Guillermo del Toro (born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco) is an Academy Award-nominated Mexican film director.
del Toro studied in the Instituto de Ciencias, and was raised by his Catholic grandmother. Del Toro first got involved with filmmaking when he was about eight years old. He executive produced his first feature in 1986 , at the age of 21. Before that he spent nearly 10 years as a make-up designer, and formed his own company, Necropia, in the early 80s. He also co-founded the Guadalajara-based Mexican film festival. Later on in his directing career, he formed his own production company, the Tequila Gang. His religious beliefs are hard to define. In one of his interviews he calls himself "a lapsed Catholic - that likes Taoism." In the same interview he also said "once a Catholic - always Catholic."
In 1998 his father was kidnapped in Mexico, which prompted del Toro to move abroad to live as an expatriate. Del Toro currently lives in Westlake Village, a bedroom community in Los Angeles.
He has directed a wide variety of films, from comic book adaptations (Hellboy and Blade II) to historical fantasy and horror films, two of which are set in Spain during or in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War under the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. These two films, El espinazo del diablo (The Devil's Backbone) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), are among his most critically acclaimed works. They also share similar settings, protagonists (young children), and themes (including the relationship between fantasy/horror and the struggle to live under Fascist or dictatorial rule) with the 1973 Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive, widely considered to be the finest Spanish film of the 1970s.
del Toro, as interviewed on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show), lists several fascinations that have become regular features in his films: "I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things." del Toro's work notably frequently includes monsters. In recent interviews, he has stated that he has always been "in love with monsters. My fascination with them is almost anthropological . . . I study them, I dissect them in many of my movies: I want to know how they work, what the inside of them looks like, [and] what their sociology is." He also mentions as influences Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and Borges.
He is also close friends with two other prominent and critically praised Mexican filmmakers, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu. The three often influence each other's directorial decisions, have been interviewed together by Charlie Rose, and Cuarón was one of the producers of Pan's Labyrinth. All three received Oscar nominations when the 2006 Academy Award nominations were unveiled in January 2007 - del Toro for his original screenplay for Pan's Labyrinth (the film itself received 6 nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film), Cuaron for writing and editing Children of Men and Iñárritu for producing and directing Babel.
