Guillermo Del Toro on Crafting ‘Nightmare Alley’ and Its Scary Truth

variety.com:

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentSearchlight’s “Nightmare Alley” takes place mostly in 1939-41, but its sensibility is contemporary.

It’s a time-capsule movie: If future generations want to know what life was like in the 21st century, tell them to see this film.“Nightmare,” written by Guillermo Del Toro (who directs) and Kim Morgan, depicts a world of liars and charlatans who manipulate the truth to gain wealth and/or power.

And the general public is surprisingly gullible. As Lilith (Cate Blanchett) says to Stan (Bradley Cooper), “You don’t fool people, Stan, they fool themselves.”Del Toro tells Variety, “We are in a moment of great anxiety, post-discourse, post-truth, almost as if we, as a society, are going through a psychotic episode.

Everybody curates the reality of the world, every piece of information, to fit their own ‘truth. And I mean everybody; this is not about a particular person or party.