NO HOLDS BARRED: Director Guillermo del Toro at the Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark premiere during the Los Angeles Film Festival; AMBITIOUS: Ashley Benson and  PUTTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: Maggie Gyllenhaal

By Mary Milliken

 

 

Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro doesn’t seem to be holding much back in his often terrifying and visually arresting movies, and yet, he says television today allows him even more freedom to create.

The director behind blockbuster Pacific Rim and dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth premiered his new TV thriller series The Strain, based on a trilogy of books he co-wrote, on the FX cable channel last week.

The Strain chronicles the vampirisation of society through a viral outbreak and the battle by Dr Ephraim Goodweather (played by Corey Stoll of House of Cards) as the New York City public health official trying to stop its spread. Del Toro, 49, talked about his fondness for television, anatomically correct gore and infusing love in tales of horror.

 

Why did you make the move to TV?

I became very enamoured of the long-form narrative of TV and really loved the fact that you can develop notions and characters over a long period of time. In the case of something literary like Deadwood or The Wire, it feels like you are reading a piece of literature.

You have the chance to explore ideas that ... don’t open and close in the space of two or three hours, like they do in a movie. And that is a unique luxury. The content also came from the fact that we have changed the way we consume stories on TV. So now an audience has a relationship with a drama that can last several years.

 

Did FX put any restrictions on you?

Noooo (laughs). I wish I had a great story to tell, but the reality was the opposite. The week before I started shooting I got a unique phone call in my career from John Landgraf (president of FX Networks) and he said ... “You can be as off-kilter as you want.” I certainly tried some things in the pilot that were edgy and it all went beautifully.

I wanted the idea that you can use these vampires and creatures and that you can use love; love as a guiding force that they remember and that guides them back to destroy the family. That is a concept I was very fond of in the book and that I really was afraid of losing. I wanted to make very clear these were not young, sparkling, beautiful vampires, but parasitic entities that are no-nonsense about the way they absorb and transform their victims.

How far did you feel you could go in the gore department?

I tried to do a very forensic approach. I didn’t want to make it cinematically cool. I wanted to make it very visceral and almost down to earth. I wanted to make it anatomically correct.

(In the killing of the first victim) what you see is a very systematic destruction of the human head, and I really wanted to make that element very medically real, but not gory in the sense of pictorial splashes of blood. I didn’t want to make it cool violence, I wanted to make it effecting.

 

We know about your childhood love of vampires, but were you also fascinated by medicine?

My parents had two encyclopedias in the library, one was an encyclopedia of art and the other was medical, volumes of family medicine with anatomical charts, and I remain to this day incredibly anatomically curious.

 

What does the lead character Ephraim represent to you?

I wanted the hero to be a very flawed hero, heroic in ways that are not just testosterone-fuelled, gun-toting ways you expect from a hero in a genre movie. He (Stoll) is really good at playing flawed characters that for some reason you find irresistible.

 

Is the second season a done deal?

Not yet. But we have a very spotless record in the way we have managed the series. FX is very pleased that I remained involved throughout. If we succeed, we start as a procedural genre piece that is going to get progressively idiosyncratic and with every passing season we can go to places a normal vampire tale never goes. – Reuters

 

 

Ashley Benson wants to
work with Tarantino, Allen

 

Actress Ashley Benson wants to make more movies and would love to work with names like Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino. The Pretty Little Liars star would love to make more films, and has a wish-list of directors whose projects she wants to be involved in, reports contactmusic.com. “I’ve always wanted to work with Woody Allen — I’m a huge fan of his, I love all his movies. And Darren Aronofsky and Quentin Tarantino — he’s pretty awesome and I want to be one of his badass characters,” she said. The 24-year-old would love to win an Oscar one day but admitted she would just settle for attending the prestigious awards ceremony, which celebrates excellence in film. Asked if she wants to win an Oscar, she told Company magazine: “Oh, man, I mean, yeah, that would be awesome, but you never know. Even just to attend the Oscars and see everybody would be pretty cool.”

 

Gyllenhaal forced
to read about herself

 

The Dark Knight star Maggie Gyllenhaal has admitted she often gets tempted to read stories about herself. She hopes to find some compliments, but only ends up feeling worse, reports contactmusic.com. “I try not to but sometimes I fall into the black hole. That’s probably the truth. I try not to read anything but sometimes I just get pulled in. It’s always when I’m looking for love and that’s not where love comes from,” she told Stylist magazine.

The 36-year-old actress takes to the social networking site Twitter to set the record straight after feeling misunderstood in interviews and takes pride in it. “I like Twitter because I sometimes feel very misunderstood by the press. You give an interview and someone will write something and you think, ‘What? How did they take this away from what we spoke about?’ So Twitter is the way to put things straight,” she explained. — IANS