Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Guillermo del Toro - Page 2

I believe that we will elevate and differentiate the discourse of cinema the more we discuss image creation in specific terms.

I want to live in a space that I designed, that is for me.

I started when I was eight, doing super 8 films.

I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.

Every Sunday on Channel 6 in Guadalajara, where I lived, they dedicated most every Sunday to black-and-white horror films and sci-fi. So I watched them. I watched 'Tarantula.' I watched 'The Monolith Monsters.' I watched all the Universal library.

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.

Ultimately, you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It's an impulse that's intrinsic to the Mexican character.

I like John Carpenter. I like some of his films more than others.

I was very attracted to doing 'The Wolverine' in Japan because that's my favorite chapter in the story of Wolverine. But I'm not a superhero guy.

I loved when the superhero genre crosses with horror. Morbius. Those are the guys I gravitated towards. Blade. So for me, to be interested in doing a superhero movie, it would need to be on the dark side or a Jack Kirby property. Kamandi, Demon, Mr. Miracle - I love any Kirby.

As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don't.

In that, Blade 2 is very much like a rock concert... if it's too loud, you're too old.

Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.

I'm very grateful of my life and my career and the movies I've been able to make.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

I hope to continue doing TV, and I think that what I've learned on 'The Strain' will come in handy.

You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.

I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it's a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.

I love producing other people's work, but presenting is a very serious business. It's a marriage.

I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

It is unnatural to deny effort, adversity, and pain.

It's never hard to cast kids; it's only ever hard to direct them.

Well I think effects are tools.

Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.

I think that The Eye is a particularly Americanized take on horror.

I think we live in a culture that is actually hedging all of it towards comfort and immediacy, things that scare me. All the things that they sell us as a way of life scare me.

I started seeing in the monsters as a more sincere form of religion because the priests were not that great, but Frankenstein was great.

I think Hollywood has a habit of developing 100 times more than they actually shoot.

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.

I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don't think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.

If you want to know how to handle a crew, it's great to be part of a crew.

I have a very promiscuous relationship with all my objects.

Every project that you write about or read about, it goes through years of hard work. We write a screenplay; we design. Then you submit those and the budget, and it's out of your hands.

I think looking is the essential act of loving. Brothers, fathers and sons, lovers, whatever. What you do when you love someone is look at that person as that person is.

I'm always very, very careful when the movies happen and where they happen.

I'm fortunate enough that my personal life falls into whack with my professional life. My kids love visiting the sets; they love the monsters.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

'Crimson' is written in a very particular style, and it's very precise in the way it graduates into a gothic romance. The souls that will connect with it will connect deeply.

I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.

I've been going through immigration all my life, and I've been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I'm not directing.

If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call 'Hollywood' movies and truly bizarre, what you would call 'arthouse' movies.

The reason there's a 'Hellboy 2' is not because the studios were passionate about the first one; it's because the numbers made sense.

What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.

When I was a teenager there was no video in my country. Betamax came to Mexico very slowly.

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.

I'm having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.

It's so much easier when you're promoting a movie that you like!

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.

As a craftsman, I bust my butt as much for 'Blade 2' as I do for 'Devil's Backbone.'

I truly try to create beauty and reflection and all of that as conscientiously and judiciously and minutely as I can.

I have said no to many, many Day of the Dead projects in the past, about 10 or 15, because every time I heard a take it was from someone who didn't know the celebration.

The creature from the black lagoon - I drew that creature almost every day, two, three times a day, for probably my first ten years of life, you know.

I don't think that Argentinian cinema is well-known outside Argentina the way it should be.

What is scary to me is silly to somebody else. CG isn't scary to me. It's like comedy - comedy and horror are quite similar, in that there'll always be somebody who'll say, 'I don't think that was funny.' And it's the same with things that are meant to be scary.

I was directing before I knew it was called that.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft - like 'Alien,' which is almost an outer-space version of 'At The Mountains Of Madness.'

I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books - thousands - and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements - the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists - you know, that I consult before I start every movie.

I love to travel, anywhere in the world. Wherever it is... India... Tibet... wherever. I'll go anywhere.