugal.
For Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro envisioned an underground city.
Where Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) would meet her parents in a throne room and be declared Princess Moanna.
Raúl Monge’s sketches and storyboards.
MSZ: This [opposite] is the underground city Ofelia goes to at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth. I have a question about that, because at the last moment, when she returns, it seems so cold and so austere. Was that your thinking?
GDT: When she comes back, I wanted her not to embrace anyone because then it would become very sappy. So I put her father and her mother in these super-high thrones, because if we made her embrace them and then you cut to her dying, it is melodramatic in the wrong way. There is melodrama that is a little more austere, and melodrama that is a lot more syrupy, and I thought if we had them all dancing around her and embracing her, and then you cut and she’s dying, it’s really cheap. But if you hear them applaud, and she’s there but she’s alone, still alone, it’s an easier transition to her dying. So I made them sort of very high and mighty, literally.
Of the high thrones that kept Ofelia at a distance from her parents, helping to avoid an overly melodramatic ending.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 14B
Walk with him for the reaction shot
–Open with the TITLE PAGE/CLOSE.
–The exterior world is blue/Hades: Gold
–The sky was truly blue in those days and the grass was greener—And now—Now look at what it has all become. What the world is today.
–USE THE MIRROR—to escape/Ofelia needs to react in front of the mirrors—
–Cages with hens in them—
–SUNlight/Ed/CGI.
–The Mouros live in underground cities. They’re beings related to the giants. In Galicia, it is believed that the mountains are hollow and contain underground palaces. Kingdoms.
–The girl is THIRSTY.
–We had dinner with Belen, Paolo Basili, Manuel Villanueva, and Alvaro at Viridiana Tuesday/2/05
–Commemorates the 600th anniversary of the TREUCE
–The prince is irritated by what people say to him at the auction and he gets very angry
–They will eat the souls of all of you, infidels.
–Manning walks through the hall with Abe Sapien/explo.
–The prince gets his arm cut off in the story. Perhaps the BPRD keeps the arm in its museum of FREAKS. “No wonder he is pissed off.” HB.
–There goes a pissed off fish, HB says to Abe.
–The film begins at Christmas with PC in the snow. The demons have lost HB.
F Porto 3/5/05 Use the sketch of Gaudí’s “Sagrada Familia” cathedral as a model.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 18A
–In the face.
Pillars for the duel. Travels in order:
(1)Lilliput, (2)Brobdingnag
(3) Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan.
(4) Houyhnhnms.
–The key to the crown. Change the beginning and make it a flashback to the scene with the stack of pancakes. Return and find the book again in the library/storeroom of BPRD.
–Abe and the princess use the “magic” escape route to reach the other side of the planet. The BPRD uses the $ media buys.
3 keys
–Count the number of keys.
–One of the keys makes the water level drop and opens the locks to the ocean.
For the battle with the giant.
–He/she cooks dinner for Abe Sapien.
–Upon entering a certain place, they find the remains of others who entered first.
–One of the keys is underwater, so only Abe can fetch it.
–Eliminate the station and trains 6–6-05 and build the interior of the Bentley to fill the plates in time for summer.
RIVER
Downriver.
Fairy tales.
Insect looks at itself in front of the book.
While reading The Book of Crossroads, Ofelia [Ivana Baquero] inspires the insect to become a fairy.
Del Toro’s notebook, Raúl Monge’s storyboards, and the film itself persistently refuse to declare whether this transformation is real or imagined.
GDT: This frame here [opposite, top] is the moment in Pan’s Labyrinth where Ofelia shows the insect the illustration in the fairy tale book and it becomes a fairy. The act of magic I believe in is if you tell the world what you want out of it, the world conforms. Not if I hold a picture of a Porsche against my forehead, a Porsche’s going to come to me. Nothing as base as that. But the world is like a torrent of impressions, I think. Spiritual, physical, all of them. And we’re like a sieve. If you adjust the size of your sieve, and you declare something, you declare the size of the sieve, you start seeing reality, and interacting with reality, in a different way. I love the idea that this girl tells the bug, “Are you a fairy?” And the bug transforms for her. It’s a moment in which magic occurs, and it becomes objective.
Pan’s, for me, responds to an original principle: that, at the end of the day, in the geological time scale, we are all insignificant. In other words, at one time or another, long after we are gone, the worst-worn pocketbook is going to mean the same as the entire oeuvre of Dickens or Shakespeare. In geological time, in five million years, we will be a stratum in the geological plate that is going to be found by no one, perhaps. All we can do is change the world in small ways. No work of art is so big that it’s going to change the world, to make a difference, geologically. That’s why the Faun says Ofelia changed the world in very, very, very small ways. Like, there are people that will remember her, and there’s one little flower blooming in the fig tree because of her, because she killed the frog. It’s a tiny, tiny change, but it says she left traces of her time in the world for those who know where to look. I think that’s all of us.
The artist only changes the world in tiny ways. To think, “Oh, my work is so important,” is misguided. Really? In what perspective? Seriously. I mean, who remembers the great poet Triceratops?
Notebook 4, Page 40A, depicting the origins of the root creature.
Puppets of Prince Nuada and Princess Nuala from the film’s opening sequence.
Tooth fairy concept by Wayne Barlowe.
A page from the book Professor Broom (John Hurt) reads to young Hellboy (Montse Ribé), illustrated by Raul Villares.
Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) drink Tecate.
A drawing of Hellboy overshadowed by a member of the Golden Army by Mike Mignola.