Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of this century. His movies include “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” and “The Shape of Water,” which won four Academy Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and Best Director. He joined David Remnick to talk about his new film, “Nightmare Alley,” along with Bradley Cooper, who plays Stanton Carlisle, a grifter who seems to want to do the right thing but is unable to resist the pull of the con. Based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s first film that isn’t somewhere in the fantasy genre; its dark depiction of American life is grounded in film noir. “We went to the root of it, American existentialism,” del Toro says, citing sources like the novel “The Day of the Locust” and the paintings of Edward Hopper. “It’s a discovery of America reckoning with its own ideals and its reality,” and a sense of tragic fate. “We knew that we needed to create not an up-and-down structure but a very steady, inexorable ramp.” The film, which was released in theatres in December, during the surge of the Omicron variant, begins streaming February 1st.

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