Guillermo del Toro: ‘The Shape of Water is my first grown-up movie’

Guillermo del Toro views The Shape of Water as his “first adult movie”.

The Mexican-American director and writer is the man behind successful films including Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak and the first two Hellboy films.

His latest offering, The Shape of Water, stars Sally Hawkins as a mute working in a government laboratory who develops feelings for a mysterious amphibious creature. The film has already received rave reviews and won several awards and del Toro feels it stands out from his previous projects with its themes.

“It is in a strange way my first adult movie and in a strange way also my first life-affirming movie,” he told SciFiNow magazine. “All the others have a tinge of nostalgia and loss and they are all centred around paraphrasing my childhood, and with this movie I wanted very much to make it a movie that shows in an incredibly natural and not perverse way that love can take any shape. That love can take many, many forms.”

The star chose to set his movie in 1960s America, explaining he wanted to focus on a period which was cherished, but also “horrible” for those who were a minority at the time.

And it seems del Toro didn’t anticipate the flick, also featuring Octavia Spencer and Michael Shannon, doing so well, as he previously admitted to GQ.com that he always sets himself a “trap to fail”.

“Every movie, I complicate,” he sighed. “I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching Pan's Labyrinth: An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy. This was a thriller-musical-romance between a woman and an amphibian man set in the Cold War. Nothing easy.”

The Shape of Water hits cinemas next month (Dec17).