"For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot"
About this Quote
Del Toro’s charm has always been that he’s both the grand architect of monsters and the guy who admits, plainly, that he was a mess. “I loved it but I felt very pressured” is a director translating creative devotion into physical weather: affection doesn’t cancel stress, it intensifies it. The subtext is that passion is not a calming force on a set; it’s gasoline. If you care that much, every decision starts to feel irreversible, every compromise like a small betrayal of the film you can see in your head.
The line also smuggles in a career-long theme: del Toro as an artist formed under constraint. The Devil’s Backbone sits in that early-2000s moment when Spanish-language genre cinema was gaining international legitimacy, but budgets were still tight and expectations oddly high. You can hear the double bind: he’s making a personal, haunted story about war, childhood, and ghosts, yet he’s also proving he can deliver a “real” movie under real scrutiny. That pressure doesn’t read as external only; it’s self-imposed, the neurosis of someone trying to protect tone. A ghost story can’t survive a wobbly mood. It needs coherence, patience, a delicately controlled dread.
What makes the quote work is its lack of mythmaking. Many directors perform omnipotence. Del Toro offers something more contemporary and, frankly, more credible: the confession that artistry is often anxiety with good taste. It frames the film’s emotional precision not as effortless genius but as hard-won focus, squeezed out of nerves.
The line also smuggles in a career-long theme: del Toro as an artist formed under constraint. The Devil’s Backbone sits in that early-2000s moment when Spanish-language genre cinema was gaining international legitimacy, but budgets were still tight and expectations oddly high. You can hear the double bind: he’s making a personal, haunted story about war, childhood, and ghosts, yet he’s also proving he can deliver a “real” movie under real scrutiny. That pressure doesn’t read as external only; it’s self-imposed, the neurosis of someone trying to protect tone. A ghost story can’t survive a wobbly mood. It needs coherence, patience, a delicately controlled dread.
What makes the quote work is its lack of mythmaking. Many directors perform omnipotence. Del Toro offers something more contemporary and, frankly, more credible: the confession that artistry is often anxiety with good taste. It frames the film’s emotional precision not as effortless genius but as hard-won focus, squeezed out of nerves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Stress |
|---|
More Quotes by Guillermo
Add to List
