My (lost) interview with Guillermo del Toro

My (lost) interview with Guillermo del Toro

Somewhere, on a hard drive in Brooklyn, there is footage of me joking with Guillermo del Toro about why Popeye and Jesus are basically the same person.

The video used to be online here; but if you click the video player, nothing happens. The link is broken. The VICE site is starting to slowly deteriorate. Perhaps that site also will be gone soon.

Even the sun goes down; [brands] eventually die.

The description on the page, which I wrote but have no recollection of, says we also discussed why del Toro doesn’t like Google. Apparently, he also gave some advice on creating monsters:

A lot of people, when they design creatures, they reference [other] creatures. And that’s the worst thing you can do…because then you’re going to regurgitate somebody else’s process and that’s it.

Seems like good advice.

I guess I should be sad that this video is gone forever. Hustling in this market is tough, and having a star like del Toro in my demo reel might give me an edge when I finally break down and apply at a local ABC affiliate or something.

It’s not that big a deal though, because the best part of my interview with Guillermo del Toro never got filmed anyway.

It was 2017, and I was interviewing Guillermo del Toro about his then-new film, The Shape of Water. We actually did two interviews. One of them is the interview I mentioned above — the one with him showing me around his house, telling me about all sorts of wacky stuff. This one was for the internet.

The other one was for HBO, and it didn’t feature me on the camera at all. I stood behind the camera, and asked him questions. He spoke directly into the lens, so it would look like he was speaking directly to the audience.

This one is still online. I think it came out well:

The interview took place in his home “library”, which is less a library than a bizarre menagerie of mannequins, fetuses, toys, and weird books in several languages. 

It was mostly about the process of creating the film — costume designing, and so on.

He also told a story about a time he almost died on set. I remember it being pretty funny. Watching this video back, it looks like we cut that part out. I have no idea why – maybe there wasn’t enough room in that evening’s show, or we didn’t have the budget to animate it.

I don’t remember a lot about the interview, but I do remember that I was trying to avoid politics. Not because I don’t like talking politics (I do), but because I’d already seen del Toro talk about politics in plenty of other interviews, so I didn’t need to retread that territory in mine.

Plus, I didn’t wanna be yet another American reporter making the Mexican film director talk Trump, when we were supposed to be talking about his weird-ass movie about having sex with mutant fish.

But somehow, near the end of the conversation, it ended up veering that way. I can’t remember what he said, but I remember being a little surprised at how frank he was being about American society.

Maybe ‘frank’ isn’t the right word here. ‘Pessimistic’ is closer.

Anyway, the best part. Or the part that stuck out to me, anyway.

After we shut the cameras off, del Toro got up from his couch. The mood was a little heavy, because we had been talking some pretty bleak politics near the end there.

I got up and told del Toro that we needed about 15 minutes to reset our equipment, so he could go take a break for a bit. One of my coworkers asked if he could get a picture with del Toro. I happened to have a little digital camera in my pocket, so I pulled it out and snapped a couple shots of them. I put the camera back into my pocket.

I started to put away the tripods and lights, and my coworkers started chatting about how we would arrange the next set.

Guillermo del Toro started quietly walking out of the room, toward the hallway. In the process, he had to pass by me, and also pass by a low coffee table by the entrance of the room.

In the middle of that table was a small model building with an American flag rising out of the central tower. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but looking it up now, it was a miniature model of the Pirates of the Caribbean building at Disneyland.

Del Toro walked over to the table, and bent down towards the model. He was facing partially away from me, so I don’t think he noticed me watching him.

He plucked the American flag off the central spire, and held it in his hand. He stood up, and for a few moments, quietly turned the toy plastic flag over and around in his hand, like he was trying to eyeball how much it weighed.

He paused. Then, he looked up. With his eyes now focused ahead on the hallway, and no longer looking at the table, he laid the flag down, gently, on the ‘ground’ of the miniature building. 

And then he walked out of the room.

I watched him leave.

Then, I took that same camera out of my pocket and took two pictures of the how the miniature building now looked. Those are the pictures you now see.

I just talked with a friend, who asked me if I had watched tonight’s Presidential debates. I hadn’t. I didn’t even know they were happening.

But it made me think, as I occasionally do, of that building, and that flag.

And that feeling I had at the time – that I had ‘overheard’ del Toro ‘say’ something that wasn’t spoken aloud, and certainly wasn’t for me to hear.

And the feeling that he was probably right.