What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek.

For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.

I'm a lapsed altar boy.

If you give an actor a green screen, the shot may work, but that green screen will not inspire you on the set as a director or as an actor.

I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.

I have a schizophrenic career. I have 'Cronos' and 'The Devil's Backbone' on one hand, and then I have 'Blade 2' and 'Mimic' on the other.

Most of the time - in 'Pan's Labyrinth' or 'Devil's Backbone' - I'm talking about my childhood.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.

I'm having a lot of fun on Twitter, tweeting about books.

I'm fortunate enough that my personal life falls into whack with my professional life. My kids love visiting the sets; they love the monsters.

I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

If you want to know how to handle a crew, it's great to be part of a crew.

I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books - thousands - and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements - the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists - you know, that I consult before I start every movie.

You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft - like 'Alien,' which is almost an outer-space version of 'At The Mountains Of Madness.'

Any actor I admire and enjoy working with - Sergi Lopez as the bad guy in 'Pan's Labyrinth,' or the little girl who played young Mako in 'Pacific Rim,' it makes no difference - I like actors with a very strong centre.

I believe that we will elevate and differentiate the discourse of cinema the more we discuss image creation in specific terms.

I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it's a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.