Ivana Baquero stars as Ofelia, a young girl with a vivid imagination who believes in fairy tales and fables, in Guillermo del Toro's fantastical adventure film, Pan's Labyrinth.
Fantasy Life and Guillermo del Toro’s Vision as a Filmmaker: Asked if her fantasies ever look like anything del Toro came up with Baquero said, “Guillermo has this amazing mind and I don’t think mine reaches to his. But I guess, like any kid, I sometimes have my imaginary monsters. I’ve never really created one, but sometimes I do have nightmares and goosebumps about weird Pans and big toads. That kind of stuff.”
Working with Sergi Lopez: Lopez plays an incredibly evil man in Pan’s Labyrinth, but Baquero says Lopez was nothing like his character when the cameras weren’t rolling. “He was totally hilarious. He has nothing to do with the real Vidal. Every time we did a sequence, we’d have to get into our characters and be serious. Like I’d be crying and he’d be like preparing to slap me, fake slap me, and five minutes later, we’d break out laughing and start joking all around again. He’s a really nice person and, as well as Guillermo, he taught me a lot during the whole filming. He was also one of the people who cheered me up and gave me advice during filming.”
Learning from Guillermo del Toro: “He taught me so much stuff. One of the things he did push me to do was keep on reading fairy tales. Before doing Pan’s Labyrinth, I did read but I wasn’t that addicted to it. But Guillermo sent me tons of fairy tale books and movies and I started seeing them. I realized, ‘Why not read them?’ They are very pretty and you can learn from them. I started, afterwards, reading fairy tales. Right now, whenever I can, I grab a book and start reading.”
Interacting with Doug Jones as Pan and The Pale Man: “He’s dressed in a suit and make-up. It takes him four hours of make-up. Of course, he sometimes had green screens but he was basically dressed in a suit with make-up. He’s also great. He’s really outrageous. One of the things that I most appreciate of his work is that, in this movie, all of his dialogue had to be in Spanish. It was hard for him to learn it in Spanish because he had really big chunks of dialogue. That’s something I really did appreciate. He did it, and it was great.”
Asked which creature played by Jones was the scariest to interact with, Baquero responded, “It’s really difficult to say in my situation because, out of four months of filming, I filmed two months with them. I ended up getting really used to it because I ate with Pan and we filmed with Pan, and had rehearsal with Pan. It was like acting with another actor. But, when I saw the movie I think the spookiest one was The Pale Man. But on set I couldn’t tell. He was like another actor.”
Starring in a Very Brutal Film: Baquero says not to equate the brutality of the finished product with how life must have been on the set of the Guillermo del Toro film. “When you see the movie, you get into the movie. The movie is put together. You watch it and hear the music, and you really get into it. You don’t realize that when you are actually filming it, it’s not like that. It’s all hilarious. You do a scene and then Guillermo says ‘cut’ and then we’re doing jokes. You don’t feel it that much. And when we see the movie, we didn’t have any sort of problems because we already knew what was going on when we were filming. In a really brutal scene, we would remember that we were joking around so it wasn’t a problem at all.”
