“A Rare and Special Cinema Artist”: Guillermo del Toro Honored at MoMA’s Film Gala

Guillermo del Toro was already having a pretty great fall. Reviews of his reinvention of Pinocchio have been coming in, and The Guardian gave the film five stars, praising del Toro’s “monstrous cinematic skills.” This week, Taylor Swift, herself a budding director, remarked that if she could switch places with anyone in Hollywood for one day, it would be del Toro. “Imagine having that imagination, that visual vocabulary, and that astonishing body of work,” Swift said in a Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter. And then, on Thursday, the Museum of Modern Art honored del Toro at its annual film benefit, sponsored by Chanel, with a blowout bash in the museum’s grand atrium, where one movie star after another sang his praises. 

“Although Taylor Swift did just say that she wants to Freaky Friday body-swap with you,” Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s chief curator of film, said to del Toro in the middle of the formal dinner, “For further confirmation of your amazingness, let’s turn, of course, to your collaborators.”

First up was Richard Jenkins, who recalled receiving, as a 69-year-old career-long character actor, a script from the maestro and an offer for a starring role in The Shape of Water. 

“And I thought to myself, Is this an answered prayer?” Jenkins said. 

The gig got him an Oscar nomination and led to a role in del Toro’s next movie, Nightmare Alley. As the applause scattered, Jenkins said, “Now somebody really interesting is going to talk—here’s a video by the great Cate Blanchett.”

“You are a rare and special cinema artist and it’s a privilege to know you,” Blanchett said from Australia, where she’s on set. “So the honor is in fact all ours.”

Next up was Tim Blake Nelson, who recalled meeting del Toro at the Venice Film Festival while picking up an award for the absent Joel and Ethan Coen, as one does. Nelson called del Toro “perhaps the most optimistically generous lover of life I have ever encountered.” 

“To work with him, to break bread with him, to listen to him, to be heard by him, simply makes you better, because you always part knowing how profoundly lucky you are to be alive at the same time he is,” Nelson said. 

And then Jessica Chastain took the stage and compared del Toro’s directing methods to Terrence Malick’s, whom she said she’s close enough to call “T. Mally.” She referred specifically to a scene she and del Toro were shooting for Crimson Peak when she had to slam a cast-iron skillet—“Which are way heavier than they look by the way,” Chastain informed the crowd—down in front of her costar Mia Wasikowska. It was super late at night and they went take after take, as del Toro just wasn’t feeling it. Then, around 2 a.m., del Toro told Chastain to fill herself up with as much loathing and hatred as possible and “just see what happens.”