“I thank you. My monsters thank you.”
Nabbing his very first Golden Globe for Best Director last night, Guillermo del Toro was put in a pretty unenviable position: he had to directly follow Oprah Winfrey, who had just delivered a rousing speech on the current state of Hollywood and society at large. Choking back his own tears, Del Toro himself made us cry some more with his speech.
“Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters,” Del Toro began his acceptance speech for the trophy, of course given to him for last year’s The Shape of Water. “I have been saved and absolved by them. Monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection.”
He continued, “For 25 years, I have hand-crafted very strange little tales… in three precise instances, these strange stories have saved my life – once with The Devil’s Backbone, once with Pan’s Labyrinth, and now with The Shape of Water. As directors, these things are not just entries in a filmography. We have made a deal with a particularly inefficient devil, that trades three years of our life for one entry on IMDb. And these things are biography. And they are life.”
“Somewhere, Lon Chaney is smiling on all of us,” he ended the speech.
The Shape of Water also took home the Best Original Score for a Motion Picture trophy.