Guillermo del Toro launches own production company, condemns "recycled" ideas with straight face
Guillermo del Toro has a stubby thumb in so many film and television projects these days, it’s almost more efficient to name the ones he’s not a part of—but even Guillermo del Toro is bound by the limits of space and time. Fortunately he’s found a way to be a part of productions without even being in the room: He will become the room, namely Mirada, a self-described “imaginarium” workspace he’s launching in Marina Del Rey that will house soundstages and comprehensive post-production facilities for filmmakers to produce everything from commercials to feature films with the help of del Toro and collaborators Guillermo Navarro, Mathew Cullen, and Javier Jimenez. “We want to attract filmmakers and help them develop their ideas from the ground up” del Toro says. “Not in a pipeline of production and not with a marketing view, but simply, how to build a story the best. That could be a short film, a feature film, a commercial, proof of concept—whatever it may be, you get all of us.”
And judging by del Toro’s recent comments in a dual interview with friend Alejandro González Iñárritu (Biutiful), his new studio is not only a welcome aid to aspiring directors, but quite possibly the savior of an industry that del Toro now describes as “a truly catastrophic panorama.” The hyperbole doesn’t end there, with del Toro and Iñárritu terming Hollywood’s recent financial crisis a “holocaust” and lamenting the current “cultural genocide” where “a whole generation has been fed by the reductive and stupid and super banal,” and “cowardly” studios “only venture to the safest, most inane bets for the audience. Things that seem recycled from a recycle from a recycle” and “it is almost not possible if you are not based on a bestseller, on a big comic book, or have a branding behind you. To bring an original idea is just the scariest thing that anybody can confront.”
Which would probably be a weightier argument were it not coming from the director of, yes, Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos, but also Blade II, Hellboy 2, the executive producer of Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss In Boots, and the TV movie remake Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, the future director of Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, and the writer behind the new TV version of The Incredible Hulk. Come on, now. But then, since we’re living in a CULTURAL GENOCIDE, anything to survive, we suppose. No atheists in a foxhole.