Separate Visions, Shared Passion

Filmmakers Cuaron, Del Toro Keep Each Other Going. Honestly.

Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Del Toro are chatting, as they usually do, over the phone, reminiscing about their friendship of 20-plus years.

Since starting out in Mexican television, their lives and careers have intertwined uncannily through the years, from their auspicious debuts (Cuarón's "Love in the Time of Hysteria" and Del Toro's "Cronos") through their biggest hits (Cuarón's "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"; Del Toro's "Blade II").

And now, with their usual perfect symmetry, Cuarón -- 45, handsome, soft spoken -- and Del Toro -- 42, generously built, voluble, with a Puckish gleam in the blue eyes peering from behind owlish glasses -- have nearly simultaneously delivered two of the most powerful, assured, inventive and exhilarating movies of the year.

In "Children of Men," Cuarón re-imagines a futuristic P.D. James novel as an eerily resonant portrait of dystopian contemporary global politics. The thriller, starring Clive Owen, unfolds as a classic chase movie while slyly subverting the genre, and contains some of the bravura camera work and production design that makes names like Welles and Kubrick leap to mind.

With "Pan's Labyrinth," Del Toro has made a film that integrates two of his life-long fascinations: monsters and the Spanish Civil War. A richly textured parable about a young girl who resists her Fascist stepfather by retreating into an often frightening fantasy life, "Pan's Labyrinth" is a lyrical, Gothic, ultimately deeply moving defense of the artistic imagination, a dreamscape populated by a faun, an enormous toad and a fairylike dragonfly, among several other surreal creatures.

Although in many ways "Pan's Labyrinth" couldn't be further from "Children of Men," both films share an adamantly humanistic sensibility, distrust of ideology, uncompromising vision and a breathtaking use of cinematic grammar. Neither film could be described as a "feel good" movie, but to anyone who cares deeply about cinema at its most fully realized and vital, that's precisely what they are.

"What is scary is that most of the time we're going through the same things," says Del Toro in a Washington hotel room. He's dressed entirely in black, his ever-present leather-bound journal, full of crabbed notes and fantastical sketches, at his side. "Personally, with our families, as guys or creatively. It's like two girls on the phone with one saying, 'I just bought these shoes' and the other girl saying, 'Oh, I just bought them, too!' " (Cuarón and Del Toro are both married; Cuarón has three children, Del Toro two.)

But sometimes those shoes can pinch, and even two promising careers can go into slumps -- simultaneously, of course. In 1998 Del Toro, fresh from the unpleasant experience (read: studio interference) of directing "Mimic," called Cuarón, who was in New York after making an un-great adaptation of "Great Expectations."

"I called him and said, 'So we both made giant insect movies!' " Del Toro says mischievously. ("Mimic" was indeed about mutant cockroaches, but it's less clear what Del Toro is getting at with "Great Expectations" -- Anne Bancroft's makeup, perhaps, or just the ant farm of modern-day aristos inspired by Jane Austen's novel.)

Cuarón, who was in town a week earlier (there's that symmetry again), has joined the conversation by phone from Seattle. At the "giant insects" line he bursts into a hearty chuckle. Then he turns reflective. "I tell you, the only time we drifted apart was the time we both drifted creatively," he tells Del Toro.

"The only time we drifted apart from ourselves, actually," Del Toro adds. "I remember that conversation so vividly. That's when I told you, 'Listen, we just ate a whole box of cereal. Now let's get the prize.' Remember?"

Cuarón: "I remember, yes. We were coming to the same conclusions about how we were losing contact with ourselves and we were trying to reconnect with the reason we loved cinema in the first place."