Guillermo del Toro Quotes

For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light.

The reality is that I feel that fear is a very spiritual emotion.

I believe that the physical effect, the physical set, whenever you can, is ten times better than the digital effect.

I only produce movies that have something stylistically different, so that I can learn from the experience of producing.

Its a bit cloudy in London but people are already drinking out on the streets- God Bless the pubs.

What is fantastic for me is that the Romantic movement comes out as a counter balance to everything that has been accumulating since the Age of Reason. I think the downfall of imagination as a genre or as a perception starts with the Age of Reason, which says everything else that came before us, all those superstitions, all those myths, are childish.

If film making is magic, there's a difference between close up magic and David Copperfield. If you're doing close up magic, which independent filmmakers do, it is a very delicate craft, interpersonal relationship, and being able to enrapture a very small audience.

I think part of making movies is dealing with restrictions of freedom and budget. I'd rather deal with restrictions of budget. It's better to feel free within any budget.

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It’s like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it’s gorgeous. You feel very exposed.

As a child that was disenfranchised from everything, and that was in a world that was the wrong size, run by the wrong people, the wrong morale and the wrong rules, I felt completely outside of that, and I wanted some measure of control, and the measure of control I found was through fear.

Imagine, there is almost no possibility for a foreign language film to be distributed in America right now. That doesn't just make the industry poorer, it makes the landscape of cinema poorer, in America. The impossibility to get a good release on a really good European, Latin American, Asian movie is a tragedy.

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.

What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA.

You’ll meet her. She’s very pretty, even though sometimes she’s sad for many days at a time. You’ll see, when she smiles, you’ll love her.

As a first-time director, you cannot have final cut. But as a producer, you can have final cut.

When somebody says something I don't agree with, I say I'd rather not. It comes to the point where that is the strongest form of resistance. As a Mexican, it took me a long while to learn one word in English, "no". And that is the one word we have in common.

I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books, but I'd love to do one where one of the kids dies, or one of the main characters dies. I love for those things to have a little bit more tragedy.

I find I'm waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it's like a book every two weeks. But I read every day.

...there's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.

Never fly commercial. That's the moral of this story.

I would much rather see somebody bring something new to a genre than produce something that seems safe.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

Survival often feels like an indignity.

There are two types of producing deals, and I've had both. I've produced over 20 movies now. You are either watching in horror, as the cars take the curve in the grand prix, or you're enjoying it.

...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.

When I stage a violent scene, I try for it to serve a purpose. I do love those things, the makeup effects. But I love them more with the monsters. I never was much of a gore guy. I've always enjoyed just creating monsters.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

They're getting more and more experience on what to expect, and the Hellboy audience is such a faithful and fanatic audience as I am, and you have to really be very open about what you do

I had gotten to the point where I just didn't want to perform anymore - I didn't want to be on the chopping block anymore. I started to want to withdraw and retreat from it.

There's nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.

I feel that we have, as Mexicans, two things: one, a natural distrust of institutions. I hate organised religion, I hate organised politics, I hate the idea of the military and the police. Because we grew up distrusting all these sacred institutions, the only thing you have left is a vague, national sense of impending doom. Why do we drink and how are we so merry? Because we know that pretty soon, our time's up. There is a sense of fatality that makes us pretty chirpy people. You try to live. The only reason that dying is important is that it gives life sense.

I'm the freaky version of that superhero who says, wherever there is injustice, I shall be there. Whenever there is a difficult project, I'd like to be there.

Oliver Stone will never be happy with the first take. He wants more than that. When you’re delivering your lines, he’ll stop you and tell you some kind of riddle about the character and you have to go away and figure that out. If you’re hoping for him to give you all the answers, then you’re in for a long day.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue

For any actor to have Oliver Stone call him or her up… It’s a compliment. He expects you to be on your toes. If you’re not, he pokes at you until you react. He’s very provocative, creatively. It started like a lot of hard work, but it ended up a lot of fun.

I really wanted the house to be a character. And I knew, I said, I'll produce that one, but if I direct it, I need to build a house.

I don't want to move over to Beverly Hills. My goal is to make the movies I want to make and support the people I want to support. That's it.

People tend to think that big things only happen to big people ... I think that is not true. The small decisions we make every day define who we are and define the world around us. ... But I bet to you there is a decision every day in your life where you affect somebody else.

I was an altar boy, a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary, I was a choir boy but then at the age of 14 I discovered masturbation and all that went out the window.

We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that.

The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7.

The only true immortality is when you don't care if you die. The moment you stop giving credence to gain is when you become invulnerable to pain.

You can always go back to not making any money, and then you get the freedom. And I'm going to continue doing it, because it really is a fantastic sense of liberation.

I have my library separate from the family home, and every room is a different genre. The only room that I can guarantee I've read everything is the horror room.

I am the nice adversary, the guy that's going to ask the tough questions and is not going to be happy with the quick answer.

In a world where we are so pragmatic and materialistic, fear is the only emotion that allows even a sophisticated person to believe in something beyond.

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

Frankfurt, discussing a stuntman: He missed being killed in that shot be literally half an inch.