Inside Guillermo Del Toro’s sketchbooks

“I like to say that we only make one movie in our lifetime,” says Guillermo del Toro, “a movie made of all the images of all our movies.” In Del Toro’s case, that movie is a never-ending box set of monsters, contraptions and beautiful, dark, twisted fantasies.
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But as his new book Cabinet Of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, And Other Obsessions shows, the Mexican maestro’s movie spills way beyond the screen.
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For one thing, the book gives us a guided tour of his home, a prop-filled fanboy funhouse that looks like something out of one of his moviesBut the meat of the book is culled from the notebooks Del Toro has been creating since his movie career began.
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The pages look a little like Leonardo da Vinci’s: fevered compositions of precise illustration and barely decipherable text, which testify both to Del Toro’s considerable drawing skills and his singular imagination.
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Some ideas for one film end up getting used in another. Some pages are instructions for make-up artists, others are just Del Toro working out what looks cool and scary.
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Del Toro calls them his own personal “mail order catalog of ideas”, but he also wants them to inspire other fledgling fantasy film-makers.
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Most of them would sell their souls for 
a talent like Del Toro’s. He can probably arrange it. Photograph: Titan Books

Cabinet Of Curiosities (Titan Books) is available now Photograph: Titan Books