Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to episode 189 of Awards Chatter, The Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcast.

I'm the host Scott Feinberg and my guest today is one of the most creative and popular

a Mexican-born filmmaker beloved by intellectuals and fanboys alike whose obsession

with monsters has led him to make some of the most highly regarded horror and or

fantasy movies of the last quarter century including 1993 1993's Kronos, 2001's the Devil's Backbone,

2006's Pan's Labyrinth, 2013's Pacific Rim, and most recently 2017's The Shape of Water, which has landed him right in the thick of the

best picture, best director, and best original screenplay Oscar Races, Guillermo del Toro.

But first I sat down on the Upper east side of New York with Annette

Innsdorf, a professor in the graduate film program at Columbia University.

Over the last 30 years she has moderated fascinating conversations at 92nd Street

Y with some of the greatest

film artists of our time. Real Pieces, her current series, is celebrating its 30th

anniversary this year and she has written some of the best books on film that are

out there as well including

Francois Truffaut, Indelible Shadows, Film in the Holocaust,

and Double Lives Second Chances, the cinema of Christoph Kislavsky.

Her latest book from Columbia University Press is Cinematic Overtures, How to Read Opening Scenes.

Professor Insdorf, thanks for joining me.

My pleasure.

What inspired you to write this latest book and what makes for a great opening scene of a movie.

Well, to tell the truth, I have been teaching film first at Yale and then at Columbia

for decades using this particular approach.

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