Toronto: Day 7 -- When directors go around the bend

Yesterday I had a chance to talk with Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican-born director of "Pan's Labyrinth," which is getting some of the best word of mouth at the festival. Del Toro is a rotund, affable madman whose films mix fantasy and harsh realism in ways that feel brand new, and "Labyrinth," which is set in post-Civil War Spain and concerns the Alice-in-Wonderland fantasies of a young girl (the remarkable Ivana Baquero) pushes his gifts to new heights. It's bloody, and bloody good. "When I begin a film, I look for the most insane idea I can find," del Toro told me, showing me an astonishingly beautiful pre-production diary filled with his hand-colored drawings.

Meanwhile, Darren Aronofsky was deflecting the bad word-of-mouth surrounding "The Fountain" (see below) by impressing upon interviewers that he made exactly the movie he wanted to, and if it's a little bizarre, it's up to us to come to it. That sounds pretentious, but in person Aronofsky's agreeable and low-key and his feeling is that his movies take time to find their audience. "When I made 'Pi," no one knew what to do with a movie about math and psychology," he told me, "and when I made 'Requiem for a Dream," I was asked, 'Why make a drug movie?'" Interesting and very un-Hollywood: The man's in it for the long haul. That said, "The Fountain" will probably still be a baroque, fairly indigestible work years from now. But if not for good directors pushing into artistically risky areas, the multiplex would be a much duller place.