Guillermo del Toro

Became a vegetarian after seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but only for four years. Currently, hes no longer a vegetarian.

Turned down a chance to direct Blade: Trinity , AVP: Alien vs. Predator and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to work on his dream project: Hellboy .

Fought the film studios for almost seven years to get Ron Perlman for the title role in Hellboy . The studio wanted a bigger name to ensure the success of the movie, but del Toro thought that Perlman was the perfect choice and wouldnt make the movie if he wasnt cast.

He is friends with fellow successful Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarn and Alejandro G. Irritu.

Has a photographic memory.

1997: His father was kidnapped in Mexico and held for seventy-two days until his ransom was paid.

In a January 2007 interview on the radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross ," said that his strictly Catholic grandmother was a "Piper Laurie in Carrie " figure in his childhood. He told Gross that his grandmother would require him to mortify himself in self-punishment, in one case placing metal bottle caps into his shoes so that the soles of his feet were bloodied while walking to school. She also tried to exorcise him twice because of his persistent interest in fantasy and drawing monsters from his imagination.

His favorite movie monsters are Frankensteins Monster and the Creature of the Black Lagoon.

In 2007, he was one of 10 Mexican Oscar-nominees. The others were Alejandro G. Irritu , Guillermo Arriaga , Adriana Barraza , Alfonso Cuarn , Guillermo Navarro , Emmanuel Lubezki , Eugenio Caballero , Pilar Revuelta and Fernando Cmara.

Lost 45 lbs. while making El laberinto del fauno , which he admitted in the DVDs video prologue.

Turned down a chance to direct I Am Legend , One Missed Call , Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Halo (????) to work on Hellboy II: The Golden Army .

Turned down the chance to direct Hellraiser: Bloodline .

He regards Mimic as the weakest of his films and blames constant interference from the producers Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein as the main reason, because they didnt respect his artistic vision. He later made peace with the film after creating a new Directors Cut.

(December 2007) Ranked #37 on EWs The 50 Smartest People in Hollywood.

Was asked to direct End of Days , but he turned it down.

His movie and comic book collection is so huge that he had to buy an extra home to accommodate it.

Is good friends with director Robert Rodriguez.

Cites Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as his favorite movie.

His favorite albums are "The Wall" by Pink Floyd and "Security" by Peter Gabriel.

In an article in USA Today (August 22, 2011), del Toro listed his 6 favorite fright flicks: Freaks (1932) , The Uninvited , The Innocents , Jaws , Alien , and The Shining .

Children with Lorenza Newton : Mariana Del Toro and Marisa Del Toro.

Inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame during their gala held on March 12, 2015 in Austin, Texas.

Has extensive knowledge and practical experience playing video-games, and is very good friends with Japanese video-game designer/director Hideo Kojima, with whom he shares many interests, including 1960s classic movies and Japanese TV shows, and rare toys.

Used to work as an orderly at a mental institution and would eat lunch in a morgue next to it.

Was attached to direct The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey but dropped out due to repeated delays in the production and the project stalling due to MGM declaring bankruptcy. He still received screenwriting credit on the film and its sequels: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies .

When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but,out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only,means to get to it.

So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a,Mexican sensibility.

The sign of a true friendship is when you can forgive success.

These shots are not eye-candy, they are, to me, eye-protein. - regarding,El laberinto del fauno (2006) .

My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.

History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts.

I hate Hollywood movies with children as happy, brainless creatures that,spout one-liners. What I tried to put in,El espinazo del diablo (2001) is how unsafe it is to be a child.

Many times in my life I saw children almost kill each other.

Kaiju [monster] movies, by definition, bring a completely escapist fun.

You cannot aspire to do a movie that is as quirky as,El laberinto del fauno (2006) in the Hollywood machinery. It,would get tested and noted by executives to death, and end up having a,happy ending and all that bullshit, you know? And at the same time, you,cannot end up with with a movie that is as spectacular and magnificent,in showmanship as Pacific Rim (2013) if you do it in Mexico or,Spain.

Success is fucking up on your own terms.

Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.

I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit. " (Guardian interview 2006),The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety. And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.

It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? To be dragged under?,THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY.

Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman.

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.

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

Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

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

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen. .