Nightmare Alley

[The NZA]

Nightmare Alley’: First Look at Guillermo del Toro’s Noir Thriller

The Oscar-winning filmmaker directs Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett in a story of seduction and treachery.

www.vanityfair.com

Del Toro says he first became interested in the project in the early 1990s when his longtime collaborator

Ron Perlman (Cronos, Hellboy, Pacific Rim) brought him the story in the hope they might make it together, but the rights proved to be too difficult to untangle. "So I put it on the back burner," the director says. The yearning to make it remained. "When I was growing up, I wanted for sure to do two genres: noir and horror," he says. Del Toro has directed a lot of the latter, but this was his chance to finally do the former.

"Curiously enough, in approaching Nightmare Alley, I said I'm not going to do any of the clichés associated with the genre. I'm not going to do an artifact. I'm not going to do the Venetian blinds, and voiceover, and detectives walking with fedoras in wet streets. I wanted to do the universe of the novel, which is a little gritty, but also strangely magical. It has a very strange, mystical allure— and mythical. I was very attracted to that possibility."