TRUST Trivia: Guillermo del Toro

Hollywood Reporter-crowned Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro could teach us a thing or two about Halloween.  With films under his belt like Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim, this Mexican director never ceases to spook, mystify, and fascinate.

Here is some trivia to help you learn how this puppeteer of perturbation keeps his creativity flowing:

He is inspired by love.

He is married to his high school sweetheart, Lorenza Newton, cousin of Mexican singer Guadalupe Pineda. They first met while studying at the Guadalajara School of Sciences.

He knows where to put his thinking cap on. 

His workspace/man-cave, the “Bleak House,” would make a terrific Halloween party venue.

He’s adaptable.

Guillermo became a vegetarian after seeing “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” but only for four years. He is currently back to being an omnivore.

Jamón Serrano, anyone?

He respects the dead and the fictional. 

Del Toro is obsessed with monsters and believes them to be incredibly powerful symbols. While his favorite film monsters include Frankenstein, the Alien, Gill-Man, Godzilla, and The Thing, Frankenstein is the one that has a special meaning for him.  In both film and literature, he claims he has a “Frankenstein fetish to a degree that is unhealthy,” and that Frankenstein is “the most important book of my life, so you know if I get to [making the film], whenever I get to it, it will be the right way.”

He is a part of a talented cultural community. 

When he was Oscar-nominated in 2007 for “Pan’s Labyrinthe” (“El laberinto del fauno”), he was one of 10 Mexican Oscar-nominees that year. The others were Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Adriana Barraza, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Navarro, Emmanuel Lubezki, Eugenio Caballero, Pilar Revuelta and Fernando Cámara.

He was wise enough to know that makeup is not “just for girls.”

He began his career in film as a makeup artist: “I’m as thorough and as well-prepared as I can be in my filmmaking, and that came from the discipline of having to work as a make-up effects artist many, many, many times in my life.”