David: Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of our time. His movies include Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and The Shape of Water, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Nightmare Alley is del Toro's first film that isn't somewhere in the fantasy genre. There's no magic, no monsters, although some of what happens has got to be described as monstrous.

The movie is based on a crime novel from 1946 by a writer not terribly well known, named William Lindsay Gresham. Bradley Cooper plays a grifter who gets a job at a carnival. There he learns the secrets of how a mentalist deceives an audience, and he tries to parlay those tricks into a bigger and much more dangerous swindle. Nightmare Alley begins streaming next week. I spoke with Bradley Cooper, who is also a producer of the film, and the director, Guillermo del Toro. Guillermo, this film is based on a novel from the '40s. I wonder what led you to this story, you have all the source material, and all the stories in the world that you could choose from, why this?

Guillermo: Well, I think what attracted me is that it reflects where we are in terms of truth and lies, and the erasure of that barrier, the sort of charlatans that we see rising, and the populist discourse that we want to hear, and also the reality of this character that is on the verge of losing everything in two seconds. These are the things that I feel in the air, an anxiety that I think is very now, and I know this guy, I understand this guy, and I felt his downfall and his revelation happen at the same time towards the end of his journey in a very brutal way, and I liked that. I liked the idea of this character discovering truth that liberates him as he falls down.

David: I think what you're saying in a maybe guarded way or veiled way is in to some degree that Bradley Cooper, in the guise of Stanton Carlisle, is playing Donald Trump in some way, that was an inspiration for you.

Guillermo: [laughs] No, not really. It goes beyond politics for me. What I think is one part of Stanton Carlisle is alive in all of us, and latent and alive right now. I think that it's a character that we can identify in every sphere of our lives, intimate, and it can be as simple as you're courting likes and dislikes and followers on social media, or it can be a spiritual thing you're going through. There is the charlatanism, and what they call [unintelligible 00:02:54] in mentalism, which means you believe the lies you tell, are very much alive right now, and the way we curate our sources to only confirm our bias, basically, it's a very strange moment in human communication.

[carnival sounds]

David: The first half of the film is set in a carnival, it's an incredibly vivid portrayal of the carnival world, and tent shows, and freak shows, and rides and mirrors, and all those things that probably a present generation of Americans has not seen in its most elemental form, that I barely remember from childhood, is local tent shows that I was witness to. It sounds like this was a very vivid part of your growing up, that you had some access to this kind of movies?

Guillermo: Yes, in fact, the Spider Woman that appears in the movie is taken verbatim from the speech I heard when I was about six or so, even younger. I have the photograph of the day we went to see the Spider Woman.

Spider Woman: I was turned into this sorrowful shape, for I disobeyed my parents.

David: Well, tell me about the carnivals of your youth. What did they look like? What did they feel like? Who were they for?

Guillermo: Well, they were almost exactly what you see on the screen. [chuckles] They had this mixture of grime and stained wonder. They were really frayed wonder. They felt like that as a kid, I sensed their tragedy, and their pain, and behind the lights, and the colors. I was always a very observing kid, and I could see the tragedy on the painted faces, or the barking, the attractions, and the wonders that you're about to witness.

Speaker 1: Remember that this exhibit is being presented solely in the interests of science and education. Where did it come from? Is it a beast, or is it a man? come on in. Come on in, and find out.

Guillermo: I thought it was important to have Stan from a place that was very honest about being dishonest, but also very human in the textures to the city. He goes from one place that was horribly alive in a way, very imperfectly alive, to a place that is taxidermy of humanity, [chuckles] which is the city. In that journey, have him change and acquire everything that he would have hoped for on the beginning of the film, and it's not enough.

David: In an early scene, Stanton is looking in a storm after dark for the Geek, this poor deranged man who's exploited by the carnival owner. He's escaped, and Stanton finds him hiding out in a carnival tent.

Stanton: I'll let you in.

Guillermo: Yes. The beauty of this moment, and this was very deliberate, this is the first time Stanton speaks in the whole movie. The first time he utters his words, he's in complete shadow. We don't see his face against the beating heart of a red tent in the background, in an interior of the funhouse, where rain permeates the tarp, and it's raining inside. In that funhouse, the whole journey of the movie is a microcosmos, you see everything he's going to go through, the mirrors, the sins, because he's dedicated, it's called the House of damnation. He's having a moment with the geek, which is a dark mirror of himself in a strange way. He's saying clearly to the audience, because it's his first day in the carnival, and he has been given orders, "You've got to blow the whistle, call everybody," and he's saying, "Look, I'm not going to obey."

Stanton: Hey, everybody's looking for you. I'm not going to blow the whistle, you didn't do nothing against me. Let's come on out. Come on. I'm not going to hurt you.

Guillermo: The funhouse is, at the same time, very real to what you could find in the late '30s or early '40s. At the same time, incredibly beautiful, and almost symbolic of the journey. The first couple of things that are repeated through the movie, mirrors, circles, and eyes looking at Stanton, which will happen over and over and over and over again, are first ciphered in this scene.

David: This film has often been compared to and put in the category of film noir, but it's not one of the venetian blinds, and trench coats, and things like that. There is no Fredrick Murray vibe going on.

Guillermo: No, we went to the root of it, and that is really American existentialism. It's that period in which you start having literature that debunks the American dream in the clash of industrial and urban living, and you have things like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? or Miss Lonelyhearts, or The Day of the Locust, and these novels fit perfectly in that period. In the painting you have Donna Thomas [unintelligible 00:08:23], Grant Wood, it's a discovery of America reckoning with its own ideals, and its own reality. Edward Hopper, you name it.

I think it's important to say this, because you mentioned something that people associate it with noir, and I love noir, which is even grander than that because it's the inexorability of that ending. It's inexorable. You know it's calming, and the way he advances towards it without revealing the ending, we knew that we needed to create not an ups-and-downs structure, but a very steady, inexorable ramp of a movie that ended up and was a prologue to the last couple of minutes of the film, which are a close up that reveals a whole world.

David: I'm glad you say that, because, over the course of the film, there are moments when Stanton seems to have some goodness in him, to have an escape route to happiness, and yet, he can't seem to take this off-ramp toward goodness. Let's play a clip here of when Stanton first goes to visit his antagonist, a psychiatrist, Lilith Ritter, who's played by Cate Blanchett.

Lilith Ritter: Is that why you're here? To look at me?

Stanton: No, I'm just thinking that if you helped me, we could make quite a big dent in this town.

Lilith Ritter: We?

Stanton: Yes. You give me [unintelligible 00:09:49] and any of the other higher-ups, I'll make it worth your while.

Lilith Ritter: You think you have something big enough or interesting enough for me?

Stanton: Nothing matters in this god-damned world but [unintelligible 00:09:59]

Lilith Ritter: All right. I'll give you something in exchange for the truth.

Stanton: Truth about what?

Lilith Ritter: Yourself. I give you a little information, and you tell me the truth.

David: I hear the sound of somebody getting set up in a film noir here. Bradley, tell me about that scene.

Bradley Cooper: We learned as an audience member, prior to that scene, as he's going up the elevator, that he's rehearsing something, and he's saying, "You and I can make a pretty big dent in this town." We watched him rehearse it five times by himself in a private moment in the elevator.

Stanton: I was thinking you and I can make a dent in this town. You and I can make a pretty big dent in this town. I was thinking you and I can make a pretty big dent in this town.

[elevator dings]

Bradley Cooper: Which really clues us into what is his objective to visit this psychiatrist that he has just one-upped the night prior at the [unintelligible 00:11:07] show when she tried to reveal his grift to the audience. Instead of him trying to take her down, we realize like, "Oh, he wants now to use her and take another bite of a bigger apple here in Buffalo, of the rich people and grift them." You're catching somebody in the flame of their-- I wouldn't say addiction, not addiction, but their running away from who they are, or desperately trying to fill the hole which cannot be filled in a joyless way.

He's not in the elevator like, "Oh, I'm going to do this. I'm about to have my big audition." It's like all those things are gone. They're all gone. We're watching a man who's-- and that's what breaks my heart as a viewer, and I think that's part of why I think the audience can connect with Stan because there is a human sadness. There's a quality of him being in a-- it saddens me. He's vulnerable.

David: One thing that film Noir always has is a visual feel, whether it's shadows or blinds, whatever it is in here, unless I'm crazy, throughout the entire film, or almost all of it, it's always raining, it's always snowing.

Bradley Cooper: Yes.

David: That heavy weather is always around. When you're conceiving a film, how much of the conception of a film is beyond story, but is rather those atmospheric or visual themes?

Guillermo: I must tell you the visual aspect of this film was solid since pre-production, all the way to post-production. It was really gelled in my mind early, early on. We knew that we were going to light it-- the cinematographer and I called it a black and white film in color. We had the contrast ratio of expressionist film. We had the contrast ratio of a classical movie. It's so achingly beautiful that it allows almost the degree of metaphor to what is otherwise an incredibly realistic emotional journey.

David: Wasn't it a temptation to do it in black and white? In fact, I think I heard that you were going to show it in black and white.

Guillermo: We are showing it. We are launching the black and white roadshow, so to speak. We're expanding to hundreds of theaters in America. Because what I love is this, you have the moral weight and a greediness on black and white that Bradley and I love and recognize in films like The Elephant Man. In the color, you have a very complete, almost bewitching, seductive universe that keeps going forward. There are two different experiences.

David: Now, everything has been hit by the pandemic, every realm of life, but you had to suspend work for half a year, right?

Guillermo: Six months.

David: You started filming, and then suspended work. What did you do for six months, Bradley?

Bradley Cooper: Well, it wound up being a wonderfully fruitful time for Nightmare Alley, we all got together, and we worked on-- We shot the second half of the film first, and we got to work on it and learned and discovered so much that we could then explore in the first half of the film that would pay off. The other truth is, as it affected everybody, post-pandemic, a lot of people, we just were different people, and that I think really impacted everything we did.

David: How do you feel you're a different person after the pandemic?

Bradley Cooper: I think it reaffirmed things that I may have known were important cerebrally and it brought it down to an emotional sense of knowledge, I would say, if I were going to boil it down to one element.

Guillermo: I think there was grace and humility, if you want. These are words that are easily said, but they're very deeply experienced. It also made us, our pores opened to a condition that was very much the condition the movie demanded. We were blessed to shoot the colder part of the movie, the more elegant and velvety part of the movie first, and then made permeable by this experience. An approach to the carnival, which was completely a different beast. It's almost like two films joined together by the experience of Stan.

Bradley Cooper: Guillermo, remember we talked about, we said, "Well, we could release 30 minutes of the movie."

[laughter]

Guillermo: Which we're like, "Oh my God, this was getting to be so good." Then we said, "We should even, if the [unintelligible 00:15:57] would have it, let's release what we have." Because we loved it so much.

David: Now, the film business has been hit by COVID in a very tough way. This film was released in the midst of an Omicron surge, and many films don't benefit all that much by the difference between a small screen and a large screen. I have to think this is one that does. Does it cause you great pain that a lot of people will possibly miss it on a large screen and watch it on a laptop?

Guillermo: Look, I really believe that one of the great blessings was that we released the black and white when we released it, so a lot of people are able to continue experiencing the film, even if it's in color on HBO, they'll experience a black and white on the big screen. We've been going to the Q&As for this roadshow that we have. It's so beautiful to see the theaters packed, and we started with just a handful of cities, and now we're going to be in hundreds of theaters.

That's really a journey that is worth it. I find the ultimate journey of the film is experienced better on the big screen, but is so commanding in the way that we are ambitious about theme, we're ambitious about reality and humanity, and then also on the scope of the cinematic experience, and that will translate no matter what.

David: Guillermo del Toro and Bradley Cooper, thank you so much.

Bradley Cooper: It's a pleasure.

Guillermo: Thank you, David.

[music]

David: Guillermo del Toro directed Nightmare Alley, as well as writing the screenplay, and Bradley Cooper is one of the stars. The film begins streaming next week on Hulu and HBO Max.

[music]

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