Guillermo del Toro has achieved the best of both worlds in filmmaking. He’s made movies that have become iconic in popular culture, found commercial success and earned a ton of acclaim and accolades, including three Oscar wins. You’d think that would warrant the writer/director to be able to make anything he wants to, right? Per del Toro’s recent comments, even over 30 years into making movies in Hollywood, he still often gets rejected by studios, and he talked about that experience while comparing the filmmaking experience to being a "sandwich of shit."
Now, Guillermo del Toro does love to take big risks in his filmmaking, be it a romance between a human and a sea creature, or a Pinocchio movie that confronts Fascist Italy. His tastes may not exactly be mainstream, but they just about always find an audience to adore it. When del Toro recently spoke to his experience with studios, he warned studios are more interested in 'grinding out shit and destroying your art.' Also, in his words:
They still say no to me. In the last two months, they said no to five of my projects. So it doesn’t go away. Making movies is eating a sandwich of shit. There’s always shit, just sometimes you get a little more bread with yours. The rate of productivity against your efforts will remain frustratingly difficult, and frustratingly long. And you will always encounter assholes. But have faith in the stories you want to tell and wait until someone wants to buy them.
The Pan’s Labyrinth filmmaker shared these thoughts during the Annecy Animation Festival this week (via The Hollywood Reporter). During the conversation, he spoke about how when studios call stories “content” or say the word “pipeline,” they are using “sewage language.” Del Toro has always been able to create art he wants through his movies and television, but he’s had to metaphorically eat a “sandwich of shit” as he put it, in order to make them how he wishes to. Along the way (even recently), he’s often faced with rejection.
Del Toro recently found great success by making his first stop-motion movie in Pinocchio, which was a hit on Netflix and became the Best Animated Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. Moving forward, the filmmaker shared that there are a “couple more” live-action movies he wants to make, but otherwise he only wants to do animation for the rest of his career.
He is reportedly working on a live-action Frankenstein movie with Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac and Mia Goth, along with returning to stop-motion for Netflix’s The Buried Giant. During the festival appearance, del Toro reflected on 2023’s great successes being animated movies, between The Super Mario Bros. Movie being the year’s first billion dollar hit and Across The Spider-Verse having a huge opening weekend earlier this month. As he continued:
Animation to me is the purest form of art, and it’s been kidnapped by a bunch of hoodlums. We have to rescue it. [And] I think that we can Trojan-horse a lot of good shit into the animation world.
Following the massive success of those two animated movies, del Toro is hoping there will be more risks taken in the medium of animation. His upcoming movie, The Buried Giant, for example, is an “adult fantasy drama” from Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro about an elderly couple living in a world where no one can keep their long-term memories. Here’s to more original films from del Toro being greenlighted (because why wouldn’t they?) and animation continuing to find advancements!
