SECOND SIGHT
NIGHTMARE ALLEY, A NOIR THRILLER ABOUT A CLAIRVOYANT CON MAN, REQUIRED DIRECTOR TO RIP UP HIS OWN RULEBOOK. EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, HE WRITES ABOUT HIS PERSONAL FILM YET JOURNEY WITH HIS MOST
Guillermo del Toro
Director Guillermo del Toro with his cast, including (left) Ron Perlman
A ALL MY LIFE I have been obsessed with two genres: horror and crime. I’ve been devout to these dark materials because both, in a strange way, are genres that tend to become parable. They hint at the horror of the dark, but they are very strong chronicles of moral downfall or salvation. When you read a good noir, it has this existential, dire view of human nature, but you can see it is very much emotionally deep and vibrant. The serene, hardboiled voice of those that have lost it all.
I read William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley novel many, many years ago when we were in post-production on my first film, Cronos, because Ron Perlman wanted me to adapt it for him to play Stanton Carlisle, a guy who is looking to something that will anchor him to who he is. He finds a little carnival, and a mentalism system that accurately simulates talking to the dead, or reading minds. He grabs onto that to ascend into what he thinks he wants, which is money and recognition. But the problem with Stan is that what he gets is not what he needs — so he thinks the only way out is the way up, and the higher he climbs, the further he gets from the ground.
Adapting it was not possible back then (we were told that Fox would never sell or release a library title), so that was put on the shelf. I also saw the first movie version, directed by Edmund Goulding in 1947, and liked it, but the novel was a lot more gritty, hallucinatory and Jungian. The film was interested in the crime, the con, the oppressive atmosphere, but the novel seemed to be interested in the symbolic and the cosmic, and in a character study of a man who carried his own enemy within.
Stanton Carlisle stayed with me — and, in fact, I was told that con men would reference him as a code to identify each other should they meet in the middle of a grift and the mark was present. “I’m friends with Stanton Carlisle,” one would say, and the other would nod and acknowledge.