Guillermo del Toro: “‘Nightmare Alley’ is a visually spectacular genre”

After winning the Oscar for best picture and after almost two years of production, Guillermo del Toro He re-unfolds his universe on the big screen with “Nightmare Alley”, a return to the “film noir” that fascinated Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s.

“It is a visually spectacular film genre. It is, on the one hand, related to horror cinema due to German expressionism but, on the other hand, it requires luxurious surfaces and a very delicate and detailed setting ”, comments the filmmaker in a talk with Efe.

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Del Toro’s status in the film industry has allowed him to achieve the impossible in a Hollywood dominated by franchises; having a “sufficient (but nothing extraordinary)” budget and a stellar cast (led by Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett) to shoot a very particular story with impeccable workmanship.

In addition to Cooper and Blanchett, Del Toro has featured an illustrious cast of actors in the film, including Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Tim Blake Nelson and Holt McCallany.

“You can go back to ‘La Confidencial’ or ‘Chinatown’, but you can’t go back to many more films that have this ambition of visual and narrative scope”, admits the Mexican.

“Nightmare Alley”, which opens this Friday in the US and will arrive in other countries during Christmas, tells the ups and downs of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious mentalist with a great talent for deceiving who travels to Chicago willing to empty the pockets of the wealthiest.

The plot adapts the homonymous novel published in 1946 by William Lindsay Greshan, in which its protagonist learns in a circus on the outskirts of the city, full of characters on the social margins, until he decides to march to the capital, where he surrounds himself with a luxury that contains another type of brutality.

There are no fantastic beasts or magical elements like in “The shape of water” (2017) or “Pan’s labyrinth” (2006). The tragedy of “Nightmare Alley” is deeply human.

“There are empathies with my previous films,” says Del Toro. I love the idea of ​​contrasting the imperfect family of the circus with the perfection of the urban world, which is even more brutal. Because the imperfection of the circus is moving, they are people who know that others are imperfect ”.

The plot takes a turn when a “femme fatale” (Blanchett), who works as a psychologist for millionaire clients, offers the mentalist an alliance with which both could earn millions of dollars at the expense of their patients.

From that moment on, a chain of bad decisions leads the protagonist to unsuspected destinations until, in the words of the filmmaker, “he faces the truth of what he is in the last two minutes of the film.”

The truth is that the novel was already adapted to the cinema in 1947 under the direction of Edmund Goulding (“Grand Hotel”), but it resulted in a commercial failure for Fox and fell into oblivion until time recovered it as a classic of the genre. .

“Neither tape covers the novel as a whole. It is a huge universe. It would take six hours and media ”, clarifies the filmmaker.

What both films do coincide in, like any “noir” film, is to present a violent and corrupt society, where all the characters hide their past and are doomed to failure.

“It encompasses demagoguery, the idea that we urgently need to be seen, that they lie to us and tell us what we want to hear. It is a deeply current film in that sense ”, Del Toro concludes, always ready to analyze human behavior in the most unsuspected environments.