He found the ideal material in William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, the grimy tale of slick conman Stanton Carlisle, who uses techniques learned while working at a carnival to trick his wealthy marks into believing he can speak with their dead family members. Where most modern filmmakers have updated the genre into neo-noir, del Toro was determined to serve it raw. It is a cinema of desolation and existentialism that was born at that curious crossroads where America abandoned the pastoral and the spiritualism of the early 1900s, and went into the post-First World War dissolution, landing in an urban industrial environment in which brutality was systematised against men.” It is, he says, with loquacious enthusiasm, “the American version of Greek tragedy. That beloved genre is film noir, which del Toro tackled as a young man in short films, leaving a lingering desire to return to it at feature-length one day. Why don’t we do just that? And why don’t we do it in a genre that I’ve loved with as much passion as I have the fantastic and horror?’” “In this instance, I thought, ‘I’ve been saying all my career that the monster for me is man, not the monster. ![]() “But in my filmography, there’s always been something in the next movie that scares the shit out of me, whether I’m going to try a superhero movie, or I’m going to try an intimate story of the Spanish Civil War but with fantastic characters. “There were a lot of decisions to be made after The Shape Of Water,” explains del Toro. For the first time in his career, del Toro has left behind the supernatural, setting aside the fantastical and horror elements that have defined his output from 1993 feature directing debut Cronos through to his Academy Award-winning creature romance The Shape Of Water in 2017. At least not in the traditional sense of monster. The same cannot be said of his latest film Nightmare Alley. “Yes,” he says, “there’s a lot of monsters here.” Screen can even see some lurking behind him in his Los Angeles home during our Zoom call: shadowy, macabre, misshapen things, some of which are plucked from cinematic history, including his own movies Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. ![]() ![]() Guillermo del Toro has lived with monsters for most of his life. The multi-hyphenate is already knee deep in his next one, a Leonard Bernstein biopic titled Maestro that Netflix is backing starring Cooper, Jeremy Strong and Carey Mulligan.Guillermo del Toro, Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett on the set of ‘Nightmare Alley’ Masters asked what options he’s been considering and Cooper said that while he is unsure (“Maybe it’s opening up a pizza shop? I really don’t know), he won’t stop making movies. No question, no question.”Ĭooper said the switch has led him to actively be thinking about other sources of revenue outside of movie-making. Those days are completely gone and there is trepidation I have with that. “The upside, if it was successful, is that I would be paid a lot more. “On a personal level, how I can make a living has completely changed,” Cooper said, adding that he’s bet on himself for films (like American Sniper and A Star is Born) that required sacrificing upfront fees for a share of the backend. The disclosure led to a broader discussion about the future of the movie business with Cooper opening up about how he’s been impacted financially on the industry’s pivot to streaming and his predictions on the future of exhibition. All of those movies I saw on a 16-inch television set.” “I saw some great movies there but the movies that changed my life and inspired me to do what I do for a vocation were The Elephant Man, Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Shampoo, Coming Home and Deer Hunter. There was a theater behind my house,” he tells Masters during what is the second installment of a two-part conversation, which covered full-frontal nudity, Licorice Pizza and playing Jon Peters. ![]() That’s what happened to him as Cooper said he saw a long list of iconic films not in a movie theater but at home. Netflix Scraps Ad-Free 'Basic' Streaming Plan in Canada
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |