>> Cover Story: 

Uprisings and
underworlds

>> Fantasy veteran Doug Jones and 12-year-old actress Ivana Baquero on their parts inGuillermo del Toro’s amazing epic  of fairies,fauns, monsters and war, Pan’s Labyrinth

EYES WHITHOUT A FACE: Jones as the Pale Man

Doug Jones apologizes for his hoarseness. “I’ve been yelling over crowds of people and loud music for the last two days,” he explains. It’s Monday, January 15,the day of the Golden Globes. Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth—in which Jones, who you may have seen before playing aliens, imps, robots and octopi in a variety of fantasy films, plays the enigmatic faun of the title and a faceless monster called the Pale Man—is nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
“That’s given some attention to this little Spanish movie but good!”
he says (Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima would take the
prize). “It’s been such a fun ride. I was the only American actor in the
movie, but of course I knew that with Guillermo del Toro being at the helm, and after reading the script and knowing what kind of story we were telling, that it was going to be a very special piece of
art. But I had no idea that it was going to have this amount of critical
acclaim, this many awards, be on this many Top 10 lists from critics
across the nation.”

As the rebel fighting around them intensifies, Ofelia begins to escape into what may or may not be a fantasy world. Following a praying mantis that’s quite possibly a fairy, she enters a decrepit old
labyrinth by the house and descends into a pit where she meets Jones’s faun—the titular Pan. He tells her that she’s actually the incarnation of an underworld princess who’d wandered out of her
kingdom years before, and that to return to her home, she needs to complete a series of trials to prove that her spirit is still whole.

Those trials take her into otherworldly environments like a muddy, mutant-bug-infested world beneath an ancient tree, where she confronts a giant frog, and a creepy chamber where she’s pursued by the frightening, child-eating Pale Man, an adult drama playing out all the while.

The 12-year-old Baquero more than holds her own against the seasoned actors around her. “It was Guillermo who basically instructed
me on what was going on,” she says of the film’s period context. “He told me that during wars—and I already knew this—that kids end
up suffering the most because they’re the weakest and the most
innocent. And that’s one of the things that the movie also wants to
teach, that you should still believe in fantasy because it really touches
your life.”

“It taps into people’s childhoods,” Jones says. “For me, personally, what resounded was how Ofelia deals with the monsters in her life, and the choices that she makes when given an out from those monsters. ‘Here’s the world that you can retreat to, and that you really belong in,’ she’s informed by this Pan character, played by me. So we see what choices she makes along the way to pass these tests, and the repercussions from the decisions she makes, both good and bad. We all have to deal with that every day,the choice-making thing, and ridding ourselves of the monsters from our childhood, whether it’s an evil stepfather, or our own insecurities that rear their ugly heads.”

Shooting amid del Toro’s beloved prosthetics and lavish effects didn’t
seem to bother Baquero much. “When I had to do a green screen,
the special effects people or Guillermo would tell me where the little fairy was, or anything that wasn’t actually there. And it turned out to be really, really funny, more than difficult. And when I was filming with all these creatures that were physically there, it was really funny too. Also, being able to work with Doug Jones— he’s a great person.”

It might have been a bit harder for Jones, although he’s used to it. “Oh my gosh,” he says. “It took me
five hours to get into my faun character, and also five hours for the Pale Man. Trying to emote something through layers of make-up that are glued to your face—your first natural instinct is to hold still and let it be a pretty picture. When in actuality you have to think like an athlete, and move a bit more to make that many layers and that much costuming and mechanics and everything come alive.”

Pan’s Labyrinth maintains what seems to be a deliberate ambiguity about just how real Ofelia’s fantasy world is. “Golly, now that more people are seeing the film, that question comes up more than I thought it would,” Jones says. “It’s left open at the end whether this underworld is real or not. I can’t say what
the intention was because Guillermo doesn’t really even tell you! But
if you were to ask him, he might lean more towards it being in her
imagination.” But, he says, “You see elements that make you think
you’re imagining all of this, and you see elements that are like—if
she was imagining this, where did that come from?”

“I spoke to Guillermo about Ofelia, and lots of aspects that I didn’t
understand about her, because she’s a really complex character,”
Baquero says. “We talked about how Ofelia doesn’t imagine the
world, that she’s really living it, and that she creates this world not
to escape from the war, but to make her mother happy again and make
the world happy again, and stop the war in general. But I think that
one of the pretty aspects of the movie is that you can choose
whether you want to believe these fairy tales or not.” ■

>> Movie Listings