Personal Life
Guillermo del Toro is married to his high school sweetheart Lorenza Newton, cousin of Mexican singer Guadalupe Pineda. He started dating Lorenza when both were studying at the Guadalajara School of Sciences. He currently lives in Agoura Hills, California with his wife and two daughters, Mariana and Marisa. In addition to the home in which he lives with his family, he owns a separate house exclusively to house his books, poster artwork and other belongings pertaining to his work, explaining, "As a kid, I dreamed of having a house with secret passages and a room where it rained 24 hours a day. The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7."
In a 2007 interview, del Toro described his political position as "a little too liberal". He pointed out that the villains in most of his films, such as the industrialist in Cronos, the Nazis in Hellboy, and the Francoists in Pan's Labyrinth, are united by the common attribute of authoritarianism. "I hate structure. I'm completely anti-structural in terms of believing in institutions. I hate them. I hate any institutionalised social, religious, or economic holding."
In 2009, in an interview with Charlie Rose, del Toro described his Roman Catholic upbringing as excessively "morbid," saying "I mercifully lapsed as a Catholic, I say, but as Buñuel used to say, "I'm an atheist, thank God." Though insisting that he is spiritually "not with Buñuel" and that "once a Catholic, always a Catholic, in a way," he followed by saying, "I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world." He has also responded to the observation that he views his art as his religion by saying, "It is. To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously."
In 2010, del Toro revealed that he was a fan of video games, describing them as "the comic books of our time" and "a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia". However, he has stated that the only games he considers masterpieces are Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.
Del Toro's favorite film monsters are Frankenstein's monster, the Alien, Gill-man, Godzilla, and the Thing. Especially Frankenstein has a special meaning for him, in both film and literature, as he claim he has a "Frankenstein fetish to a degree that is unhealthy", and that it's "the most important book of my life, so you know if I get to it, whenever I get to it, it will be the right way."
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