Mexican director Guillermo del Toro was honored Tuesday with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, where he urged fellow immigrants to reject fear and division in the US.
The double Oscar-winning filmmaker, 54, is known for creating surreal worlds filled with fantastical monsters in movies such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.
Speaking in the aftermath of the El Paso mass shootings, he told the crowd that “great fear” was being used to divide people, but “those divisions are complete fantasies.”
“When people say, ‘You dwell in fantasy,’ I say, ‘I don’t. Politicians do, churches do, I don’t. I deal with facts of the soul and the stories.’”
Del Toro left Mexico in 1998 after his father was kidnapped for a $1 million ransom that he only managed to pay with the help of fellow director James Cameron.
He is now known as one of the “three amigos” of Mexican film along with fellow Oscar-winning directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Birdman, The Revenant”) and Alfonso Cuaron(Gravity).
He told the crowd how searching Tinseltown’s sidewalk in the 1970s for the stars of horror legends Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, and Alfred Hitchcock had inspired him in creating his famed horror universes.