"I was fortunate to live in a very strange time." Those words offered a key to the cinematic universe of Guadalajara-born filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who was bitten with the movie bug as a young child and took Dick Smith’s Advanced Professional Makeup Course before writing and directing his stylish indie debut film, Cronos, which combined vampirism and alchemy in modern Mexico. Since then, Del Toro has switched between lavish Hollywood spectacles and dark, war-torn fables about children losing their innocence. His more action-oriented films include the apocalyptic chiller Mimic, the martial-arts adventure Blade II, the hard-boiled Hellboy series and the monster vs. robots mashup Pacific Rim, while his more fable-like films include the Spanish Civil War ghost story The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth. Joined  by Academy Museum director Kerry Brougher on October 7, 2015 at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, del Toro shared his thoughts on the magic of fiction, showed dazzling artifacts from his films, and explored the enduring appeal of watching fantastic cinema in a darkened theater.