A tiny but clearly humanoid fairy figure flaps its wings as it flies towards the ancient ruins of a bygone kingdom. Guiding a young heroine to meet a mysterious faun, the fantastical creature momentarily appears to cross the threshold of the screen.
That’s when Guillermo del Toro, wearing 3D glasses, chuckles proudly as if to say, “Look at this,” as he sits for a technical check in the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum’s majestic David Geffen Theater. Later that night, at the premiere of the new 3D version, nearly 1,000 fans were transported to his stunning 2006 masterpiece “Pan’s Labyrinth” (aka “El Laberinto del Fauno”).
“Pan’s Labyrinth,” which opened in theaters nationwide on Friday (which also happens to be Del Toro’s 62nd birthday), celebrates its 20th anniversary with a new 4K restoration directed by Del Toro himself, available in both 2D and the aforementioned 3D transfer.
Doug Jones, left, plays the faun that summons Ofelia, played by Ivana Baquero, in “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
(Scott A. Garfitt / Andreea Alexandru / Invision / AP)
As charming as it is brutal, the Mexican director’s modern classic takes place during the Spanish Civil War, in 1944 to be exact, when young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother are transported to a camp run by the ruthless Captain Vidal (Sergi López).
Amidst the bloodshed, Ofelia discovers an underworld of magical beings, including a charming faun (Doug Jones) who convinces her that she is a princess who must reclaim her royal status.
“Pan’s Labyrinth” marked an artistic turning point in Del Toro’s career, winning three Academy Awards and receiving two additional nominations representing Mexico, one for Del Toro’s screenplay and the other for foreign-language film. These accolades come after he directed two comic book adaptations for Hollywood studios: “Blade II” and “Hellboy.”
Beyond recognition, the experience was spiritually transformative for the Guadalajara native; not least because of the obstacles he overcame to achieve this.
“‘Pan’s’ marks a big departure between what I did before and what I did after,” del Toro says. “I started investing in filmmaking from a different angle. “I don’t know how to describe it, but filmmaking became a religion as opposed to something I could do. He bonded with me.”
Although the film is now considered one of the great works of the 21st century, the industry was not receptive to Del Toro’s ideas when he decided to make it.
“Everything I thought I wanted to say about the war in ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ seemed dated because we had had 9/11 and the world had changed,” Del Toro recalls. “I didn’t want to do an American movie. I was offered a lot of comic book movies and they said, ‘I have to do a companion movie to ‘Devil’s Backbone’ no matter what.’ But no one wanted to make the movie.”
One of the main objections was the mature tone of the narrative, in which the child protagonist is directly confronted and endangered by the evils resulting from fascist ideologies.
“They said, ‘If this is a fairy tale, then it has to be a family movie,’ because I was offered ‘Narnia’ a year ago. [former Walden Media chief executive] Cary Granat,” Del Toro tells me.
“’Why don’t you do ‘Narnia’?’ he said. And I said, ‘Because I want to make my own version of a fairy tale where the lion doesn’t come back from the dead and where a cruel world is told against a limitless imagination.’”
Del Toro’s interest in stories in which children’s suffering is taken seriously was stimulated by Luis Buñuel’s 1950 classic ‘Los Olvidados’, about a group of neglected children surviving a harsh reality on the streets of Mexico City.
“I was a teenager when I saw ‘Los Olvidados,'” del Toro says. “I thought that whenever someone tells an unsentimental and somewhat brutal story about a child, whether it’s ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’ or ‘Los Olvidados’ or ‘The Red Balloon’ or even Bobby Driscoll in ‘The Window’ – like ‘The Fallen Idol’ where you see a child in real peril, a child in peril, a child in a moral dilemma – I thought I was really touched.”
Del Toro believes that children are mostly unseen by adults. They are “cartoons” in the eyes of “ordinary adults”. So when his mother began reading child psychology books to better understand the young Del Toro, she read them too so she could try to manipulate him.
Del Toro laughs mischievously as he recalls their antics. “I would do exactly what the book said, and I realized I could work within that bias and get my grandma to buy me horror comics or my mom to let me miss school,” Del Tor recalls. “Ofelia is very strong. That was the point of the movie for me. I wanted to see a conflict of wills between a young boy and a fascist captain, and the boy winning.”
(Teresa Isasi / Picture House)
Del Toro’s mother, Guadalupe, died in 2022. But she lives on in cinema thanks to director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s landmark 1985 gay Mexican film “Doña Herlinda and Her Son,” in which she plays the titular Doña Herlinda.
If you look closely, you’ll also find Del Toro in the film, which was shot in Guadalajara.
“There’s a cameo in it with my ex-wife, Lorenza. She’s the receptionist, and I look like I’m dancing in Chapala, but I’m so skinny, so you’ll never recognize me,” he says. “I was dancing with a girl I liked, but I was in the throes of dating Lorenza, who was already my wife.”
Then there was the problem of the language of the picture. Del Toro would not hesitate to make “Pan’s Labyrinth” in Spanish.
“A lot of them said, ‘If you do it in English, we’ll do it; it’s set in Spain, same ending, girl dies, no problem, but in English.’ And I said, ‘I can’t do it. It’s not right for the movie.’ I’m not saying you can never do it, but there’s always that ‘Zorro’ thing: ‘Are you in a hurry? S.Dear?’ or ‘Come here Hfarm‘” he says, emphasizing the Spanish words with a funny, exaggerated emphasis.
“If you’re trying to compare reality and fantasy, reality has to be in its own language, in its own position,” adds Del Toro, emphasizing his determination to make the film in his native language. “I thought, ‘This is about reality colliding with fantasy. I need to stylize reality, but I don’t want to do it in English because then everything is a fiction. Everything is just an idea.'”
In 2026, the film’s bilingual appeal is a key component of the marketing strategy implemented by Cineverse, the entertainment company Del Toro tapped for the restoration and re-release of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” to reach audiences across the country.
“Most of our messages are in English and Spanish. Messages about the making of 3D — Guillermo likes to say ‘F— AI’ but we positioned it as ‘Made by the people, for the people.’ Made by people for people,” says Yolanda Macias, Cineverse’s head of feature films. “It’s a really powerful message that resonates with our fans.”
Macias, a Mexican American woman whose parents immigrated from Jalisco, sees “Pan’s Labyrinth” as a timeless film that is as relevant today as it was two decades ago.
“We’re not ignoring a very important segment of the audience, which is the Latino population, which in my experience is always attracted to creators from Mexico or Latin America,” Macias says. “And we’re proud of Guillermo for being that person for this audience.”
When Del Toro first imagined “Pan’s Labyrinth,” he found himself grappling with existential concerns about the meaning and validity of the things each person leaves behind when they leave. Can everything we mortals create stand the test of time? Does it matter?
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
“One of the things I experienced was, ‘Is it worth making movies? You give them years and years and years, and then they just drift away and drift into the oblivion of the culture,'” Del Toro says. “The main theme of the movie is, ‘Can we give our lives to something that’s not going to change the world?’ That’s why the movie ends with a small flower blooming on a dried tree. “That’s all that’s left of his story in the real world.”
His films will one day turn into flowers left not only as evidence of his time on earth, but also as a message to those who have the sensitivity to appreciate them.
“You could say, ‘Ofelia lived in the other kingdom,’ but there’s only one tiny flower in the real world. That’s why he says, ‘For those who know where to look.’ Because that’s what we do as filmmakers. When you ‘discover’ a filmmaker, you say, ‘I discovered this Fellini guy.’ He’s been there for a while, but I’m sure. Or you discover Miyazaki or Mamoru Oshii… These are continents, but they’re only found on top-secret maps. I like that image.” gone.”
As long as they’re found, Del Toro doesn’t worry too much about how people will encounter them.
“[Films] continue to live to a certain degree. For example, when I was shooting ‘Frankenstein,’ I said, ‘We’re going to live in the Netflix queue forever,'” he recalls, trying not to laugh: “Theater is the best. There is no comparison. But I remember when I was a kid, I watched all the Universal monster movies on TV and they were very important to me. “There is also something to be said about accessibility, which is important.”
I agree with him and note that some of the most enlightening movie-watching experiences for me as a young moviegoer came thanks to the bootleg DVDs I would purchase as a teenager in Mexico City.
“I love pirated DVDs from Mexico,” Del Toro says with a laugh. “I’ll tell you a little story: We went to promote ‘Hellboy’ in Mexico City and we were having coffee. A guy walked in and said, ‘Do you want to buy a movie?’ he said. And we already had ‘Hellboy’ opening weekend… and it didn’t have a cover!”
Another feature of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that it is the last Spanish-language film directed by Del Toro. However, he says this may change; He still has another project he wants to do in Mexico.
“I actually have an idea that I would love to shoot, but I want to make it into a drama. I don’t want to make it into a fantasy movie,” he explains. “I have a great story that I want to shoot someday. It’s a kidnapping scene from three perspectives. The victim, the people doing the roundup, and another component that I won’t reveal.” (Del Toro’s late father, Federico, was famously kidnapped in Guadalajara in the late 1990s.)
The thought of del Toro making another Mexican film in the future reminded me that the original script for the period ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” was set in Mexico, but a lack of funds forced him to shift production to Spain with the help of Pedro Almodóvar’s company, El Deseo.
“It was about a traveling circus at the time. [Mexican] Revolution with a mother, a father and a son. It was full of shaken fetuses. The boy was a clown and his father was a magician. I was trying to do Bergman’s ‘Hour of the Wolf’ or ‘The Sorcerer’; modest but chilling,” he explains: “But it was very different. I had the orphanage, the myth of the fetus and the ghost; and I kept the devil alive in the monastery.”
In every language, Del Toro is an ardent advocate against the use of generative AI in artistic creations. He believes that anything humans touch has a better chance of lasting. The audience’s love for “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a testament to this sentiment.
“[Pan’s Labyrinth”] It’s so true to who I am. And whenever you can be honest, people feel like that’s important to you,” Del Toro says. “And when you think that’s important to someone, you care about them.”