It’s Cool to Fight Dictators: Says Pan’s Labyrinth, 20 Years Later

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is now a world classic. That alone is enough to prove we are not beyond the age of classics yet. And this year, the movie’s fans rushed to the San Diego Comic-Con to meet its creators.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the film. And the grandest of all surprises was the director himself, Guillermo del Toro, who went as far as converting the entire film into 3D solely by his hand.

This is as loyal as an artist could stay to his art, in the age of generating deepfakes with AI. Not only did he refuse to use AI, but he used a completely manual method to do what he did. Of course, he still had 1,000 assistants. With them, he was rotoing every frame to keep the original essence from escaping.

In his own words, they were “protecting a lineage of art” by doing that. As he says, “if we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them.”

And so, they revived the film all over again, only switching the format this time. He announced it at the SDCC. The stars who attended included del Toro himself, the film’s cinematographer (and his brother) Guillermo Navarro, actor Doug Jones and Ivana Baquero, who played Ofelia when she was 11 years old.

The announcement says, the film is going to return to the theatres again this October, in 4K, 3D and HD format. But as Jones put it, “when you have an opportunity to see it on the big screen, take that opportunity. ‘Cuz it’s not a small screen movie.”

Nothing could be truer than this.

The Loyalty to One’s Own Art

The SDCC event became as much of a reunion of the film’s cast ’n’ crew as it was a celebration. 20 years later, everyone was offering their own bit from their experience of working with del Toro. And soon enough, it turned into an art class just as much.

Doug Jones had perhaps the most extreme of all memories. He was the Faun in the labyrinth. And his job was to really become one. It involved things like studying how cows shake flies off their buttocks with their tails upon del Toro’s orders.

“With the Faun character, he told me to study the hindquarters of barn animals. Look at the so I had to look at a cow’s ass and go, ‘Ah! How do the hooves meet the ground? And how do they shake flies off? That kinda thing.’” He tells Beats Exclusive.

The director himself did not hesitate to detonate a truck on one of his lucky days when “the fire department was not around.”

As they were recalling all these memories, the crowd was bursting in claps.

Ivana Baquero had her own delicate memories to share. She was barely 11 years old when she played Ofelia. She says she doesn’t remember reading the script. It was her ‘cinephile’ dad who did that for her.

“And he read the script and he was like, ‘This is a really special movie. This is the one. This is going to be magic.’ And my dad immediately saw it when he read the script. We knew early on we were in for something special.” She recalls.

The team went on to tell that her audition was so powerful that everyone had tears in their eyes. After it, they immediately hired her for the project.

And after that, came the challenge of turning a child Ivana into the story’s Ofelia. As she says, “That level of depth that was required for Ofelia, because I was a child, I didn’t know that amount of sorrow. I hadn’t gone through that level of pain and sorrow. I think that comes as you grow up. And you’re able to deepen that emotional toolkit you can then apply to your craft. But I didn’t have that back then. And when it happened and when it all clicked, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is what it’s actually about.’”

She talked about all the different layers of the movie she discovered over the years ever since. Also, how she aged with the movie herself. On the other hand, Jones himself had to learn Spanish phonetically to portray the Faun as believably as possible.

For del Toro, converting it to 3D was much like the View-Master toy he loved when he was a boy.

“That has such an incredible depth. And I think that we always color coded and shape coded. The real world is cold and straight lines and the light is a lot more cold. And then, the fantasy world has warmth,” he says.

The cinematography of the film, 20 years ago, was done accordingly.

The audience at SDCC had the chance to watch a sneak peek of the 3D version, along with the 20th anniversary cut’s trailer. Adding to that, del Toro revealed a behind-the-scenes documentary is also on the way. He shared a preview of it exclusively for SDCC.

The re-releases are planned on his birthday, 9 October.

Oppressions Not Named, Yet Remembered

With all this, questions were flying around on the cultural impact of the movie, such as on Eric Kripke of The Boys. The real impact is probably immeasurable, and for very strong reasons.

Ivana wanted to see “people that are now rediscovering or discovering the movie for the first time, what it does for them and if it resonates, which I’m sure it still does.”

Navarro put forward the reason: “We’re still fighting dictatorships. And we still have things to believe in. And we have to carry on.”

This was, arguably, still vague, coming from the makers. They did not name any specific world situation in a world that already has too many. But for Ivana, it was “everything going on in the world,” which makes “roles like Capitan Vidal” all the more relevant today.

This is the greatest of all gifts the movie could ever have offered, through the vessel of a story set in the world of fantasy. During the panel, Ivana herself admitted at one point that maybe Ofelia wasn’t really evading reality. Maybe it was her own reality, after all.

For as far as the memory of the human race itself can go, such stories have always existed in one form or the other, and they were always told through the metaphors of the same fairy tales. The same monsters, same goblins, same elves and the same fairies.

In that sense, del Toro did not do anything exclusively new. He just channeled it into a contemporary medium, without being the first one to do so. For the movie, set in Francoist Spain of 1944, to become a classic, it didn’t have to be the first one. It only needed del Toro’s artistry, something he’d never compromise.

Perhaps what he still cannot do is naming all the oppressions in the world that so directly resonates with what Pan’s Labyrinth is all about. For after all, right when people are living it, and experiencing it with their own flesh and blood, opinions are meant to stay divided. A very huge sure of the political establishment of the day might consider it even offensive. It is only when the dust is settled when everyone condemns it univocally.

And so many dusts are yet to settle. Except, some did.

Things worked out for Navarro, too. With Pan’s Labyrinth, he became the first Mexican cinematographer in the history of cinematography to win an Oscar. He recalls, when he first came to the US and went to a talent agency, they told him, “Why would we hire a Mexican? We already have a gardener.”

And merely a decade and a half later, the same Mexican would stand on the Academy Awards stage with a Spanish-language film people could never forget.

It proved a point all over again that never needed proving and still did, like the wheel that always has to be reinvented, again and again: it is cool to fight dictators.

Everything Else that Happened at San Diego

For del Toro, it was the ‘second hardest movie’ of his entire career. People called him ‘crazy’ for mixing a story from Spain’s history with his favourite monsters.

As everyone knows, that should never deter an artist. For it is an artist’s job to be crazy. Regardless of how big or small they are and whether they reach as far as del Toro in one life or not.

He accepted the Inkpot Award at SDCC, and fondly recalled how he frequented the Comic-Con way before it became so mainstream, dreaming of a day like this.

In the end, one del Toro might be too insignificant for all the Captain Vidals in the world, but what he created isn’t.

In his own words, “art saves your life sometimes. Sometimes, especially when you’re young, you’re vulnerable and you’re down, you’re crushed, and in comes a piece of music, a song, a movie, an illustration, an image.”

Pan’s Labyrinth will remain an inspiration for everyone who believes in dreams and suffers the misfortune of living under a dictatorship. It is less likely to lose relevance anytime soon.