Pan's Labyrinth
Short description
Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain in 1944, five years after the Civil War, where republican fighters are still resisting the Franco regime in the northern mountains. Ofelia, a young girl fond of fairy tales, travels with her pregnant mother Carmen to a military outpost commanded by her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, a ruthless officer tasked with crushing the resistance. Lonely and unhappy under his control, Ofelia discovers an old labyrinth near the house and encounters a faun, who tells her she is in truth the princess of an underground kingdom and sets her three tasks to prove she belongs there. The fantasy world and the violence of the surrounding conflict increasingly interweave.
Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the film, the sixth of the thirteen features he has directed, following Hellboy and preceding Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Ivana Baquero plays Ofelia, with Sergi López as Vidal, Maribel Verdú as Mercedes, and Doug Jones as the faun and the Pale Man. Alfonso Cuarón and Frida Torresblanco produced alongside del Toro.
Made for about 19 million dollars, the film took roughly 83 million worldwide, a strong return for its budget. On IMDb it holds 8.2 from around 744,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.8 from over 11,000. A critics' rating of 8.9 from 239 reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In 2007, the film became one of the few fantasy films in the entire history of the Academy Awards to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
- Doug Jones was the only American involved on the set and the only one who didn't speak Spanish at all.
- It took actor Doug Jones four hours to get into the Pale Man costume. Jones had to look through the nostrils of his character, as the character's face has no eyes.
- The film was banned in Malaysia for failing censorship due to scenes containing violence.
- At the Cannes Film Festival, the film was awarded 22 minutes of applause.
- After a week of screenings in Mexico, cinemas were forced to add warnings about the film's violence to its posters, so that parents would not allow their young children to attend showings.
- Ivana Baquero, who played the girl, was too old to play her character, originally created as an 8-year-old girl. But Del Toro was so inspired by her performance that he decided to adapt the script for an 11-year-old actress.
- The ruined city shown at the beginning of the film is actually called Belchite. It was also used as a location for Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988). Belchite was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War and has never been rebuilt since.
- In one of his interviews, Guillermo del Toro hinted that, in his conception, both the Pale Man and the Toad are incarnations of the Faun, who guides Ofelia through a series of trials to reveal her moral integrity. A hint to this in the film is that all three fairies appear at the end of the fairy-tale sequence, two of whom had supposedly perished at the hands of the Pale Man.
- Doug Jones had to memorize not only his own lines in Spanish (a language he doesn't speak at all), but also Ophelia's lines, so he would know when to say his next words.
- Guillermo del Toro is known to keep notebooks where he sketches and jots down ideas for future films. Once, he left a notebook containing ideas for "Pan's Labyrinth," which he had been developing for years, in the back of a taxi and thought the project was lost. However, when the driver found the notebook, he immediately realized how important it was to the director and tracked down Guillermo to return the notes. Del Toro considered this a divine blessing.
- The Faun's legs were not created on a computer. Guillermo del Toro's discovery was that the real legs of the actor, removed digitally, were replaced with puppet legs.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
