Guillermo del Toro knows more about movies than most of us could ever learn in our lifetimes. Whenever I’ve seen him speak, or been lucky enough to interview him, I’m endlessly amazed at his ability to go down a deep rabbit hole of knowledge on any subject ranging from Orson Wells to why he loves Hayao Miyazaki. But the thing about del Toro is it’s not just his ability to talk about so many people and films; it’s the way you can feel his sincere passion and boundless enthusiasm as he’s talking, and you know he’s speaking from his heart.

With his new movie, Nightmare Alley, arriving in theaters on December 17th, I recently spoke with del Toro about his top ten film noir inspirations for the film. While I expected to briefly go over the list (which you can read further down the page) and maybe spend a few minutes going in-depth on one or two of the films, del Toro wasn’t having any of that. Instead, he went through the entire list of ten films, sharing why each film was important to him and why each one was special and worth your time. He also revealed why he likes grittier film noirs and shared so many cool facts about the people involved in each film that it would be impossible to list them all here. If you’re a fan of del Toro and want to hear him geeking out about film noirs you are going to love this video.

If you’re not familiar with Nightmare Alley, the film was adapted by del Toro and Kim Morgan from William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name. The novel was previously made into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power, but wasn’t as faithful to the source material. Del Toro’s version stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton “Stan” Carlisle, an ambitious con man who learned his craft working at a seedy traveling carnival. As he gets more successful, he teams up with Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who may be more dangerous than he is. The rest of the all-star cast includes Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, Clifton Collins Jr., Tim Blake Nelson, and Mary Steenburgen.

Del Toro previously spoke with us about how he was first introduced to the book and how his version will not embrace any supernatural elements:

“The book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman before I saw the Tyrone Power movie, and I loved the book. My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily—the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have—in my short films I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real underbelly of society type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”

#GuillermodelToro #NightmareAlley #FilmNoir

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