Guest Lecturer: Guillermo del Toro

[School of Movies 2024]

This is an idea for a new kind of show that I've been developing. It just so happens to coincide with a period where my voice has been wrecked from illness and I'm trying to limit talking for long stretches so that my vocal cords can heal up.

I've been pulling together an archive of Director's Commentaries from the various discs that nobody seems to want any more. These represent a window of just over a decade wherein we got to hear what was in the heads of the filmmakers. As we move into the era of the vast majority of movies being watched over streaming, with scant few extras or documentaries on their construction, it is even easier to dismiss the works as 'content'. The general public never much cared for these materials, but if you love movies like we do, the bonus features are troves of creative insight to be uncovered.

However, most commentaries are a little bit dry, or might need the film there viewable for context, or the speaker falls back on saying what they're seeing onscreen, and the bigger issue is who has the time in the 2020s to sit down for two hours with one of these? My way forward is listening to them on my iPod as audiobooks. And what I want to share with you is the focused and collected cream the crop I'm studying. This brings our show closer to what it was always meant to be, Sharon and I learning along with you folks, from the craftspeople of film. And who better to start with than my absolute favourite person in this industry?

Now, I need feedback on this show, which is composed of the most fascinating parts to me from his commentaries on Hellboy (2004) and Cronos (1992). How much do you like this format and who else would you like to hear from? Because my archive is growing towards hundreds of hours worth of precious perspective, and to be the curator of that for you would be a literal honour.