Guillermo del Toro and Bradley Cooper on the Enduring Appeal of Noir

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of this century. His movies include “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” and “The Shape of Water,” which won four Academy Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and Best Director. He joined David Remnick to talk about his new film, “Nightmare Alley,” along with Bradley Cooper, who plays Stanton Carlisle, a grifter who seems to want to do the right thing but is unable to resist the pull of the con. Based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s first film that isn’t somewhere in the fantasy genre; its dark depiction of American life is grounded in film noir. “We went to the root of it, American existentialism,” del Toro says, citing sources like the novel “The Day of the Locust” and the paintings of Edward Hopper. “It’s a discovery of America reckoning with its own ideals and its reality,” and a sense of tragic fate. “We knew that we needed to create not an up-and-down structure but a very steady, inexorable ramp.” The film, which was released in theatres in December, during the surge of the Omicron variant, begins streaming February 1st.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.5	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of our time.
0:17.5	His movies include Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and the Shape of Water, which won four Academy
0:22.5	Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Nightmare Alley is Del Toro's first film that isn't
0:28.8	somewhere in the fantasy genre. There's no magic, no monsters, although some of what happens has got
0:34.2	to be described as monstrous. The movie is based on a crime novel from
0:39.1	1946 by a writer, not terribly well known, named William Lindsay Gresham. Bradley Cooper plays a
0:46.6	grifter who gets a job at a carnival, and there he learns the secrets of how a mentalist
0:52.9	deceives an audience.
0:54.6	And he tries to parlay those tricks into a bigger and much more dangerous swindle.
1:00.2	Nightmare Alley begins streaming next week, and I spoke with Bradley Cooper, who was also a producer
1:05.0	of the film and the director, Guillermo del Toro.
1:09.2	Guillermo, this film is based on a novel from the 40s, and I wonder what led you to this story.
1:15.7	You have all the source material and all the stories in the world that you could choose from.
1:19.2	Why this?
1:20.8	Well, I think what attracted me is that it reflects where we are in terms of truths and lies and the erasure of that barrier,
1:30.2	the sort of charlatans that we see rising in a populist discourse that we want to hear,
1:38.0	and also the reality of this character, this character that is on the verge of losing everything in two seconds,
1:46.8	these are things that I feel in the air and anxiety that I think is very now.
1:54.3	And I know this guy, I understand this guy, and I felt his downfall and his revelation happened at the same time
2:05.8	towards the end of his journey in a very brutal way, and I like that.
	...

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