Guillermo Del Toro on Crafting ‘Nightmare Alley’ and Its Scary Truth
28.01.2022 - 01:33
/ variety.com
Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentSearchlight’s “Nightmare Alley” takes place mostly in 1939-41, but its sensibility is contemporary. It’s a time-capsule movie: If future generations want to know what life was like in the 21st century, tell them to see this film.“Nightmare,” written by Guillermo Del Toro (who directs) and Kim Morgan, depicts a world of liars and charlatans who manipulate the truth to gain wealth and/or power.
And the general public is surprisingly gullible. As Lilith (Cate Blanchett) says to Stan (Bradley Cooper), “You don’t fool people, Stan, they fool themselves.”Del Toro tells Variety, “We are in a moment of great anxiety, post-discourse, post-truth, almost as if we, as a society, are going through a psychotic episode.
Everybody curates the reality of the world, every piece of information, to fit their own ‘truth. And I mean everybody; this is not about a particular person or party.
This is a moment when we either recuperate or destroy each other.” In the film, Stan tells good-girl Molly (Rooney Mara), “I’m afraid every day of my life.” He also says, “Sometimes you don’t see lines until you cross them.”Del Toro says, “For me, that encapsulates the anxiety that is in the air — the need for a tacit agreement on truth and lies, which has evaporated. That anxiety is the reason we wanted to do the movie.”The plot closely follows William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, which was filmed in a 1947 version starring Tyrone Power.Drifter Stan joins a carnival, whose attractions include mind-reader Zeena, “freaks” like Dogboy and Birdgirl, and a geek, who bites the head off a chicken (“Is he man or is he beast?” the carnival barker exclaims).