When Guillermo del Toro arrived in Cannes with Pan’s Labyrinth 20 years ago, he was not expecting a triumph. He was expecting to be ignored.
Del Toro’s dark, ravishing fantasy set in Francoist Spain — which had taken years to finance and produce, endured a brutal production and emerged from post barely in time — was the last film to screen in competition at that year’s festival. “A lot of the press was leaving,” del Toro recalls, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in Cannes, where he returned to present a newly restored 4K version of the movie, as the opening film in the festival’s Cannes Classics selection. “I was thinking: ‘How many people are going to show up for this, on the final day?’ Then the screening was packed, packed!”
What followed is now festival legend. The film ended with what del Toro describes as “an explosion of applause that is the largest and most emotional I’ve ever had in my life” — a standing ovation that ran to 23 minutes, a Cannes record that still stands. “Twenty-three minutes is a commute,” del Toro told the audience at the Classics screening on May 12, in the Debussy Theatre. “You know, like the time to go from your office to your house.”
He was not prepared for it. “Normally Cannes is very circumspect,” he said. “You either get no sound or you get aggressive sound. But rarely do people react to the screen loudly, and then they start reacting. And then it gets more and more emotional.” Standing there, receiving the ovation, del Toro found himself unable to take it in. “In spite of my great body, I’m not used to adulation, it’s very hard for me to take in love,” he told the Cannes audience. “But Alfonso Cuarón was there with me, and he said, ‘Let it in. Let the love get in.’ ”
