Pan's Labyrinth

Once upon a time there lived a boy who loved monsters. This week, Chris & Lizzie head swap Jim Henson's Labyrinth for Guillermo Del Toro's, err... Pan's, err... the Faun's Labyrinth. They explore Del Toro's dark-fairy-tale of a childhood, his battles with real Hollywood monsters (the Weinsteins), and how an insult to Alfonso Cuarón's face led to arguably his most defining film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a childhood fantasy fairy tale.

• 2:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Tales slash nightmare, or is it for the ages? I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what Labyrinth del Fauno do you have for us today?

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The one and only Labyrinth del Fauno, the one that has been misnomered, I should say, or marketed as Pan's Labyrinth, although there is no Pan in this movie.

• 2:32Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 2:32Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no character named Pan. There is no Greek mythology in this movie at all. Let's debunk that right now. I saw a lot of Reddit threads saying, oh, the, he's a god on this world. Nope, Pan was just a marketing choice. So let's just get that out of the way right now. This movie is, yeah, Lizzie, a dark fairy tale in some ways. It's also a war film in many other ways, or a post-war film, a resistance film. Pan's Labyrinth, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Lizzie, I'm assuming that you had seen it before this episode. What were your thoughts upon watching it for the podcast?

• 3:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I saw this at the Bird Theater in Richmond, Virginia. Shout out to the Bird. It's an amazing theater that plays a lot of independent and foreign films. There's a Wurlitzer organ that comes up out of the stage before the showing. And I loved this when I saw it. We were, what, probably 16, 17 when this came out, would have been in high school. It really blew me away. But I remember thinking at that point in time, oh, it was clearly all in her head. Like, this is such a tragedy. This is just a child trying to understand how to deal with tragedy and how to deal with trauma. And like, that's what this movie is about. I don't think I had rewatched this until last night, when we watched this for the podcast. And I was so surprised because on this viewing, I feel pretty strongly that it's all real.

• 3:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's not that it's not about the reasons that we create fairy tales, or the reason that, you know, children may need them to process trauma and understand it. But I felt like the two are not mutually exclusive in a way that I guess I didn't the first time that I watched this. But I mean, this is just, this is a pretty perfect movie. It is brutal. I did remember the most violent moment in this that will always stick in my head is when he kills the guy with the bottle, which is just awful. And I can't look at it, but I was pleasantly surprised by how great the effects look in this. I think for the most part, it all Really, really held up. I think the girl who plays Ophelia is remarkable. Really, all of the acting, and this is wonderful. To me, this is Guillermo del Toro's absolute best movie, hands down.

• 4:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I just, I think it's beautiful and I, I got a lot more out of it this time, I guess. I loved the connection between, you know, the Fauno saying, oh, you have to just do what I'm saying and you can't ask any questions. Which is of course what the doctor says to the captain when he says, you know, I'm not the kind of person who can just accept any authority without questioning, you know, whether or not it's right or wrong. And then it turns out that that was the Fonz's point and the whole thing was she was supposed to question what he was offering. So anyway, it's beautiful. It's sad. I hope she's living forever for centuries in her father's kingdom and not just dead post Spanish Civil War. But what about you, Chris?

• 5:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree. I saw this in high school as well. I did see this one in theaters and remembered loving it. I was already a del Toro fan. I saw The Devil's Backbone, which we're going to talk about today. When I was a freshman in high school during Spanish class.

• 5:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So I have not seen that one.

• 5:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's great. And we'll talk about it a little bit because it's really the sister film to this movie in so many ways. But then I went and I watched all of his stuff because I liked Blade 2 a lot. I loved Hellboy. I went and watched Cronos, which we will also talk about, even something like Mimic. And one of the reasons I wanted to cover this movie is that del Toro is a really, I think, rare, modern example of a director who sits at the intersection of studio movies and art house fare. And not in that he's doing both at the same time necessarily, but he really weaves in and out of both of these worlds. And I was talking to Jessie, our researcher, and she was saying, you know, he refers to Pan's Labyrinth as one of the most, if not the most difficult experiences of his life, making this movie.

• 6:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And when she started going through the research and tried to figure out why, yes, the production was hard, as we'll get to. But I think it more has to do with where del Toro was in his life when this movie came out and where he was in Hollywood.

• 6:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, because I think I and David, when we watched this last night, we both had the assumption that this must have come earlier in his trajectory because this was such a sort of watershed. Moment for him, but it's not. There's so much before it. And I guess it makes sense because instead of this being him breaking out, it was him breaking out as the kind of filmmaker that I think he wanted to be.

• 6:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think this movie is an inflection point in his career. So because we're going to go through this roadmap, I'll just really high level say it. So his first film, Chronos, early 90s, you know, $2 million indie genre film. We will talk about it in a moment. And then he goes to do Mimic and we'll talk about that, which is a Hollywood film. And then he kind of ping pongs back into Spanish language with The Devil's Backbone. Genre, very, very similar tonally to Pan's Labyrinth, then back to Hollywood, Blade Two.

• 7:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Love Blade Two.

• 7:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Hellboy, then back to Spanish language, Pan's Labyrinth. So yeah, he was straddling two worlds, you know, very much by the time that Pan's Labyrinth comes along. I agree. I think this is probably his best movie, although I do love The Devil's Backbone so much. And for me, this movie, for the first hour, I find myself wondering, every time I watch it, even though I know the answer, how is he going to tie the disparate elements of the resistance fighters and Captain Vidal and Mercedes and all these characters that are existing in a very brutal, real political resistance, you know, sort of world under Franco's authoritarian regime, going to blend with Ophelia and her relationship with the Fawn

• 7:52Chris Winterbauer?

  and the tasks that she's doing. And it's like a magic trick every time. Every time we hit the third act, I'm just left speechless with how well it ties together. He does such a brilliant job of, Captain Vidal is such a heinous person and villain, yet his motivation is so well drawn in this movie. Like, I find that I hate him so much for the violence that he commits. The scene you mentioned with the farmers comes to mind. And yet, at the end, the moment when he, you know, says, tell my son, you know, and then Mercedes, he will not even know your name. I think, again, it's not that you are sympathetic towards his character, but you really understand his character. And it was reminding me of, we were just discussing Disclosure Day on this podcast, and I did not understand the villains in that movie very well.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 8:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And Del Toro does such a good job. So I agree. I think this is an absolutely lovely movie. I think it's a triumph of so. So many departments, the Pan's Labyrinth theme, the

• 8:43Lizzie Bassett?

  It's beautiful.

• 8:44Chris Winterbauer?

  The lullaby is absolutely gorgeous. I will remember it forever. Fantastic performers and in so many ways, Lizzie, a movie that very nearly didn't exist. And so today's episode, we're going to spend a lot of time on Del Toro and how his creative being was formed. Because this movie is a crystallization of so many parts of his childhood and early career. It'll be kind of first half on that and then second half on the actual production of this movie.

• 9:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. I can't wait.

• 9:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Before we get to the details, so Pan's Labyrinth is a 2006 dark fantasy, although I would add historical war or resistance film.

• 9:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It was produced by Del Toro along with Bertha Navarro and Alfonso Cuaron. It stars Ivana Baquero as Ofelia, Doug Jones as Fauno, the pale man as well. Sergi Lopez as Captain Vidal, Maribel Verdú as Mercedes, Ariadna Gil as Carmen, Ofelia's mother, Alex Angulo as Dr. Ferrero and many, many more. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Lizzie, on May 27th of 2006. Rolled out internationally as it hit a number of festivals and then reached the United States in a limited release at the end of December and opened wide on January 19th of 2007.

• 9:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And as always, the IMDb logline reads, "In 1944, Francoist Spain, an imaginative young girl meets a fawn who tells her she's a princess and that she must prove her worthiness by completing three dangerous tasks." Also, there are resistance fighters.

• 10:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, the Spanish Civil War ended like maybe four or so years ago.

• 10:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Cause they do reference D-Day, don't they?

• 10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  They do.

• 10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So this is post-Spanish Civil War.

• 10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. So the Spanish Civil War ran from 36 to 39.

• 10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 10:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And this is under the Franco military dictatorship. Initially, it was a military junta and then it was Franco came to power in 36, I believe. The Francoists won and they were backed by Nazi Germany and the Italians. And they were ruling through 1944. As the war is coming to an end, the Allies are landing at Normandy during this movie. They make reference to it.

• 10:50Lizzie Bassett?

  But there are still resistance fighters that are there.

• 10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, living in the mountains and whatnot.

• 10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  As we know, it's interesting because like, we know they're not gonna win. Like, that's the position you're in from the very beginning, and that's kind of lovely because it doesn't matter at the end.

• 11:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Because Franco obviously ruled until 1975, is that right?

• 11:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and kind of similarly, in The Devil's Backbone, it takes place right in 39, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and the children in the orphanage are mostly the sons of the fighters for the Republic.

• 11:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 11:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And so we know their parents are also, they're gonna remain orphans, basically, obviously.

• 11:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, my notebooks, collections, and other obsessions by del Toro and Mark Zickrey, The Making of Pan's Labyrinth by Mark Cottavaz and Nick Nunziata, that's a book, the film's DVD commentary and special features, and many, many more articles, interviews, and retrospectives with those involved in the making of the film, in particular, Guillermo del Toro. All right, Lizzie, in order to tell the story of Pan's Labyrinth, we're gonna have to set it up a bit like a fairy tale.

• 11:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Era hace una vez, en una casa grande y solitaria, vivía un niño pequeño y solitario, al que le encantaban los monstruos. Pero no siempre fue así.

• 12:21Chris Winterbauer?

  That boy's name was Guillermo del Toro, and he was born, of course, in October. What other month could be appropriate? October 9th, 1964. When he was four years old, his life changed forever. He sat down and watched an episode of the American science fiction anthology series, The Outer Limits, not The Twilight Zone.

• 12:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 12:41Chris Winterbauer?

  An episode called "The Mutant." The main villain was, Lizzie?

• 12:45Lizzie Bassett?

  A mutant.

• 12:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good, with huge, bulging eyes. Del Toro was terrified, and then his brother decided to scar him for life. He put little Guillermo in his crib, left the room, and came back with fake- Plastic fried eggs over his eyes

• 13:01Lizzie Bassett?

  No!

• 13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And his mother's stockings on his head. Del Toro immediately wet the bed.

• 13:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, buddy.

• 13:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And from then on, all he could see were monsters. The shag carpet in his bedroom looked like long green fingers, ready to pull him down into the floor. The armoire would mutate when the church bells rang, growing a hand, a goat's face, and a leg. Del Toro was terrified, and he kept wetting the bed. His mother would punish him with chores every time. Finally, he'd had enough. This was no way to live. It was time to make a pact with the monsters. I'd like to play you a clip of how Del Toro approached these fiendish friends.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And one night, I got up and I said to the monsters that I saw in the closet and all that. I said, if you let me go pee, I'll be your friend forever. And this was said in earnest, and immediately something magical happened. I started what my therapist says is reverse, reverse phobia. But basically, I bonded with them. I adore them, and I adore them to this day.

• 14:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 14:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So Del Toro, just to go pee, said, "I'll be your friend forever." And he went from being a scared little boy, Lizzie, to being a strange little boy.

• 14:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  For Christmas, he asked his mother for a mandrake root, so he could perform a Wiccan ritual to turn it into a living being. So she took him to a psychologist. The psychologist gave Del Toro a ball of clay and said, "Do whatever you want with this. I'll come back when you're done to assess." He left the room. When he came back, Del Toro had turned it into a skeleton.

• 14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 14:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He was five years old.

• 14:42Lizzie Bassett?

  How did a five-year-old find out about a Wiccan ritual involving a mandrake root? There was no internet.

• 14:47Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get to it. He may have had a familial influence that we'll talk about in just a moment.

• 14:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He has to have, yeah.

• 14:53Chris Winterbauer?

  So in many fairy tales, there is a reversal of fortune that comes at the end of the story. So Hansel and Gretel find the witch's precious stones. The family's situation is improved. The circumstances that led to the child being abandoned in the woods is undone. Jack gets the giant's gold, for example. In the beanstalk. But for Del Toro, everything seemed to be happening backwards. When he was just a boy, Del Toro's father won the lottery. Six million dollars.

• 15:21Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 15:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And so the strange little boy moved into a house so big that he and his family could go weeks and weeks without seeing one another. But he had something new to keep him company. Stories. So Del Toro's father was a self-made man who'd stopped going to school very young. He'd never learned how to read, but he was self-conscious about not having a proper library now that he was rich. So he had one installed. And even though it doesn't sound like he used it much, Guillermo del Toro lived in that room. There was a medical encyclopedia that made him a mini hypochondriac. He'd diagnose himself with something awful, run to his mother and say, I'm dying. But he also learned how to diagnose art.

• 16:00Chris Winterbauer?

  There was a 10-volume set called How to Look at Art that introduced him to Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Manet, Goya. Guillermo read a book every one to two days, and not stuff for kids, heady stuff, surrealist, symbolist, Gothic horror, obviously.

• 16:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Chris Winterbauer?

  When he wasn't reading, he was writing and illustrating his own horror stories. Now, Del Toro had made friends with the monsters, but he wasn't completely fearless. His great aunt Josefine made sure of that. Now, Del Toro's parents decided to use some of their lottery winnings to travel the world. And in true Roald Dahlian fashion, I'll say, Del Toro was left behind with Josefine. Now, on the one hand, she liked to listen to his stories. They even hung up a sign at the house that read, Monster Club, Do Not Trespass.

• 16:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 16:45Chris Winterbauer?

  On the other hand, he said she made the mom in Carrie look like a party animal. She'd read him the most disturbing parts of the Bible. She tried to perform an exorcism on him. She threw holy water at him, and she put upside down bottle caps in his shoes so he'd bleed to, quote, "mortify the flesh" and atone for the original sin.

• 17:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, she's just having a good time. Listen, you have to find some activities when you've got a kid on your hands. You can't just let them sit there.

• 17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And you have to make sure that they appreciate every moment, which is why when they weren't living together, she'd end their phone calls saying, "Good night. I don't know if I'll wake up tomorrow."

• 17:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, a parenting icon.

• 17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, like Ophelia in El Labyrinth del Fauno, or Pan's Labyrinth.

• 17:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, Chris, you have to do it in the Doug Jones voice.

• 17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  How does he do it? He does like with the Spanish.

• 17:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yo soy un fauno.

• 17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But that's not Doug Jones's voice, to be clear.

• 17:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, okay. I thought he learned Spanish for this.

• 17:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He did, but it's still not his voice.

• 17:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, okay.

• 17:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, like Ophelia, Del Toro's dark fairy tale of a life was surrounded by very real political violence. And he has spoken at times about witnessing real-life horrors at a young age, seeing corpses of, quote, "people who had been shot or had accidents or even people burned alive." He was roughly four years old during the infamous Tlatololco massacre and seven during Alcanazo, or the Corpus Christi massacre. In the first of these, students had been protesting the ruling party of Mexico for not delivering on the promises of the 1917 Mexican Revolution. There was a demonstration, and days before Mexico hosted the Olympics, the police and military, including tanks, fired into the crowd.

• 18:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus.

• 18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And the exact death toll is debated, but official estimates peg the fatalities at 32. Unofficial sources, I saw it go into the hundreds or even thousands. And lots of people were arrested and beaten. From this, a counterculture film movement was born, called Los Super Ocheros, or The Super Eights. Amateur artists and filmmakers started making Super Eight movies and documentaries. The film was cheap, they could evade censorship, and Del Toro's family happened to own a Super Eight camera, projector, and screen. Not because he was countercultural or a cinema revolutionary, but because he owned multiple car dealerships now. What do you do when you win the lottery? You buy car dealerships.

• 19:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not a bad idea.

• 19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And someone had given him the camera equipment as a down payment on a car. So when Del Toro was eight years old, he made his first movie. It starred his Planet of the Apes figurines. It was an action film, but he quickly moved into genre with The Killer Potato, about a potato that wanted to take over the world. This sounds great.

• 19:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 19:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Then he saw The Exorcist, and he was blown away by Dick Smith's makeup effects. They're incredible. He bought Smith's makeup kit in a toy store. He started creating his own effects. He and his brother would make full-size, human-like figures filled with ketchup, and then they'd push them off the roof of the house to watch them explode.

• 19:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. Sounds fun.

• 19:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, mainstream Mexican cinema was undergoing a bit of a revival. Despite the fact that Mexico was under authoritarian rule, several more left-leaning directors were making movies that, quote, "broke through the barriers of satire and farce to tackle the problems of contemporary Mexico more directly, and deal openly with previously taboo subjects such as sex, violence, and politics." One of the few films on this list that I was familiar with is called Canoa, which is about another political uprising slash massacre of intellectuals. And one of these directors that was part of this movement was Jaime Umberto Hermosillo. He was openly gay. He explored gay relationships through his films, and often criticized what he saw as hypocrisy in Mexican cultures. And when Del Toro was in high school, Hermosillo moved to Del Toro's hometown of Guadalajara.

• 20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, in fairy tale parlance, the faun of Pan's Labyrinth is sometimes referred to as a donor or a mentor. These are creatures that appear in liminal spaces. They test, they help the hero. A fairy godmother, Lizzie, would be a classic example. Obviously, the faun is a little bit more mysterious than that. We can't tell, is he good, is he nefarious? Oftentimes, they're a talking animal. And sometimes, they're a director looking for students to help on their next film. Now, unfortunately, Guadalajara did not have a film school. So Hermosillo made one. He co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival and Center for Cinematographic Studies at the University of Guadalajara. And Del Toro started working on his films, first as a P A and then as a producer. In fact, as he rose up the ranks, he not only produced one of Hermosillo's most enduring films, Doña Erlinda and Her Son, about a gay couple,

• 21:10Chris Winterbauer?

  but Del Toro's mother played the lead

• 21:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:13Chris Winterbauer?

  in that movie. And like any good donor or mentor, Hermosillo installed in Del Toro a crucial lesson. If a road is not presented, you build one. Del Toro grew up obsessed with Universal monster movies and Mexican melodramas. He wanted to take the genre mixing stylings of the Mexican horror films he'd grown up on, but combine them with Hollywood-quality special effects. He wanted to do melodramas with monsters.

• 21:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 21:39Chris Winterbauer?

  The only problem? Nobody was doing this, at least in Mexico. There was no road. So we'd have to build one. And it was gonna be bumpy.

• 21:49Lizzie Bassett?

  We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful, organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince and it's all super high quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup. Now, obviously, you shouldn't stop at bedding. You should also refresh your closet with elevated everyday essentials that you will wear over and over again. Think cozy Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at 50 bucks, cashmere scarves, responsibly sourced down jackets, and 14 karat gold jewelry. I genuinely love Quince and I shop here for everything. I walked out the door the other day and realized

• 22:31Lizzie Bassett?

  every single thing I was wearing was Quince, down to my socks. Did I mention their socks are great, too? Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was what went wrong. It's the best way to support the show. Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats, and I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&Ms, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy to make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie

• 23:16Lizzie Bassett?

  night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie Treats and Peanut Butter M&Ms, and because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration, too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited time Halloween offerings.

• 24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the mid 80s, he strikes out on his own and he founds a stop-motion animation and makeup effects company called Necropia. Do you want to know their slogan, Lizzie? It's really compelling.

• 24:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 24:13Chris Winterbauer?

  "We're not the best, we're the only ones."

• 24:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 24:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 24:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He wrote to Dick Smith, convinced him to be one of his mentors. He eventually traveled to New York to study Smith's work. And in the late 80s, he's working on a Mexican science fiction anthology show, La Hora Marcada, which means "The Witching Hour", something very much in the vein of Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, for example. And he meets, he actually around this time meets two very influential Mexican directors. They're influential now, they were coming up at the time. Do you know who these other two people are, Lizzie?

• 24:47Lizzie Bassett?

  One's gotta be Alfonso Cuarón.

• 24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Alfonso Cuarón, that's the important one we're going to talk about a lot today because he's very involved in Pan's Labyrinth. Do you know the other one?

• 24:54Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 24:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Alejandro Iñarritu.

• 24:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, okay, of course.

• 24:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, the three amigos, as they would later become known. But let's focus on Cuarón because he is crucial to this story. So, Cuarón had just directed his first episode of the series, A veces regresan. This is based on Stephen King's short story of the same name, "Sometimes They Come Back", although they never officially credited Stephen King on it. I think they did the whole thing bootleg.

• 25:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 25:18Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Cuarón, both he and Del Toro were in the production office waiting room. And Del Toro says, "You're Alfonso, right? You directed that episode based on the Stephen King short story." And Cuarón knew who Del Toro was. Quote, "He designed corpses, mutilated hands, bullet wounds for a couple of people I knew working in film." Del Toro's reputation, according to Cuarón, was as being generous, smart, funny, and very, very strange. So Cuarón confirms, "Yes, I just adapted the Stephen King story." And Del Toro follows up with, "Well, if the Stephen King story is so great, why did your episode suck so much?"

• 25:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, nice. Neg him a little bit.

• 25:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Cuarón bursts out laughing and then says, "Well, why did you think it was so bad?" And then Del Toro just very calmly explains everything that was wrong with it. Cuarón realized that he was right and so began a beautiful friendship. And if you ask Alfonso Cuarón, Pan's Labyrinth, because one of the episodes that Del Toro wrote and Cuarón directed was the quote- Story of a little girl living with her abusive alcoholic father and the child eating ogre that was haunting her. But there are three feature films we need to talk about briefly before we get into our labyrinth, and the first was never made. Lizzie, did you know that Guillermo del Toro's first attempt at a feature film was an epic, claymation, prehistoric masterpiece called Omnivore?

• 26:34Chris Winterbauer?

  About a lizard man in a land where everything is savage and trying to eat everything else.

• 26:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Let me tell you, it sounds like a hit.

• 26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It maybe could have been, but we will never know because even though they made 120 puppets, several sets, shot and animated the first minute, someone broke into their studio and destroyed everything.

• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  What? Did they take anything or they just murdered the puppets?

• 26:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Not only did they murder the puppets, they then pooped and peed on everything too.

• 27:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Why?

• 27:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Unclear.

• 27:06Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I gotta say, anytime there's like a crime that involves someone taking a dump, I'm like, how do you, how do you do that? How do you do it on command? How do you do it under pressure? I don't understand. I'm not saying I support this. I don't, I'm just saying I'm a little impressed.

• 27:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Twist, it was Coron for trashing his first episode. It was not. Del Toro decides, not a great start, I should probably pivot to live action. So he's gonna do a ghost story. He writes an early draft of what would eventually become The Devil's Backbone, and he takes it to his mentor, Hermosillo, for feedback. And Hermosillo throws it in the trash. He says, it's not formatted properly. If you're not gonna format it properly, why am I gonna read it? So Del Toro says, well, okay, that's not a great start. I could rewrite that, or I could start over again. So he says, I'll put that away. And he writes, another movie, that's a vampire movie. Have you ever seen Cronos?

• 27:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not.

• 27:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Cronos is very fun. It stars a very young Ron Perlman, or co-stars in it. It is about a vampiric device, basically, that clamps onto you. I believe it hints that there's actually an insect deep inside of it that's causing the powers. And it gives you youth and vitality and turns your skin into marble, but it also makes you blood thirsty. What if vampirism was less a disease and more a mix? Mechanical device in this world.

• 28:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 28:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It was unusual. It was genre. It had to do with ideas of life and death. It also has a very fun, central story around a young girl and her grandfather, kind of buddy comedy element to it. And it has an American in it with Ron Perlman, for example, speaking English. It's very much a mashup kind of movie. And the government regulations that pushed for social criticism that had helped his mentor, Edomosio, hurt Del Toro because they weren't really interested in genre movies. It took him four years to get the Mexican Institute of Film to greenlight Cronos. Del Toro pulled together $2 million, apparently which included $500,000 in bankers' fees, which if I'm reading that correctly, means of the 2 million, $500,000 was just going to the banks for generating the money to begin with.

• 29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So he really had a $1.5 million.

• 29:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's a terrible deal.

• 29:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's basically taking out a loan from the mafia where the vig is 25% right up front. And it's around this time that he starts keeping journals with notes and drawings. And some of these made it into Cronos. But others, like a torture scene with a sadistic captain, would appear in the later movie. Now, Cronos was an enormous critical success. I do think we'll cover it at some point on this podcast. It won nine Adial Awards. These are the Oscars of Mexico, including Best Picture and Best Direction. And it was nominated for four more. And it was a bit of a big time flopper. It can't be really considered a big time flopper because it was such a low budget movie, but it flopped. Del Toro was broke. He had taken out a mortgage on his house and sold his car just to pay for the vampire device scene in the movie.

• 29:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 29:54Chris Winterbauer?

  But over in the United States, Cronos caught the eye of Nina Jacobson, who we've discussed before, Senior Vice President of Production at Universal. She brings in Del Toro and she says, "I want to give you a development deal." And he says, "Oh, my God, you're going to give me money to make movies? I've only ever lost money on movies. This is amazing." And it was a dream come true until he met two very real monsters.

• 30:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet I can guess one.

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I bet you could guess both.

• 30:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm guessing Harvey Weinstein for one and Bob Weinstein for the other.

• 30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good, Lizzie. They hired Guillermo to direct Mimic, a creature feature that would be his English-language debut. The IMDb logline reads, "Three years ago, entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler, played by Mira Sorvino, genetically created an insect to kill cockroaches carrying a virulent disease. Now the insects are out to destroy their only predator, mankind." Have you ever seen Mimic, Lizzie?

• 30:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 30:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Pretty fun, B-movie, 90s. Bugs have become giant bugs and they can mimic people with camouflage.

• 30:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 30:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Their faces in the subways of New York City, I believe.

• 31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't like that.

• 31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's an elevated B-movie. I actually quite enjoyed it. You can see hints of what Del Toro is interested in it, but it definitely does not feel entirely like him.

• 31:10Lizzie Bassett?

  And to be clear, he did not write it.

• 31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He technically co-wrote it, so I'm guessing he rewrote it. And it was also based on an existing short story. Just know that it was hell for Del Toro, mostly because of The Weinsteins. He later said, quote, "They would hire you for who you are. Then they didn't want your personality on the film."

• 31:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 31:28Chris Winterbauer?

  They wanted to suffocate every instinct you had as a filmmaker.

• 31:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen this. Anytime we have encountered them, they, you know, obviously Harvey is horrible for a whole laundry list of reasons, but they, like, they were just creatively crushing a lot of the time, unless they were dealing with, you know, a Quentin Tarantino, someone who they just had to give money to and back off, basically. But that was the exception to the rule with them.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, if you guys remember our coverage of Lord of the Rings, for example.

• 31:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Chris Winterbauer?

  They were suffocating Peter Jackson before he ended up hooking up at New Line.

• 32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I think the difference is Quentin Tarantino put them on the map to a certain extent, so they didn't have the same power with him that they then would have with every subsequent director that they are doing this to, where they're like, offering you this golden opportunity, but then what it really is, is they just strangle you.

• 32:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Del Toro is getting a firsthand experience of what a destructive machine Hollywood can be and how monstrous people can really be in this business when it comes to protecting their financial investment, at least from their perspective. They basically could not understand why Del Toro, quote, "wanted to make an art film out of a bug-based B-movie." Midway through production, they tried to fire him. The cast then walked out.

• 32:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 32:45Chris Winterbauer?

  So Del Toro was brought back. Remember when somebody destroyed his first feature by pooping and peeing all over it?

• 32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Looking back, Del Toro said, "The one silver lining was that, quote, 'It prepared me for the Weinstein.'"

• 32:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Very good.

• 32:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Then, after shooting Mimic, Del Toro's father was kidnapped and held for ransom. But guess what? Del Toro later said that working with the Weinsteins was even more harrowing than his father's kidnapping.

• 33:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. Silver lining's everywhere.

• 33:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "At least the kidnapping had a certain logic. They wanted money, and we wanted my father. With Mimic, I didn't know what they wanted."

• 33:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 33:21Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote. Del Toro's father was returned home after being held for nearly two and a half months.

• 33:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus.

• 33:26Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron actually helped with that. We can sidebar on that later. We gotta keep moving. Mimic flopped. Del Toro disowned the theatrical cut. He was haunted, not by what Mimic was, but by what it could have been. So he made a decision. Success is fucking up on your own terms. His next movie would be a ghost story on his terms. Therefore, he would not make it in Hollywood. So he dusts off that old idea that Hermosillo had rejected the devil's backbone, follows a young boy living in an orphanage haunted by the ghost of another orphan. And at this point, it took place during the Mexican Revolution. But Del Toro decided to change the setting to the Spanish Civil War, in part because it made it less ambiguous from his perspective. There were so many factions and betrayals and changes of power in Mexico

• 34:09Chris Winterbauer?

  that it was hard to pinpoint two clear sides, I get the sense. And the Spanish Civil War could be boiled down more to the Republicans versus the nationalist rebels. I will say, it is more complicated than that. I was looking into it a little bit, and it's really the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. And this includes, you know, socialists, anarchists, communists, separatists. And they're supported by the Soviet Union, I believe, broadly. And then on the nationalist side, you know, phalanxists, monarchists, conservatives, traditionalists. And they're supported by Germany and fascist Italy at this time. So again, big coalitions, but you can say, "We understand Franco over here. We understand the Republicans over here."

• 34:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there's also a pretty clear bad.

• 34:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 34:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I understand that there is nuance to it. There's... You know, I'm sure issues with the other side as well, but there is a very, very clear villain in that one.

• 34:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Now, it should be said, we think that location was another factor. So he had reportedly pitched the project to the Mexican Institute of Film, but they thought it was, quote, "too big." So he reaches out to Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, who had told him after Cronos, "If you ever come to Spain, my brother and I would like to produce a movie for you." What's interesting is Hermosio, his mentor, is often compared to Almodovar for both doing similar things with pointing out the hypocrisies of culture through sex comedies, et cetera. You know, it's interesting that he's moving, you know, between these two directors who are contemporaries in so many ways.

• 35:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I've not seen Hermosio's work. I have seen a lot more of Almodovar, and he does lean into fantasy quite a bit in certain ways.

• 35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And a lot of Mexican cinema at, I think, the time did. A movie that I love that is not super well-known, it's called A Poison for the Fairies, about two little girls, one of whom is exerting power over the other by pretending that she's a witch and taking credit for weird things that are happening, like the death of a teacher, for example, and trying to, you know, it's a twisted story of friendship, but it uses religion in Mexico at the time as, you know, sort of a playground for childish desires and whatnot. And then there were some later that I really liked, like Herod's Law and stuff, that are very satirical and outlandish and explorations of the complicated hypocritical, like, Mexican political history and whatnot.

• 36:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Does make sense. I mean, magical realism is such an enormous part of, I believe, Mexican literature as well, so.

• 36:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Think of something like Water for Chocolate or something like that. Now, with The Devil's Backbone, unlike with Mimic, Del Toro had complete control, and he was thinking about making it a trilogy with The Devil's Backbone as the first installment. He starts playing with an idea. "A story of a pregnant woman who arrives at a big mansion in the north of Spain. Her husband is working for a fascist captain, restoring the mansion. The woman falls in love with a fawn in the nearby labyrinth. They make passionate love, and then the fawn asks for the blood of her firstborn in exchange for opening the labyrinth and taking her to the magical kingdom with him. In the end, she sacrifices her son to go with the love of her life." It's very dark. Obviously, you can see Pan's labyrinth in here.

• 37:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think you can see the shape of water. The Devil's Backbone is released in 2001 to critical acclaim, but like Chronos, it fizzles financially. So Del Toro returns to Hollywood to play with the financially bankable monsters, Blade and Hellboy. He directs Blade 2, and then he directs Hellboy. Fun fact, he wanted to make Hellboy, and the deal was he had to make Blade 2 first.

• 37:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 37:25Chris Winterbauer?

  In order to make Hellboy, yeah.

• 37:26Lizzie Bassett?

  They're both fun. I enjoy both of those.

• 37:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too, and it's interesting. I think it was actually a really good thing because Blade 2 did really well. And I think helped secure him more control on Hellboy, because I think you can feel more of Del Toro in Hellboy than in Blade 2, for example.

• 37:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that makes sense. He's establishing the on-screen world in a way that you couldn't with Blade 2, because that had already happened with the first one.

• 37:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So Blade 2 makes 155 million against a $54 million budget. Heading into production on Hellboy, Del Toro's getting offers, Lizzie, to do a lot more IP work, including The Fantastic Four.

• 37:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Say no.

• 37:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's 2003. He's 39 years old. He knows he can make dark, melodramatic creature features, but he doesn't know if they can make money. He also knows he can make big studio movies that make money, but I don't know if he thinks they can make him happy. Does he make The Fantastic Four, lock in financial security, ride the superhero wave of the mid-ots? Lizzie shaking her head.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Just say no. We know how that one turned out.

• 38:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Or does he make the sequel to The Devil's Backbone, a movie that made half at the box office what Blade 2 did on its opening day? So Del Toro has a decision to make, and he's in London. He steps out of a cab, lost in thought. I get the sense he is often lost in thought. The man is very thoughtful. He is thinking a lot. And he realizes he is missing his journal, the journal filled with all of the sketches and ideas and story points that he has been accumulating for years, for what would become Pan's Labyrinth. He runs for the cab, and he can't catch it. He then jumps into another cab and says, "Follow that cab", and they can't catch it. He goes to the police. They can't find it. He calls the cab company. They can't figure out which one he was in. The notebook is gone. He goes home, and he cries.

• 39:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And he wonders, "Why did I lose the notebook?" And he realizes, "It's because I was about to lose myself." I'm going to do Pan's Labyrinth. And according to Del Toro, at that moment, the phone rings. It's the cab driver. It's been two days. The driver had noticed the journal, found Del Toro's hotel using a scrap of stationery that had its logo but no name.

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 39:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And returned it.

• 39:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 39:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Del Toro was going to make Pan's Labyrinth, and then he gave the driver a $900 tip.

• 39:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. To go to that length to find him.

• 39:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And 1% of Pan's Labyrinth's profits. No, he just did $900, very generous. So Del Toro strips out the love story and decides to focus on the perspective of a young girl. And I have a quote here that I think is very important to understanding his work. "I find midlife a little dull. I like old age and childhood because in both stages of life, you become invisible. People write you off like a thing, an idea, and therefore you become an invisible observer." And if you were to watch Cronos, for example, it is very much about the perspective of this older man and his granddaughter. If you were to watch The Devil's Backbone, not only is it the boys in the orphanage, but also their protector, the older man who's running it and the older woman who runs it with him. And the villain, played by Eduardo Noriega wonderfully, is the man in midlife who's seemingly vital and young.

• 40:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and same thing here. The villain is midlife. The mother is sort of at sea for this entire thing. I mean, Mercedes is active, but yeah.

• 40:34Chris Winterbauer?

  But the doctor, for example, the reason he goes unnoticed, right?

• 40:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 40:37Chris Winterbauer?

  He's older and nobody thinks he has it in him maybe to, you know.

• 40:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I think same for Mercedes.

• 40:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I agree. There's a class element to that that I really like. So Del Toro pitches the movie to Cuaron, who says, "Okay, let's go into pre-production. Let's start financing you and me and see what happens." And Del Toro backs this up. He says that he called Cuaron and said he was bootstrapping it with $100,000 of his own money. And Cuaron said, "Screw that, I'll put in half," meaning of the $100,000, not of the final budget. Del Toro replied, "You realize if the film doesn't go, we'll have a bunch of really expensive drawings." And Cuaron says, "Yeah." So in the summer of 2004, Del Toro moves his family to Madrid, and the roughly year-long pre-production process began. And to be clear, Lizzie, they don't have funding.

• 41:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 41:21Chris Winterbauer?

  "Everybody turned us down." He also said that a number of people Offered double the budget if they do it in English. But Del Toro said no. Quote, "I hate those movies that people should be talking in their native languages and they're speaking in English."

• 41:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 41:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Completely agree.

• 41:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I would always rather have them speaking the language they're supposed to be speaking.

• 41:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Producer Bertha Navarro, who was Del Toro's longtime collaborator and part of the Tequila Gang with him and, quote un, great name, and sales agent Rosa Bash, she was also part of the Tequila Gang. They said it took two years to come up with an agreement with Spanish co-producer Telesinco. In June of 2005, just before production was going to begin, Del Toro wrote in his journal that he was being offered X-Men 3, I believe Men in Black, Thor, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

• 42:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. I will say there's one of those that I actually think he could have done a pretty interesting job on.

• 42:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Chronic what goals of Narnia?

• 42:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yeah.

• 42:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He has said that Pan's Labyrinth is kind of his Chronicles of Narnia.

• 42:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 42:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It bears a lot of similarities.

• 42:20Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a fond in both.

• 42:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, he was broke by his standards. He later said, quote, "It was a moment where money-wise, I was tight and I thought, should I leave Pan's to do that and then come back? And I chose to stay." The budget was set at 14 million euros, roughly 19 million US dollars at the time.

• 42:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, that's not much.

• 42:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Not for what you see on screen.

• 42:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 42:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He estimates that this was roughly the same as the effects budget on Hellboy.

• 42:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Chris Winterbauer?

  So Hellboy's budget, I think, was around 65 or 70 million dollars. I think if you were to say VFX, meaning CGI, but also makeup effects, meaning costumes and whatnot, yes, that makes sense to me because the prosthetics work in Hellboy is so extensive.

• 43:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I will say, this movie is so economical with its settings.

• 43:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 43:04Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so smart about the way, so that number makes more sense when you think about the fact that they're clearly shooting-

• 43:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Farmhouse, labyrinth, mountains.

• 43:11Lizzie Bassett?

  That's it. And you're shooting what looks like around a real farmhouse.

• 43:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That was actually a build. The exterior was built on location and the interior is a soundstage. But your point stands, one big location.

• 43:22Lizzie Bassett?

  You've got the labyrinth, which I'm guessing they built, but that's a set that's actually pretty contained. And then everything else that's extraneous to that looks like a soundstage. So that's like pretty, that's pretty good, other than the mountains.

• 43:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a smartly contained story, much in the way that The Devil's Backbone was, which entirely takes place at this one orphanage.

• 43:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the plan is to do as much in-camera as possible, but they would need some visual effects, obviously. So he hired a California-based studio, Cafe Effects. Now, I read that they estimated that they would need $1 million to do everything that Del Toro needed, but they took on the work at a much lower rate so that they could get an associate producer credit on it and since they were launching their own production company at the time. Let's keep in mind that they already came in low when we get to some overages later. For makeup effects, he hired a Mexican firm called DDT Efectos Especiales. Henceforth, we shall call them DDT. I like to think that they are the spiritual successors to his prior necropia, for example.

• 44:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 44:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, don't confuse DDT with GDT, which is sometimes what people call Guillermo del Toro. So, the key design is obviously what character, Lizzie?

• 44:34Lizzie Bassett?

  The fawn.

• 44:35Chris Winterbauer?

  The fawn. El fawn.

• 44:37Lizzie Bassett?

  The fawn.

• 44:37Chris Winterbauer?

  El fawn.

• 44:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I just love the way he talks.

• 44:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I love it, too. It's like half goat, half ent.

• 44:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Half fawn. It's great. And it changed a lot. So there was a cute, fat, old goat man version designed by American fantasy artist and illustrator William Stout, who has incredible credits, and you guys should look up his work. William Stout. Lizzie, for reference, he designed the big bug villain Edgar in Men in Black.

• 45:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 45:01Chris Winterbauer?

  There was also a younger version. There was an adult version that was more human with goat legs and more hunched over, less upright.

• 45:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is more of a traditional fawn design.

• 45:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, it is. But it was Del Toro who came up with a design that would allow the actor to puppeteer his own legs.

• 45:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 45:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It was simple, so simple, that apparently DDT laughed at him when he first proposed the idea. Basically, the actor's legs would sit in front of and above the fawn's legs and feet, wrapped in green fabric, and then they could remove them and post. Lizzie, can I show you a photo?

• 45:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 45:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Really quickly.

• 45:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I have seen this before, I think, but let me see it again. Yeah, yeah, it's so cool.

• 45:37Chris Winterbauer?

  We will put this on our Patreon for you guys.

• 45:39Lizzie Bassett?

  God, that's so cool.

• 45:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it looks horribly uncomfortable, but it is super cool.

• 45:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that is amazing. That's one of my favorite parts of this movie is the way the fawn moves, the way that he is able to shake out a leg, the way that a goat might. And it's just obvious- It's Doug Jones.

• 45:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we'll talk about that. That was very specific.

• 45:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And also very specific direction from Del Toro.

• 45:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so good.

• 45:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So he brings on a bunch of the crew from The Devil's Backbone. I mean, he is making the sister film in so many ways to The Devil's Backbone. So cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, set decorator Pilar Revuelta, composer Javier Navarrete, set construction company Construcciones Moya, casting director Sarah Bilbatua, and editor Bernat Villaplana. But there were also some fresh faces. So, Lizzie, he landed famed costume designer La La Uete. She'd won three Goya Awards, which is the Spanish Oscars, for costume design. And he had a newcomer with Eugenio Caballero, who came in as the production designer. He was recommended by producer Bertha Navarro, who'd just worked with him on Cronicas. And Del Toro said that he liked his inexperience. These Del Toro quotes.

• 46:42Lizzie Bassett?

  He seems like the best.

• 46:43Chris Winterbauer?

  He seems like the best, but also he cannot help but turn it into something epic. It's just, it's great. So here's the quote. "In his eyes burned the death wish of the novice, the limitless hunger you have when you don't know boundaries or budget." End quote.

• 46:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 46:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's just, everything's a story. So then Del Toro puts his own office in the middle of the art department so he could, quote, torture Caballero all day. I love that. Del Toro read all the Celtic lore he could find, plus anthropological, psychological, and sociological studies of fairy tales and myths and folk stories from around the world. And the result, in my opinion, is this kind of lovely improv riff on Iberian paganism that touches on fairy tale lore. You know, never eat fairy food, for example, with the pale man.

• 47:23Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing. The Celtic influence makes a ton of sense because, you know, frequently those fairies are underground. There's the whole thing with not eating the food. There's this idea of them taking children. Like, there is a lot there.

• 47:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And coming in threes. And there's so many elements of classic fairy folklore. But then I think there's also kind of equal measure Catholicism in here as well. I think there's a lot of Latin Catholicism in this movie. He also worked in real accounts from the war into the script. So the priest's speech, that was based on a priest at a concentration camp who used to tell prisoners, "Remember, my sons, you should confess what you know because God doesn't care what happens to your bodies. He already saved your souls." And did you think Del Toro's very Interested in souls, especially through the idea of something like a ghost. But he is so interested in the human body and the damage that can be wrought to the human body. And you'd see there are certain motifs visually wounds through the armpit. Captain Vidal being shot through the optical nerve, like through his cheek is something that is repeated

• 48:19Chris Winterbauer?

  almost exactly in Crimson Peak, for example. So he locks in on certain forms of violence and really explores them again and again. Also, there are apparently other stories he was pulling from. The rebel getting shot through the hand and then elements of Captain Vidal killing the farmer with the bottle. And I read that that was also based on a fight that Del Toro had been in. I don't know if that was, I'm assuming that was when he was older, but he had actually been in a lot of fights when he was a kid. He tells a story how he got bullied a lot because he was really thin and he was really pale and had blonde hair and blue eyes. And he actually started eating a lot more, trying to gain weight so he could defend himself in these schoolyard scraps. And there was some fight where the bottle didn't break and it either surprised him or it surprised somebody. And it's really the most horrifying part of the movie.

• 49:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it is.

• 49:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Production designer Eugenio Caballero studied the Franco era, obviously. He visited the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. And Del Toro, quote, storyboarded, designed and planned everything to a T and then marched straight into hell. But he wouldn't be going alone. So for the role of the fawn, Del Toro knew there was only one man for the job.

• 49:23Lizzie Bassett?

  One tall, slender man.

• 49:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Six foot three and 140 pounds.

• 49:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus Christ.

• 49:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Actor, mime and consonist Doug Jones. The two had met on Mimic.

• 49:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I love this pair so much. I love this friendship.

• 49:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it's just your classic visual pairing, right? It's an Abbott and Costello style pairing.

• 49:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So Jones had been called in on Mimic to do last minute pickup shots of one of the giant bugs. The actor, I believe, who had originally played the bug was Canadian. There was a holdup with immigration visas and so they brought in Doug Jones. He actually also had a small role as a ripper on Tank Girl, Lizzie. We didn't talk about him because it was so minor.

• 50:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I saw his name in the credit.

• 50:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Five years after Mimic, Del Toro calls on Jones for the role of Abe Sapien in Hellboy. I'm sure you remember, feel like very much an influence on obviously Shape of Water later. And in 2005, he gets another email from Del Toro. That basically says, I'm working on a film in Spain. The title character is a fawn. Nobody can play him but you. And at first, Jones is intimidated. This is a lot of pressure. It's the title character. And then he reads the script and he loves it. And then he rereads the email and realizes the entire movie is in Spanish.

• 50:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He tells Del Toro, I think you've got the wrong guy. But Del Toro knew he didn't. He told Jones, look, we'll dub your dialogue. It doesn't matter what you say. You can count to 10 for all I care. But even though they did dub his dialogue, Jones learned all of it in Spanish so he could deliver his real lines while shooting.

• 50:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 50:45Chris Winterbauer?

  He did it out of respect for the other actors and to make the dubbing process smoother.

• 50:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 50:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And I am sure it made the dubbing process a lot smoother.

• 50:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And I'm sure it was helpful for Ivan Abaceto as Ophelia when they were doing that together. Now, dubbing meant that they had to bring in another actor, which was another expense. But I think they made up for that because Jones was gonna play another role. Who else does he play, Lizzie?

• 51:05Lizzie Bassett?

  He plays the slenderest Slender Man.

• 51:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, the creepiest depiction of a non-slender man Slender Man ever. The Pale Man is-

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  A skinbag Slender Man with little toothpicks for sticks.

• 51:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, the toothpick legs are probably the scariest part of this whole thing.

• 51:19Lizzie Bassett?

  They are.

• 51:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's horrifying. It's truly horrifying.

• 51:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I will say, though, I love his little eyeball hands.

• 51:24Chris Winterbauer?

  His eyeball hands are great.

• 51:25Lizzie Bassett?

  When he popped up this time, I was like, there he is.

• 51:27Chris Winterbauer?

  His finger lashes?

• 51:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I was like, there's my guy. I missed him.

• 51:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, don't take my food. He's so skinny.

• 51:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He needs it.

• 51:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the Fawn and the Pale Man would be played by an American, but the rest of the principal cast was from Spain. Del Toro is a Mexican director and he's casting Spanish actors in Spain, and it presents some challenges. Del Toro wants to cast against type, at least against the type that these actors were best known for in Spain. So, Lizzie, broadly speaking, Sergio Lopez, who plays Captain Vidal, was best known as a comedic actor.

• 51:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 52:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Maribel Verdú, who played Mercedes, had recently done an Alfonso Cuaron film. Do you remember which one?

• 52:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 52:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Y tu mama también.

• 52:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 52:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And she was known a bit for playing like sex bombs and acting in like comedies.

• 52:14Lizzie Bassett?

  She's very beautiful.

• 52:15Chris Winterbauer?

  She's great in this movie.

• 52:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Ariadna Gil, who plays Carmen, usually played bigger parts, more fully fleshed out characters. As you mentioned, she's a little absent, I think, obviously necessarily so for the story.

• 52:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think she's great in this.

• 52:27Chris Winterbauer?

  She's fantastic, yeah. Alex Angulo, who plays Dr. Ferrero, had recently played a lot of villains.

• 52:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 52:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And obviously, he's doing a heroic turn here. Del Toro even said that he had dinner with a Spanish producer who told him, "You don't understand, you're casting these roles wrong because you're Mexican." And Del Toro replied, "No, it's not that I don't know them, it's that I don't give a fuck."

• 52:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 52:47Chris Winterbauer?

  "I can cast them how I want, because this is a Mexican co-production." The producer then waved him off and said he'd regret it, some of the actors' careers were already over, and that Del Toro would end up firing them. Obviously, he did not. But for the role of Ophelia, they went with an actress whose career was just starting. So they screen tested more than 300 young girls. This is very standard.

• 53:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for kids.

• 53:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, we talked about Short Round when we were doing Temple of Doom recently, and they had casting calls at six major cities and saw thousands of boys. But casting director Bilbatua saw her photo and froze. And when Baketo did her screen test, Bilbatua's hair stood on its end.

• 53:20Lizzie Bassett?

  She's really, really good.

• 53:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So Del Toro had actually written her as a younger, street-urchin type. So a bit less innocent, I think, a little more street-smart, resistant. I think it's so smart.

• 53:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:33Chris Winterbauer?

  The way that they changed this to fit her personality. I think her innocence is so necessary for the final twist of the film to work. I'm curious if you agree.

• 53:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree, and I also think her look is so good. She looks like a little girl, like sometimes they-

• 53:48Chris Winterbauer?

  She's 11 years old.

• 53:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, but sometimes even when they're casting littler girls, they'll choose ones that have sort of more mature features or expressions. And also, the way that they're dressed often can be to, you know, almost make you a little bit more comfortable and make them look a little older.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, precocious.

• 54:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 54:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't do that with her at all. She's very soft, she's very sweet, she looks like a little girl. And the way that they've dressed her and everything, and her hair, she's so beautiful, so cute. And yeah, it does, it makes it all the more heartbreaking.

• 54:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think that subtextually, and I'm curious if you agree with this, it reinforces the idea of Carmen's character being someone who is so desperate to protect her child from the horrors of the war and what has happened, so much so that she is willing to marry Captain Vidal, right, in order to survive, right? That's what she's doing. She's surviving here, you know, she's found this person. And I see Ophelia as presenting as sheltered is the wrong word, but she is, she's innocent, and her mother has maybe helped protect her innocence, and she's escaped through fairy tales, et cetera.

• 54:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I maybe have a slightly different view on the mother. I think the mother is perhaps more selfish than you're giving her credit for. And I don't know how much of it is protecting Ophelia and how much of it is protecting her own

• 54:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Herself.

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  experience and herself, because in reality, like, this is not a good position to be putting Ophelia in, going to this place is a dangerous

• 55:06Chris Winterbauer?

  No, as we learn, yeah.

• 55:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything about this is not somewhere you should take your child, or that you should go when you're pregnant.

• 55:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I wondered how much of that might be Vidal lying, not lying to her, but selling her

• 55:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 55:18Chris Winterbauer?

  this idea, "I'll protect you, come with me, come live here," right? And then the true self is revealed when you arrive at the, you know, creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, et cetera.

• 55:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally possible. I guess my read on this was, while I understand Carmen, I do think that she's a pretty selfish character at the end of the day, who is less capable of taking care of anyone other than herself than I think maybe it appears.

• 55:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think she's very important. They draw her nicely opposite Mercedes, where she embodies obey and we will survive, right?

• 55:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 55:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And Mercedes and the doctor and obviously Ophelia in the end embody, no, I must do what's right, even if my blood must be spilled in order to do it.

• 55:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 55:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And he does such a nice job of aligning these characters along that philosophical axis. And so, anyway, it's just, well, it's a great movie, who knew? So, when Baqueta auditioned, Del Toro decided to rewrite the role for her. And Baqueta says that when she went in to do her callback, her performance made Del Toro's then-wife cry, and Del Toro offered her the part that day.

• 56:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 56:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And so they brought her in. Production began in the summer of 2005. It lasted three months, and the Money was tight. Del Toro apparently almost immediately forfeited his entire salary. And I don't know if it was all of his points or some of his points, but points is the quote, "to make the budget work."

• 56:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 56:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But there were things beyond his control. So two months before filming began, a massive forest fire broke out. The area was already dealing with a drought. The production had a, quote, "moss squad" that was dressing the dead, dried out forest with pigment and sawdust. I do wonder if, I think the color correction is pushed particularly green at the beginning of the film, and I wonder if they are fighting that a little bit. They built an irrigation system around the mill where they were shooting, and they planted grass and ferns. But in order to protect the forest from more fires, the Spanish government said, "You can't ignite anything," which meant no blanks in the guns, and, Lizzie, no squibs on the actors. So can you explain what a squib is very briefly for our audience?

• 57:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. A squib is a little pouch of blood, essentially, that does have a tiny little explosive in it that causes it to explode when someone is shot, so that you get the blood appearing underneath someone's, you know, shirt or whatever. Famously, James Caan in The Godfather had like hundreds of squibs.

• 57:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Hundreds of squibs on his body, which must have hurt because it is a little explosive, like, you know, getting shot with a paintball or something like that, I would imagine.

• 57:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So Del Toro said that this was one of the most difficult parts of shooting. Quote, "I had literally the actors pretending that their guns were working, like children playing cowboys and Indians."

• 57:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Pew pew.

• 57:55Chris Winterbauer?

  "They were moving their hands as if their guns were shooting. I remember Sergio Lopez, who played the captain, in the first or second take, he was going through the take saying, 'Bang, bang, bang,'"

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  because he just didn't know what he was doing.

• 58:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So the gunshots and the bullet wounds would have to be done digitally.

• 58:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 58:12Chris Winterbauer?

  The VFX company already took a cut rate to do the movie, and now they're gonna have to add in the work. There are a lot of gunshots in this movie, and I think they look really good.

• 58:22Lizzie Bassett?

  They do.

• 58:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't really notice when I was watching it. I think it holds up.

• 58:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No, and the blood looks great. Like, when the doctor gets shot and you see it just sort of blooming up underneath his shirt, it really looks awesome.

• 58:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that scene always gets me.

• 58:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The gunshots were gonna be- Fake, but Doug Jones's makeup and prosthetics were obviously very real. It took five hours for the fawn and six hours for the pale man to get ready to shoot. So if you think about it, if you have a 12 and a half hour day, five, you're not going to get a shot off before lunch. Basically, unless you pre-call your whole hair and makeup team, which I'm sure they did, and Doug Jones, and maybe you keep him longer, but there are turnaround time restrictions on how much time an actor can have between wrap and starting the next day. It creates a really tough logistical puzzle that you have to figure out. It also didn't help that as the fawn, Jones could only see through the creature's tear ducts.

• 59:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 59:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And as the pale man, the pale man, Lizzie, where are his eyes?

• 59:14Lizzie Bassett?

  His eyes are in his hands, palms.

• 59:16Chris Winterbauer?

  So he could only see through his hands. No, he could only see cross-eyed through the nostrils.

• 59:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Chris Winterbauer?

  The tiny little nostrils at the front. Plus, the fawn costume was extremely heavy because the horns were filled with battery packs.

• 59:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 59:29Chris Winterbauer?

  To operate the remote puppeteering on the face.

• 59:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 59:33Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way, incredible work.

• 59:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 59:35Chris Winterbauer?

  When they were switched on for the remote puppeteering, they would buzz so loudly that Jones could barely hear Baccaro delivering her lines in the scene with him. He also had a little tail, little fawn tail, that made it so he couldn't sit on a regular chair.

• 59:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, good. He needs his own little fawn chair.

• 59:51Chris Winterbauer?

  He'd have to lean over a modified bike with a T-bar that he would lean over between takes.

• 59:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus.

• 59:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, you mentioned farm animals for his performance, and Del Toro did tell him to, quote, "study the back end of barn animals," which I think he does very well in this movie, how they shake flies off, how their hooves meet the ground. But he also said, "channel rock stars like Mick Jagger and," and a shout out to OG labyrinth, David Bowie.

• 1:00:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:00:16Chris Winterbauer?

  There is some funny behind the scenes footage of Jones in the pale man suit, eating Subway. And as we later learned, Jared is basically the pale man, so that makes sense. At some point, Jones got sick and they lost one of the five days planned for the pale man sequence. Basically, because of the time that they needed in the makeup chair to prep and remove the prosthetics, Jones was only going to get three hours of sleep between two shooting days. So he wore the pale man suit back to the hotel.

• 1:00:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:46Chris Winterbauer?

  He didn't tell anyone outside the makeup team, not even Del Toro, because this is a very expensive prosthetic suit.

• 1:00:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Chris Winterbauer?

  They took the head and neck off, to be clear, and they took off the hands, but they left on the whole arms and torso. They then Saran wrapped all of that and then put his clothes on top of it so that the prosthetics wouldn't stick to his clothes. It really reminds me of Robert Englund getting Thai food with Johnny Depp dressed as Freddy Krueger when we were covering Nightmare on Elm Street.

• 1:01:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That is disgusting. That must have smelled so bad by the time he was out of it.

• 1:01:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That was a stanky pale man. It smells like what we would expect him to smell in the movie.

• 1:01:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Makeup Effects House, DDT, was under enormous pressure. You mentioned the frog, Lizzie, earlier in this episode. So the scene with the frog was actually supposed to be very different. It was supposed to take place in a massive domed set, and the frog was going to jump around. This makes sense to me, and I'll pitch you why in a moment. It would be a mixture of practical effects and CGI. And in the practical version, they would need to puppeteer the frog from the inside. One of the co-owners of DDT would basically go inside from underneath the set, like a Jim Penson situation, and puppeteer it. And Del Toro said ahead of time that he didn't think it was going to work. The puppet was going to be too big and too heavy to move, but DDT decided to go for it anyway. They ultimately had to outsource some of the construction of the frog because their mixing machine and oven were too small.

• 1:02:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And when they got done with the puppet, the puppeteer climbed inside and couldn't move. So if the frog couldn't move and jump around, it suddenly looked really small relative to the enormous set that they'd built. So Del Toro scrapped the set and rewrote the scene to take place in a narrow root tunnel. And then most of the sequence had to be done with CGI instead of practical effects. He later said that they worked and reworked the frog vomit shot more than any other scene. I have to say, in my opinion, this is, by the standards set by the rest of the movie, this is the weakest scene visually and narratively.

• 1:02:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree, and yet it still looks pretty good.

• 1:02:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think it's still fine. It doesn't bump me. But when I read this, it made sense.

• 1:02:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It made sense because the challenge, it feels too simple ultimately, right? The frog is just there, and she shoves the rocks. It makes more sense that, oh, it would be jumping around. She might have to try to figure out how to catch it, you know, or get its attention.

• 1:02:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:02:55Chris Winterbauer?

  This did make sense when I read it, but I don't think it hurts the movie ultimately.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It doesn't.

• 1:03:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, before production wrapped, two members of DDT walked off the project, and it sounds like DDT co-partner David Martí came close. He later called Pan's Labyrinth "the worst experience of his movie-making life." He clarified, he said, "It's a very good movie, very bad experience."

• 1:03:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "We went bankrupt. I cried three times. I got into an argument with Guillermo, the only one in my career for the now 11 years I've known him. If I have to do another Pan's Labyrinth, I will die. We have a saying, 'We always have the ghost of Pan's Labyrinth behind us.'"

• 1:03:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:03:32Chris Winterbauer?

  To be fair, Del Toro was struggling too, was he? He claims there was a group of Spanish producers who wanted the project shut down, perhaps because his team was basically entirely Mexican, and they were coming into Spain instead of using local hires and local producers. Del Toro also said that this group had, quote, "spies among the crew who created a blog and message board to post about mistakes and problems from the shoot." One of his friends had access to the site and told him every couple of days to be careful and, quote, "Make sure all your paperwork is impeccable and up to date, because if they can, they will shut you down."

• 1:04:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Who has the energy for this?

• 1:04:07Chris Winterbauer?

  The Spanish.

• 1:04:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:04:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, according to Del Toro, they only ever went 15 minutes over schedule, but he was stressed out of his mind. He was sleeping three hours a night, losing three pounds a week, getting immigration permits and passports for the crew, dealing with the extremely tight budget pushing DDT beyond their limit, VFX overages, and, quote, "Most of the crew thought we were making a strange, silly movie," end quote. But they made it through production and ran out of money.

• 1:04:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:37Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Del Toro, this is why you can still see the shadow of Jones's real legs in some of the scenes with the fawn. They just ran out of VFX money at a certain point in time. Del Toro, we never saw it, we never noticed it, it's fine.

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• 1:05:30Chris Winterbauer?

  He and editor Bernat Villaplana had been editing throughout production. That's very normal, although to what extent? This might have been more extreme, we're not sure. And they'd been sending sequences to composer Javier Navarrete so he could start composing. Del Toro then showed an early cut to James Cameron, Lizzie. And if you had to guess, and you're never gonna guess, but just guess. What do you think James Cameron's concern was about the film? He had one concern, one element of the movie.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  The women are not holding enough guns.

• 1:06:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He was fine with that. It was the violence.

• 1:06:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it's pretty rough.

• 1:06:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It jarred him because it was established as a dark fairy tale.

• 1:06:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:06:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He said that, quote, "That type of torture probably took place in the Spanish Civil War and felt too real for me." But that's also what's important about it because this is a film about dissociation, of escaping from horror into fantasy, end quote.

• 1:06:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and the other reason I really like it is that in many ways it hearkens back to before fairy tales were sanitized because they...

• 1:06:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah, when they were grim.

• 1:06:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, if you've never read some of the original, both Hans Christian Andersen and grim fairy tales, they have been quite a bit modified in the years since those came out. Famously, it's the stepsisters trying to cut chunks of their feet off to fit into the slippers in Cinderella, is one example.

• 1:06:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Go read The Little Mermaid and see how it really felt to have human legs.

• 1:06:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Del Toro has a separate quote in which he says he showed the film to a very famous Hollywood director, producer, who said, "It's grim." Great. If you could only cut the violence out, then children would go to it and it will be a success. We think that's probably James Cameron, based on their two quotes, but we don't know. On a happier note, he had an early screening with Stephen King and his son.

• 1:07:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:07:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And Del Toro called it the best screening of his life. He said watching Stephen King squirm during the pale man sequence was equivalent to an Oscar.

• 1:07:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's so great.

• 1:07:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Sound mixing and design was happening in Mexico. Color correction was taking place in Toronto. So Del Toro was traveling between the two. And of course, at one point, the travel hard drive with the color correction for the whole movie was stolen from Del Toro's checked suitcase.

• 1:07:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:38Chris Winterbauer?

  To be clear, I don't think any work was lost, but that was obviously an expense. They had to ship another drive, et cetera. So in January of 2006, Picture House, home of indie marketing guru Bob Burney, who we just discussed on my Big Fat Creek Wedding, who had handled the US marketing, I believe, for Itumama Tambien, for Alfonso Cuaron's film, picked up the North American rights for Pan's Labyrinth for $6 million. So, Lizzie, the budget for this movie was $19 million, and I think this sets up an important set of parameters. To me, that indicates, obviously, what the value of the film from a US or North American distribution perspective was. So one-third of the budget, $6 million, is what they're spending. That checks out. I was looking at some other big foreign films, successful foreign films, in the United States from a couple of years prior to Pan's Labyrinth.

• 1:08:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Kung Fu Hustle, I don't know if you ever saw it.

• 1:08:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:26Chris Winterbauer?

  2004, 2005. Yeah, did 20% of its business in the United States. City of God did a little more, around 25%. And Hero with Jet Li, 2003, did over 30%, almost a third of its business in the United States. $53 million of its $177 million. But to be clear, that's an action movie. I know it's a historical epic with a recognizable star coming hot off the heels of, you know, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

• 1:08:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:08:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The point is, I think the expectation is, ah, this movie will do, you know, maybe a third of its business at the high end in the United States as opposed to international. It's a foreign film. It's a Spanish-language film. So Pan's Labyrinth premieres at Cannes on May 27, 2006. If you guys are interested, it apparently received a 24-minute standing ovation. At a certain point, people forgot why they were clapping and they just kept doing it. I just don't understand these ovations, but I've never been.

• 1:09:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. The ovations at Cannes are ridiculous.

• 1:09:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe we'll go, Lizzie, and we'll get swept up in it and we will understand someday.

• 1:09:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, maybe you'll get your own 25-minute standing ovation at Cannes and then you'll like it a whole lot more.

• 1:09:26Chris Winterbauer?

  What I make, Spam's Labyrinth.

• 1:09:30Chris Winterbauer?

  About a killer potato and a can of Spam.

• 1:09:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It would be cheaper. Spam is very moldable. Yeah.

• 1:09:34Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. So Warner Brothers picks up the international distribution rights. I think it's interesting that a big studio picks up the international rights.

• 1:09:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's Picture House, the smaller company that picks up the domestic. I'm reading the tea leaves here a little bit, but to me, it suggests the expectation is this will perform better internationally than domestically.

• 1:09:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and also it sounds like Bob Bernie picks them up prior to Cannes.

• 1:09:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, but I'm sure I would expect that they screened the movie for a number of potential distributors.

• 1:09:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:09:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not simply, you know, Bob Bernie gets the pick of the litter.

• 1:10:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but you see a reaction at Cannes and that may change.

• 1:10:05Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:10:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Chris Winterbauer?

  US critics loved it. In fact, it was later named best picture of 2006 by the National Society of Film Critics. Now, Del Toro might have anticipated this. I know he comes off very modest, but he's obviously a very confident person. Cronos was a critical darling. The Devil's Backbone was a big critical hit. He always said, though, that he thought he was doing Pan's Labyrinth for a small audience. Both of those films had been, relatively speaking, for a small audience, especially relative to Blade 2 or Hellboy, for example. He said he's never pitched a movie and had someone go, oh, wow, which makes sense. I do think when I was thinking about his filmography of all of his original movies, I could see people more saying, huh, as opposed to, oh, wow, just on the concept. And then obviously they turn out great.

• 1:10:45Lizzie Bassett?

  So there's a fish man and she's in love with the fish man and hmm.

• 1:10:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, and you said she masturbates in the first scene in her bathtub?

• 1:10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And I'm sorry, he's a fish man?

• 1:10:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. And then Michael Shannon just holds his wife's breast?

• 1:11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I really like Shape of Water. It's an odd film, but I love it. Now, Bob Bernie knew he had to overcome this exact problem. What's the short sales pitch for the movie? The tricky thing is getting audiences to view the film as anything more than a niche foreign film. How do you blow this thing up beyond arthouse cinema? They didn't have endless resources. So according to one source, Pan's Labyrinth's initial P and A, Princeton advertising budget, was $8 million. Lizzie, we've talked about the general rule of thumb, one half of the production budget.

• 1:11:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:11:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Tacked on as marketing. That makes sense. $19 million total budget, $8 million P and A. But Pan's Labyrinth was about to go on a pretty cool run. It was courting the high Profile film festivals like Toronto and the New York Film Festival, but also genre festivals. Its first premiere in an English-speaking country was the London Fright Fest Film Festival in August of 2006. So it opens in Spain in October of 2006, where a lot of people involved in the production thought, this is where we're going to make most of our money. Makes nearly $2 million its opening weekend. It would end up being the fifth highest grossing film in Spain that year. Mexico follows nine days later, makes a lot of sense. Then a lot of European countries, South Korea, Russia. And then finally, it opens in the United States and Canada in a limited release on December 29th.

• 1:12:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And then it goes wide on January 19th. Makes four and a half million, its first weekend wide in the United States. And then, Lizzie, the nominees for the 2007 Academy Awards are announced on January 23rd, and everything changed for Pan's Labyrinth. It was nominated for five Oscars.

• 1:12:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:12:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Original screenplay, foreign language film, not Spain, Mexico.

• 1:12:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh oh, that's gonna piss some people off.

• 1:12:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Art direction, cinematography, makeup, and original score. Now, I think Del Toro was robbed by not getting a nomination on the direction front.

• 1:12:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree, but he did get screenplay.

• 1:12:49Chris Winterbauer?

  He did get nominated for screenplay. I will read you the other nominees. Alejandro Iñárritu, so another compatriot for Battle, which I think is exceptionally well-directed. Martin Scorsese, The Departed, no problems there.

• 1:13:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima.

• 1:13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Stephen Freer's The Queen.

• 1:13:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, no, I'll leave that one in.

• 1:13:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's good.

• 1:13:09Lizzie Bassett?

  But to me, that one honestly deserves screenplay more than anything else.

• 1:13:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. Paul Greengrass, United 93.

• 1:13:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm, I think the one I would take out is probably Clint Eastwood.

• 1:13:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably me too. Pan's Labyrinth made more in its second weekend of wide release in the United States than its first with an Oscar bump. And the marketing campaign all of a sudden became an Oscar campaign. Now, I've often thought to myself, what's so important about the Oscars? It's just a little stamp of approval from a silly group of people. Yeah, money. The marketing budget cares. According to one source, the marketing budget for Pan's Labyrinth grew from $8 million to $35 million as it rounded the corner to the 2007 Oscars. And all of the sudden, Del Toro has some real muscle behind one of his dark fairy tales.

• 1:14:00Chris Winterbauer?

  On February 25th, 2007, Pan's Labyrinth won the Oscars for art direction, cinematography, and makeup. Very well deserved. It lost original screenplay to Little Miss Sunshine. Michael Arnt, tough. I love Little Miss Sunshine, but Pan's Labyrinth is so good.

• 1:14:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It is really good.

• 1:14:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Arnt, you're a genius. I would never take anything away from you, but that's a close one for me. Original score, it lost to Babel. I don't remember that score well enough in context to comment. I just love the score in Pan's Labyrinth so much.

• 1:14:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Pan's Labyrinth is incredible.

• 1:14:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It lost Best Foreign Language Film to Germany's The Lives of Others, which I love that movie. It's a great movie. I know. That's a good year. It's a good year.

• 1:14:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's really good.

• 1:14:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Good year at the Oscars.

• 1:14:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I saw both The Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth in theaters.

• 1:14:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Lizzie Bassett?

  This was a year where I remember the foreign films in particular being heavily marketed.

• 1:14:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And Babel was not technically a foreign film, but it felt a bit like a foreign film with its structure. Because it was like, oh, what if we did Crash International? Good.

• 1:14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. But good this time.

• 1:14:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, or better. We don't need to. People have dunked on that movie for too long. Lizzie says no. She says the donkey must continue.

• 1:15:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, I thought Crash was good the first time I saw it, but I was probably 12.

• 1:15:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I did too. Now, Del Toro was actually relieved that he didn't win Best Foreign Film. Quote, "The day I didn't win the Oscar for foreign film for Pan's Labyrinth, I was happy. Any prize that I don't win fuels the fire, and every prize I win quenches it." Picture House, I'm sure, was also very happy. Pan's Labyrinth made $84 million worldwide. 45% came from the domestic market.

• 1:15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The United States alone. I believe if you include Canada, it hits 50%. So that one-third number we were talking about earlier, they blew right past it. It remains the seventh highest grossing foreign film in the United States.

• 1:15:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:15:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I think at the time it was released, it was the fifth, and it has since become. Seventh. But not everyone is happy, Lizzie. The producers have said that there was negative feedback about the violence and perhaps some resentment from people in Spain, that it was a Mexican production effectively telling a Spanish story. And then there was frustration amongst Mexican film critics who felt that Del Toro was part of, quote, "Mexican cinema in exile." We talked about Christopher Nolan, for example, getting a somewhat similar reaction from some British film critics with the release of Memento back in the early 2000s. Still, in Mexico, the movie won nine Ariel Awards, including Best Picture and Best Direction. It was nominated for three more. Del Toro had plans for a third film, 3993 was the working title.

• 1:16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  It was set in Spain in 1939, which obviously would make it a prequel or spiritual successor to this film. But instead, Lizzie, he moved on to...

• 1:16:36Lizzie Bassett?

  The Shape of Water? Crimson Peak?

• 1:16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Hellboy Two.

• 1:16:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Hellboy Two, obviously, sorry. He's made a lot of movies.

• 1:16:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He has. He returns to studio work, and he has since balanced that studio work with his darker, fantastical impulses.

• 1:16:49Lizzie Bassett?

  And Pacific Rim, right? Shortly after this?

• 1:16:51Chris Winterbauer?

  He did then Pacific Rim, yep. And then he did finally win both Best Picture and Best Director with...

• 1:16:57Lizzie Bassett?

  The Shape of Water.

• 1:16:58Chris Winterbauer?

  The Shape of Water. But, Lizzie, interestingly enough, Pan's Labyrinth remains Del Toro's last film, shot in Spanish.

• 1:17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, yes. You know, we talked about this a little bit when we covered Frankenstein for all of the Oscars, but I miss him working in Spanish. There's sometimes, not always, obviously, I think he's an unbelievably talented writer and director, but in Frankenstein, one of the things that bumped me is sometimes the language can feel, at times, more generic or a little bit more ham-fisted in a way that it does not in his Spanish language features. Which makes sense, it's your native language, like, there's gonna be a different ability to handle it and manipulate it, I think, if it's the language that you grew up with. Not saying that his work in English isn't incredible, it is, but I would love to see him return to a Spanish language work.

• 1:17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm curious if any of our listeners, especially ones that are patrons, because you can comment, I'd be curious to know, from Spanish speakers, specifically, Spanish is a first language, I'm curious if they agree with us, or if they feel differently.

• 1:17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Because we're reading with subtitles, which is very different. And obviously, the translations are usually pretty good, but they're not always great.

• 1:18:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's always an approximation. Yeah.

• 1:18:06Chris Winterbauer?

  It's an approximation and oftentimes condensed slightly. So you can fit it on the screen and you can read it more quickly. And I'm just curious if our Spanish speaking listeners feel that Del Toro has a way with dialogue in his Spanish films that feels more naturalistic than what they perceive in the English language, or if they actually feel the same way we do.

• 1:18:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I'm saying? On the flip side.

• 1:18:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not even that it's more naturalistic because it actually still feels very heightened and elevated. But it's that it feels to me like there is a different mastery of it than there is when he's trying to do the same thing in English.

• 1:18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And he speaks, obviously, he speaks very good English.

• 1:18:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:18:40Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I would imagine, though, that it's his native language, obviously. So he would be more comfortable. Yeah. And that concludes our coverage of Pan's Labyrinth. Well, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:18:50Lizzie Bassett?

  My God, so much. This was really fascinating. I love Guillermo del Toro. I mean, I knew that, but I didn't know how sort of magical his own life has been. It's really crazy. I mean, there's so many things that went right, but I think what went right was that he read the signs and listened to them, that, you know, he didn't just lose his journal in the taxi cab. He thought, no, I've lost myself. And I love that. I love that he sees magic in the real world, it seems, just as much as he does in his movies. And I'm so glad that he took that as a sign and listened.

• 1:19:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree. I think what it indicates to me is, in his heart, he knew what he wanted to do.

• 1:19:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think he could have interpreted it, here's my guess. If that phone call had come in 30 seconds earlier, before he'd made the decision, it would have been, obviously, the same decision. But it would have been, my notebook has been returned to me. I'm supposed to do Pan's Labyrinth.

• 1:19:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:19:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Right? And I guess my point is like, I like that he has a romanticism to the kismet of the way that his life works. It's very fun.

• 1:19:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I would like to give mine to composer Javier Navarrete. I love the score.

• 1:19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It's incredible.

• 1:20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  So much. It's so beautiful. The main theme is absolutely gorgeous. It transports me into the world of a child that is surrounded. By danger, as we know, in this movie, never feels like it overwhelms the movie in any way.

• 1:20:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No, they really don't use it as much as I thought that they had.

• 1:20:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's used very sparingly and to great effect. So I think it's an amazing score.

• 1:20:21Lizzie Bassett?

  And I hadn't seen this since I was 17 years old and I still hummed that lullaby to my daughter when she was a baby.

• 1:20:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. It's absolutely an earworm in the best way. All right. Well, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, can you let them know how they can support it?

• 1:20:36Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell a friend or family member that what went wrong, it's pretty good. If you liked Pan's Labyrinth, give this episode a listen. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. That really, really does help us. You can now, on both Apple and Spotify, you can subscribe and you will get at least one bonus episode every month. Usually it's more than one bonus episode every month because we're having a lot of fun with these. They tend to be reviews of new releases coming out. And if you want everything that I just mentioned and more, you can for $5, join our Patreon, where you will get bonus episodes, ad-free feed, plus a fan community. We really love talking to our patrons. And yes, it is us responding to you, mostly Chris, but I'm there too sometimes.

• 1:21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  And then if you want to go one step further, for $50 a month, you can get a full stop supporter shout out, just like one of these.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  Soy es vos? Soy es vos? Yo? Yo he tenido tantos nombres, nombres viejos, nombres que solo pueden pronunciar el viento y los árboles. Yo soy el monte y el bosque y la tierra. Soy? Soy Adrian Pan Correa, Angelina Renee Cook, Ben Schindelmann, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B.,

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  hija del rey del mundo subterráneo, Chris Gallagher, la segunda G es muda, Chris Lille, David Friscolanti, Darny Del Conklin.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Don Schaefer, Em Zoria, Evan Downey, Felicia Gigi, Filmen Lo Estes Mismos, Frankenstein, Galen y Miguel, Los Niños de Vidrios Rotos, El Elenco y el Equipo de Ganar, Un Viaje a Browntown, Medio Galgo, Tengo una Admiración Platónica enorme por Chris Winterbauer, James McAvoy, JJ Rápido, Juan de Wiltshire, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Emilano Salto del Giorgio, Karina Canaba, Kate Eldington,

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  Kathleen Olsen, Amy Ogreslager McCoy, Mira a tu hombro izquierdo, Lena El J, Malísima Susan, Lydia House, Mark Bertha, Los Humanos de Mariposa, Mateo Jacobson, Miguel Migraz, Natán Ashley, Natán el Cuchillo, Rosa María López, Sery, Solamente Sery, Scott Oshita, Somman Shainani, Esteban Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson y la Familia Provost, Donde las Oz suenan como Oz.

• 1:24:00Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Thank you, Chris. Well, next week, we're gonna venture into the dark underbelly of Chicago, excuse me, Gotham, because we are covering one of my favorite movies ever made, which is, and I know not an original take, but it is a fascinating story.

• 1:24:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Is this one of your favorite movies?

• 1:24:20Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. It genuinely is.

• 1:24:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 1:24:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I really love it.

• 1:24:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's wildly entertaining.

• 1:24:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's The Dark Knight, in case anyone's wondering, in which we will encounter-

• 1:24:27Chris Winterbauer?

  What if you're just, it's the Garbage Pail Kids movie?

• 1:24:29Lizzie Bassett?

  No, in which we will encounter, obviously, the Nolans, but also the Weinsteins. And of course, Heath Ledger.

• 1:24:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm very excited to get into this. There's so much more behind the scenes to this movie than I realized. And it's a fascinating journey into the reinvention of Batman, but more specifically, the reinvention, and I think crystallization of the Joker. So I can't wait, and we will see you for The Dark Knight next week.

• 1:24:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't remember the score. I almost did the Terminator.

• 1:24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Boom.

• 1:24:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I almost did the Terminator score. I was like,

• 1:25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  No, that isn't it.

• 1:25:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, is it?

• 1:25:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Isn't that when the Batmobile is going down?

• 1:25:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But I was like, no, that's the Terminator score. Yeah. Well, I am so excited. I don't know. He's a little weird laugh that he does. Very thrilled. Thank you, Lizzie. We look forward to seeing you guys next week.

• 1:25:18Lizzie Bassett?

  In the meantime, come back on Friday because we're doing a bit of a Heath Ledger double feature. We are doing a new format called a featurette, which is just a shorter, more conversational version of a regular What Went Wrong episode about a movie that doesn't have quite enough to discuss for a regular episode format. So we are talking about 10 Things I Hate About You, and we have a special guest joining us for that. It's a Heath Ledger kind of week, which is a nice kind of week. So come back for that and then come back for The Dark Knight on Monday.

• 1:25:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Until then, bye.

• 1:25:48Speaker 05

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krupson.