Orphaned project adopted by del Toro

The story behind “The Orphanage” (“El Orfanato”) is almost as interesting as the haunting tale the film tells.

The Spanish psychological horror film, which opens in District theaters today, is the first film to be “presented by” Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican director made one of last year’s most acclaimed films, the visually extraordinary adult fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth,” in Spain and is a hot commodity in Hollywood.

Just how did a first-time director and a first-time screenwriter get Mr. del Toro’s name — and the attention that comes with it — on their film?

When he was just 17, the now 32-year-old director Juan Antonio Bayona met Mr. del Toro.

“I was pretending to work as a journalist at a film festival in Sitges [Spain] to get free tickets,” Mr. Bayona reminisces, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles. “I interviewed a lot of people I really admired. Guillermo was one of those people.”

He laughs, recalling it now. “The first time he saw me he said I was like a 10-year-old boy with sideburns.” Nevertheless, Mr. del Toro obviously took him more seriously than that. The two kept in touch, including through Mr. Bayona’s four years in film school. The young man kept Mr. del Toro apprised of his work in short films and music videos.

“From the moment he knew I was doing a movie, he wanted to be there to help protect me, to help me do the movie I wanted to do,” Mr. Bayona says. “He liked the script so much.”

Not everyone did.

It’s hard to believe now — “The Orphanage” is up for 14 Goya Awards (Spain’s Oscars), including best picture, and it’s Spain’s official submission to the Academy Awards — but 34-year-old screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez thought his work might never be made.

“The script had been to all these workshops and had been shown to many production companies, and nobody wanted to touch it,” he recalls. “They said it had this impossible mixture of drama and horror. All the things we liked about this script, they didn’t. It was too ambiguous, it didn’t have a main bad guy.”

Mr. Sanchez met Mr. Bayona eight years ago, when both had shorts screening at a festival. Mr. Sanchez gave Mr. Bayona and his production company a copy of “The Orphanage,” hoping it would lead to a commission for another script — but Mr. Bayona liked it so much that he wouldn’t commission something else.

Spain’s film executives turned out to be wrong. “The Orphanage” took in $8.3 million in its first four days, the biggest opening in the country that year and the second-highest premiere ever for a Spanish film.

The filmmakers said they never felt the pressure of having Mr. del Toro’s name on their film. After all, they point out, they started making “The Orphanage” before Mr. del Toro had his biggest success with “Pan’s Labyrinth.” More than anything, they felt grateful.

“Without Guillermo, it would have been impossible to do the movie,” Mr. Bayona says.

It did lead to heightened expectations by the time their film came out, though. “At Cannes, the first screening the film had, everyone was expecting the next ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ ” Mr. Sanchez says. “We were surprised the film got such a warm response. ‘Pan’ [is] such a tough act to follow.”

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