#PERSONAL NIGHTMARE CHARACTERS MOVIE#

(Del Toro says that he drew inspiration for Nightmare‘s noirish look, in fact, from midcentury painters such as Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, and George Tooker.) It’s also a sordid, seedy movie that prefers to walk on the darker side of the street, and not even the occasionally dangled promise of a better tomorrow for Carlisle and his lady love can keep a bone-deep sense of pessimism from seeping in.

It’s a film with an A-list cast - which also includes Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, and David Strathairn - a prime awards-season release, and a production design that recreates both 1940s Americana and Art Deco interiors with a painter’s eye. It’s not a spoiler to say things don’t end well. Carlisle’s assistant and romantic interest, a former fellow carny named Molly (Rooney Mara), begs him not to turn their smoke-and-mirrors meal ticket into a “spook show.” Stanton doesn’t listen. He also meets a femme fatale psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett, in jungle-cat mode), who has no qualms about passing on her rich clients’ personal information to him in the name of mutually beneficial scams. It turns out that Stanton has a knack for reading people - not to mention manipulating them with words, wish-fulfillment promises, and the ability to “find out what they fear, then sell that back to them.” Soon, he parlays his talents into a nightclub act and the chance to bilk high-society swells. He slowly learns the tricks of the mentalist trade from an old husband-and-wife team. An adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 cult novel which hits theaters on December 17th, it follows Stanton Carlisle (played by Bradley Cooper), a man on the run who takes up with a traveling carnival. Say what you will about the perverse pleasures of del Toro’s new film, Nightmare Alley: It is definitely not a love song. So, when people ask, ‘Well, what about your new one?’ It was: This is where I was at.” “You know what the flip side of the American dream is, right? It’s a nightmare. And then, it’s like…”ĭel Toro puts his elbows on the table and leans in. I wanted to sing it in a way that was an affirmation of life. When I did The Shape of Water, I wanted to make it a love song. “I’ve jokingly said every movie I make is a biography,” he says. But he was also looking around, seeing a lot of despair and feeling a little broken. Del Toro was in the midst of starting a new chapter of his life. That’s the look he gets when he talks about the last four years, which were marked with love and death, some extreme highs and several subterranean lows. It’s a smile with a shadow lurking over it. The corners of his mouth still point up, but the lips are tight. It’s probably the smile del Toro has when he’s on set it definitely there when he’s gently issuing orders to his postproduction team behind a mixing board (“That thunder needs to go up two decibels on the left, the footsteps down a decibel on the right”) and then everything onscreen suddenly looks and sounds exactly how he imagined it in his head.īut there’s a second del Toro smile that occasionally comes out, one that you’d be tempted to describe as wistful if that didn’t make it seem light.

It’s there when the chef-owner of a Toronto restaurant is telling him about the secret, off-the-menu specials of the evening, or when del Toro remembers catching a rare pre-Code 1930s movie late one night on TV, or when he’s recommending some obscure 19th-century horror author who you just have to read. Spend any time with the Oscar-winning 57-year-old Mexican filmmaker, and you will see that smile many times. The first is the kind of open-mouthed, mid-laugh, teeth-displaying, 100-watt grin you associate with childhood, when your enthusiasm about things is pure and knows no bounds.

Personal nightmare characters