Guillermo del Toro Quotes

To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.

Film-making was not at all what I had expected.

Making films has got to be one of the hardest endeavors known to humankind.

I think it's counterproductive for actors to come to the set with well-thumbed copies of the book their film is adapted from.

'Deadpool' feels like it exploded out of nowhere, but it was a ten-year development process on that movie. I think it was honed over those ten years.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Making a film is a very difficult thing to do, but the experience of 'Best F(r)iends' is a great memory.

I think everyone loves 'The Departed.' That was a movie that had a lot of problems structurally. And we had to battle with it. Fight. Experiment. Try different things. And I think finally we hit it.

The business of taking a book and transforming into a script to make this thing called a film - it's a mysterious process to me; sometimes it works.

Sometimes films don't turn out the way they were envisioned on paper. And when that happens, one must just forget the entire episode.

I definitely had some heated but extremely productive chats with screenwriter Justin Monjo, but while it's my story, it's their movie, so I have to allow for compression and poetic license.

Be passionate about your [movie] material, because you're going to have to overcome a lot of "No's," and it's that passion that fuels the fight.

I think every time a movie gets made, it's a miracle. I would love to get to a point where it became easier and it wasn't so much of a struggle to get it done or finished.

Each film is difficult, in its own particular way. There's a unique set of challenges on every movie.

When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day.

Once you are shooting a movie, even if it's your own script, you have to let it go at a certain point. That's true for every film. It breaks up into phases where the thing that you have in front of you is the thing you have to address, and you can't worry about what you imagined a scene was going to like and that it came out differently, because that's what you have to make work.

I love Brooke Shields. She's developed into a wonderful actress and a wonderful person. We were all babies then in Brenda Starr. That's why when people say, "What did you think of that film?" I can't do what people do and say, "I hated it." I can't speak ill of a film, because it's so hard to make a film. Everybody thinks we're sitting by a pool peeling grapes, and this is not the case. It's hard. It's hard to do this stuff - and getting harder!

Actors can be very precious about their work and their scenes, but I think good actors have a strong understanding of narrative and are very often not as precious about that stuff. They just can't be because they understand what makes for a better film, and that it's the job of the actor to work toward that, and then if you want you can go to acting class or workshops. But making movies is not workshops.

In the end, whether I write the script or, in this case, somebody else did, there's a point where you let it go when you're making a movie. You just have to. The thing that you shoot is not what you imagined in your head - it never is exactly that. And it shouldn't be.

There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn't.

When I'm casting a picture, I think who I'd like to see in it if I was sitting in a theater. Who would surprise me?

I try to approach making movies in a way that it's about the making of them and not the result of them, if that makes sense.

For me, trying to expand the energy to make one movie in Hollywood would be the equivalent in terms of energy to making 10 movies in Japan.

When you make a movie, it's just a huge bureaucracy because movies cost so much money. Millions of people get involved, and pretty soon the creative idea gets tramped on and watered down or filtered through a huge system.