Guillermo del Toro Looks Toward The Future
By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
Guillermo del Toro entered the geek radar with Blade II in 2002. Seven years later, the Guadalajara native has seen his stock rise even while he’s stuck to the realm of the fantastic, thanks to the success of the Hellboy series and Pan’s Labyrinth. This month, in an interview in Wired magazine, Del Toro hit back at those who would dismiss him as a filmmaker catering to a geekier crowd:
People think because you love genre you don’t know anything else. It’s condescending. If the emotion is provoked and the goals are achieved, what does it matter? Is Thomas Pynchon a more worthy read than Stephen King? It depends on the afternoon. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. He threads the profane and irreverent with the profound and soul-searing.
Even while praising him, though, Wired’s Scott Brown seems to ignore del Toro’s statement; Brown refers to him as a “schlock-meister” twice in the article, and uses the term “pasty indoor kid” to contrast del Toro with friends and fellow directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Thankfully, though he’s determined to hang an asterisk onto del Toro’s success, even Brown concludes, “Suddenly, we’re looking down the barrel of the Del Toro Decade,” citing a list of projects that includes:
* A vampire-oriented novel, The Strain, written with Chuck Hogan and which presumably doesn’t include shiny skin
* The film adaptation for The Hobbit, a two-film project he was selected for by Lord Of The Rings mastermind Peter Jackson
* A new movie version of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
During the interview, del Toro also says the day is coming for a new, pan-media form of story telling, encompassing film, television, print, video and even video games:
We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
Video games seem to figure heavily in del Toro’s vision of this “single platform” future: he says “the Citizen Kane of games” will come about during the next ten years.
“We’re using [non-linear storytelling technology] just to shoot people and run over old ladies,” del Toro says. “We could be doing so much more.”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
InJM wrote:
A del Toro Hobbit is definetly something I can see looking really nice. And I must say his view on video games is really nice too. This is something I’ve heard talked about on a few video game blogs before but I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone calling it the “Citizen Kane” of video games before. That would be a game I’d love to play.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 8:15 am ¶
Persia wrote:
A new version of Slaughterhouse Five directed by Guillermo del Toro?
Wow.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 10:33 am ¶
Pickly wrote:
It does seem odd, given how how many Science fiction books have written about what could be considered important issues, that some attitude towards these sorts of movies hasn’t really seemed to follow.
For some issues, Science fiction and fantasy may be better at handling them than other types of stories. If someone were to write about, say, religious fanatics, making their own world for these fanatics to work in might work better, since there would be no need ot get exact details of a current religion right, and no worry about current day politics or viewpoints getting into the story, the person telling the story could just focus their own impressions/thoughts/feelings into the story without as much interference.
(I do, as a very part time hobby make up worlds for computer games, or just for the heck of it, or sort of fan fiction type things, and when thinking of what a world is like a lot of current day issues, like environmental problems, political corruption, and such tend to worm their way in. I’m not sure what this says about more major stories, though, but the possibilities are there.)
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 11:30 am ¶
johnjihoonchang wrote:
Guillermo, I’m with you. Let’s take storytelling to the next level.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 4:30 pm ¶
Kaonashi wrote:
This is wonderful news! I love him so much.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 5:23 pm ¶
trooper6 wrote:
It is somewhat frustrating to continuously see Hollywood folks talking about how there needs to be great storytelling in video games…that it has to be more than shooting and running over prostitutes in cars….because video games don’t need saving from the outside. There are already many very detailed and interesting games with great storytelling in many different varied ways.
From the intensely psychological Silent Hill 2, to the “is it art or is it a game” The Path, to Knights of the Old Republic 1 (which was the best Star Wars movie since Jedi), to the critique of Randian philosophy in Bioshock, to some of the epic grandeur of Final Fantasy. Even the much maligned Grand Theft Auto has been working very hard at telling complex stories…which culminated in GTAIV.
Video games have had brilliant voice acting, very interesting direction and art design for some time now. And stories…has everyone forgotten the purely text based video games from the 80s?
And as for the “we need a Citizen Cane” — I think there is a problem with Citizen Cane narratives in general. It is the great man, genius narrative that is affixed to Citizen Cane that marginalizes people like Guillermo del Toro in the first place. And since this is racialicious I want to point out that these great men are almost always white and men.
I teach Popular Music Studies and I get so tired of people trying to make a case for popular music’s importance by comparing their favorite artist (usually the Beatles) to Beethoven.
Rather then trying to find the Citizen Cane of video games, let us not reinforce the covert values of the master’s house when we make a case for the marginalized people/genres/works of art we are advocating.
Bioshock has this moment…that….wow…is this really, really amazing moment. I would never call that a Citizen Cane moment, because Citizen Cane could never accomplish this moment. This moment (I won’t say to avoid spoilers) is something that could only take place in the medium of video games. And it was phenomenal and made me think for weeks afterwards–about the actions that I, as a player, had or had not taken.
The thing that got film lots of cred was when they fully embraced the myth of the lone genius auteur…arrived in the form of Orson Wells and Alfred Hitchcock. All the other people who went into making that film…from the obvious like the cinematographers and editors, to the next obvious like the actors…to the not so obvious like the costumers, scene painters, gaffers, grips, and craft services. Films are collaborative collective efforts, and when that collectivity was ditched in favor of the lone hero director, to match the genius composer or whatever…then film got its cred.
Roger Ebert said that video games could never be art because there was no auteur who had all the control in created the narrative. That the fact that the player is part author of that narrative invalidates video games as art. People have tried to counter by recreating the genius auteur narrative in video games…Peter Molyneux, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Tim Schaefer, Ragnar Tornquist, David Cage. To be sure, the games with strong auteur figures get better press, even though there are great games that don’t have such a visible figurehead. But it has been harder in video games to ignore the heavy team aspect of games and the very distributed international aspect to the industry.
I don’t want a Citizen Cane of video games. I’ll take Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, with an amazing female protagonist and set in Morocco–until you go *somewhere else…dum dum dum!* I don’t need the lone hero, I can take the team of Bioware or Team Ninja or Team Silent or whichever team is the one whose collective labor brings about the very unique work of art I’m interacting with.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 5:44 pm ¶
Mr. Noface wrote:
I must say that I am looking forward to see what he does with the Hobbit movie duo.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 9:07 pm ¶
Titanis walleri wrote:
“to Knights of the Old Republic 1 (which was the best Star Wars movie since Jedi)”
I’d go even further and say it’s probably the best thing the franchise has produced so far…
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 9:27 pm ¶
trooper6 wrote:
Well Titanis…I do think it was better than Return of the Jedi no doubt…and I haven’t seen A New Hope in a while…it’s probably better than that one. It is better than Empire? I don’t know….but KotOR 1 was pretty phenomenal. I was invested like…I mean…yeah.
And unlike the films, my protagonist was proud POC! Lol!
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 10:52 pm ¶
Daomadan wrote:
I love him. That is all.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 11:57 pm ¶
Chris Diaz wrote:
I REALLY like Hellboy 2. It really touches on the whole “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” concept. Not to sound overly geeky, but I’m human and still had trouble rooting for the humans unilaterally…lol.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:23 am ¶
Betty Chambers wrote:
He makes such nightmarishly awesome films. He could make sequel to add to the Aliens franchise, and I know it would be great.
I look forward to anything coming from him.
Okay, now I know why Blade II was the best in the series.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 5:55 pm ¶