The Night 'Pan’s Labyrinth' Changed Cannes Forever

Guillermo del Toro and the cast of 'Pan's Labyrinth' at the world premiere of the film in Cannes on May 27, 2006.

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

When Guillermo del Toro arrived in Cannes with Pan’s Labyrinth 20 years ago, he was not expecting a triumph. He was expecting to be ignored.

Del Toro’s dark, ravishing fantasy set in Francoist Spain — which had taken years to finance and produce, endured a brutal production and emerged from post barely in time — was the last film to screen in competition at that year’s festival. “A lot of the press was leaving,” del Toro recalls, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in Cannes, where he returned to present a newly restored 4K version of the movie, as the opening film in the festival’s Cannes Classics selection. “I was thinking: ‘How many people are going to show up for this, on the final day?’ Then the screening was packed,  packed!”

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What followed is now festival legend. The film ended with what del Toro describes as “an explosion of applause that is the largest and most emotional I’ve ever had in my life” — a standing ovation that ran to 23 minutes, a Cannes record that still stands. “Twenty-three minutes is a commute,” del Toro told the audience at the Classics screening on May 12, in the Debussy Theatre. “You know, like the time to go from your office to your house.”

He was not prepared for it. “Normally Cannes is very circumspect,” he said. “You either get no sound or you get aggressive sound. But rarely do people react to the screen loudly, and then they start reacting. And then it gets more and more emotional.” Standing there, receiving the ovation, del Toro found himself unable to take it in. “In spite of my great body, I’m not used to adulation, it’s very hard for me to take in love,” he told the Cannes audience. “But Alfonso Cuarón was there with me, and he said, ‘Let it in. Let the love get in.’ ”

The journey to that moment had been, by del Toro’s account, extraordinarily difficult. “This was the second-worst filmmaking experience of my life,” he said at the screening, “the first one being making Mimic with the Weinsteins.” Preproduction had been a struggle — “nobody wanted to finance it” — and the production itself piled on additional problems. “It was very difficult in preproduction, difficult production, difficult postproduction. Everything.” They arrived at Cannes, he said, “basically just in time with the print.”

The film they brought was something unlike almost anything else in competition that year. Set in 1944 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth follows Ofelia, a young girl living with her pregnant mother and her new husband, a brutal Francoist captain played by Sergi López. In the labyrinthine woods near their military outpost, Ofelia encounters a faun who tells her she is a princess from an enchanted world and gives her three dangerous tasks to complete before she can return to it. Del Toro intertwines her magical quests with the real-world underground struggle of the Spanish Republicans, suggesting — as in much of his work — that imagination is a form of resistance.

Guillermo del Toro and the cast of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ at the world premiere of the film in Cannes on May 27, 2006.

Pascal Le Segretain

Ivana Baquero, who played Ofelia, was at the Debussy Theatre for the Cannes Classics screening.

“Ivana was about 10 or 12 when she made the movie,” Del Toro notes. “She’s now 30. And I was 100 pounds lighter.”

Looking back, he sees the 2006 competition — in which Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy also screened in competition — as a turning point for the festival itself. “Old Boy and Pan’s Labyrinth marked a big shift,” he said. “This is early days at Cannes of changing the mentality of the programming from the 10 or 20 directors that normally came to Cannes.” He noted that he had been to Cannes before, with Cronos in 1992, as had fellow Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu with Amores Perros, “but always in the sidebar sections, not in competition.” Pan’s Labyrinth and Old Boy were the start of Cannes embracing genre-inflected cinema from beyond Europe and the U.S.

The Cannes premiere of Pan’s Labyrinth, and the momentum it generated, set the film on a path that few could have predicted. It screened next at the New York Film Festival, “another v