Guillermo del Toro on Pan’s Labyrinth at 20: “We Have to Renew the Pact With Images”

At Beyond Fest’s North American premiere of the Pan’s Labyrinth 4K restoration, Guillermo del Toro talked 3D fairies, the shot he still can’t fix, why fascism “never goes away,” and the script that had him “bawling ugly.”

Guillermo del Toro walked out to a full house in Westwood on Friday night and immediately started pointing at other people. Producer Bertha Navarro and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro were in the audience, he told the crowd, calling them two of the most important people in his life.

The occasion was the North American premiere of the 4K restoration of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, presented by Beyond Fest at Directors Village on Oct. 2 for the film’s 20th anniversary. The Nerd Wire was in the room, along with a crowd the moderator put at 1,400.

What followed was part restoration talk, part masterclass and part sermon on why handmade art matters. The film returns to theaters on Oct. 9. Here’s what del Toro said.

The moderator opened with a show of hands for everyone in their 20s, and plenty went up. Del Toro said every generation seems to find the film, and he has a theory about why: schools teach it, “which is the best part of school, watching movies.”

He described his regular life as “so isolated,” spent painting miniatures, drawing, writing and reading. A night like this, he said, leaves him hopeful.

Del Toro says Pan’s Labyrinth in 3D is “absolutely bananas”

The anniversary re-release includes a 3D conversion, and del Toro traced the idea back to Pacific Rim. While converting that film, he said, he wondered about doing the same for Pan’s Labyrinth, and who would ever pay for it.

“Turns out I paid for it,” he said.

His case for the format comes from how the film is built. The real world sits a little flatter, he explained, and the image gains depth once the fairies arrive.

“It adds so much, because already the two worlds are differentiated by a lot of colors and shapes,” he said. He called the 3D version “absolutely bananas” twice and urged the room to go see it that way.

He was just as excited about the new color grade, which he said is the version headed to the Criterion Collection. “I think it’s so gorgeous now,” he said. “There’s so much information in the blacks and so much information in the highlights.”

The Pan’s Labyrinth shot del Toro still can’t fix

One thing the restoration didn’t solve is an establishing shot. Del Toro said he never does them (he calls them “Seinfeld” shots) and that the one in Pan’s Labyrinth, with horses going by, still sends him “into spasm” every time he sees it.

He compared it to a shot of two men in front of the lights in Blade II. “I can never fix them,” he said. “They’re part of the movie.”

When the moderator joked that he should have cut it and called the result a director’s cut, del Toro didn’t bite. “No, you know, I don’t like doing that,” he said. A film should stay the way people first saw it, he added, because once it’s out it no longer belongs to him.

He knows the feeling from the audience side. As a kid he saw The Shining with a hospital scene that Stanley Kubrick removed shortly after the film opened. “I swear to God I saw the scene in the hospital,” he said. Then it was gone. “That’s the way I saw it.”

A girl against a fascist

The Faun began as a childhood terror. Del Toro said his family lived close to a church, and when the midnight chimes rang he would watch a faun come out from behind the armoire in his bedroom.

“I would see a hand and then the face of the goat and then a leg, and I would start screaming,” he said. He called it lucid dreaming. He knew it wasn’t real, “but I saw it and I was paralyzed with fear.”

The film itself came from somewhere else. Children, old people and women are invisible to a certain kind of person, he said, and there is a tactical advantage in that.

“I wanted to show the power of a girl,” he said, one with more conviction than a captain who only does what the structure tells him to do. He set a girl against a fascist, he said, and let the girl win.

Why fascism “never goes away”

He tied the film to The Devil’s Backbone, which he recalled screening in Toronto on Sept. 10, 2001. After the next day, he said, he felt that movie needed a companion piece.

He also remembered being asked whether it wasn’t easy to criticize fascism “now that it doesn’t exist.” His answer: it never goes away.

Del Toro didn’t soften what he thinks that means now. He described a world run by “people that are barely able to function socially” who have a lot of money, and a public deliberately split against itself.

“They manipulated the way we get our information and divided us,” he said.

Then came the line of the night: “We used to look for windows to look into the world. And now all we do is look in a mirror.”

Keep looking, he warned, and “you end up with a face that you don’t recognize.”

Even authority got the fantasy treatment. Anyone who puts on a uniform and tells you to obey is role-playing, he said. “Everything we talk about as grown-ups is a fantasy that we all agree upon,” borders included.

His answer wasn’t more anger. “Can we all forgive each other?” he asked. He argued for accepting that everybody is flawed over demanding purity from one another, and landed on three words: “Let’s keep going.”

How the monster talks to us

Doug Jones plays both the Faun and the Pale Man, and del Toro said it was always going to be him. The catch: “he had to do it blind and in Spanish.” A Spanish actor later dubbed Jones’ voice.

Del Toro said he directed the Faun as a character who is not to be trusted. He begins as a funny old man. Then “he gets younger and younger and less trustworthy,” until he’s beautiful by the end, like a glam rocker. “More Jagger than Bowie,” he told Jones.

That arc pays off in the Faun’s last request, which sounds like the smallest ask in the world. “Three drops of blood. Nothing. Just give me the baby,” del Toro said, paraphrasing his own monster.

“That’s the way the world talks to us. And you know what? We fall for it.”

“A sacred, sacred pact”

The biggest idea of the night arrived near the end. “We have a pact with the image,” del Toro said, tracing it back to the first cave paintings.

“We blew paint on the hand and we said, we were here, we were you. Please think of us.”

That pact is broken, he argued, “because now we don’t know if we can trust the images.”

“We have to renew the pact with images,” he said. “It is a sacred, sacred pact and an essential part of being a human. Being able to trust that that was made by somebody. For you.”

It connected to something he’d said earlier about what the audience had just watched. “Art is not the final image. Art is a process to get there,” he said. “Everything you saw on the screen is real. Somebody built it.” Somebody, he added, woke up at three in the morning to do it.

Why he wants you back in a theater

The venue was part of the point. A group of filmmakers led by Jason Reitman bought the historic Westwood theater, now called Directors Village, in 2024, and del Toro is one of them.

“We bought this theater. We bought it together, all the directors. To preserve it,” he said.

“The way to wisdom is humility. And the way of humility is to surrender yourself to something larger than you. And movies, when they work, you can surrender to them.”

He made the case for repertory screenings in particular. “I think that revival experiences are vital for the survival of the theatrical experience,” he said.

His comparison was a concert. Everybody already has the song, on the radio and in the car, he said. “Why do we pay for it?” Because of the experience.

More from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth Q&A

On writing and directing

• The Buried Giant made him cry. Del Toro said he was “sobbing” while typing the last 15 pages of the film he’s making now, his stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. “I was, like, bawling ugly.”
• He still pitches before he writes. The moderator recalled Sergi López saying del Toro talked him through the entire film for two and a half hours before a script existed. Del Toro said the same thing happened with Oscar Isaac.
• His writing days vary. Sometimes he writes 10 to 15 pages a day. Other days, he said, he just tries not to go on eBay.
• The Shape of Water cost less than it looks. “It was a movie that looks like 50 million dollars. We did it for 19. 19.3.” One bathtub shot took more than six hours, because a small change in lens or camera height made it read as funny or salacious. “We spent six hours finding that exact frame.”
• His promise to actors. “At the end of it all, you will render the best work you’ve ever done and you will feel very proud of yourself.”
• On Frankenstein. He said he sat Oscar Isaac down and told him: “If I’m the visionary director and you are the star, we’re never going to make this f—ing movie.” The fix was trading stories about everything each of them had done wrong.

On monsters, anger and himself

• He voices his own monsters. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro said, he is the voice of the toad, the mandrake root and the Pale Man. “I always voice the monsters.”
• Every emotion has a job. “All the emotions that we were given are useful,” he said. “The more we suppress one, the more it controls us.” There is, he added, “a place for anger in this world.”
• All his films are one voice. He compared himself to a singer covering someone else’s song. “All you have is your voice.”
• What Guillermo del Toro would tell himself on day one of the Pan’s Labyrinth shoot. “You’re going to be so much more relaxed with who you are.” He followed it with this: “The most astounding lack of charity is towards ourselves.”
• He wants to paint miniatures with you. Del Toro floated a Sunday at the Academy Museum where fans come and paint miniatures with him. He promised to make the Mexican rice. No date came with the offer.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth returns to theaters Oct. 9 in 4K, 3D and HDR from Cineverse and Fathom Entertainment. Beyond Fest runs through Oct. 5 in Los Angeles.