The Oscar-winning director also reveals the scene that make his long-gestating passion project hardest to finance.
First announced in 2008 but long mired in development hell,Guillermo del Toro’s version ofPinocchiois finally here.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was your very first encounter with the Pinocchio story?
Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited stop-motion ‘Pinocchio’ film comes to Netflix this December.Jason Schmidt/NETFLIX
GUILLERMO DEL TORO:My father didn’t like movies, but my mother loved movies.
And the second or third movie I saw with her wasPinocchio.
And I found it really incredible.
‘Pinocchio’ director Guillermo del Toro.NETFLIX
It is one of my three favorite Disneys.
To this day, I worship it.
I think it’s a perfect animated movie.
Puppets dance in ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’.Netflix
It’s so scary!
I was not the kind of child people expected a child in the ’60s to be.
He’s created, he doesn’t belong.
David Bradley voices Geppetto opposite Gregory Mann’s Pinocchio in Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pinocchio.'.Netflix
He has to go through the world to learn the ways of men.
What do you say to a filmmaker that is under 10?
“Of course you might.”
The Sphinx (Tilda Swinton) in Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion ‘Pinocchio’ film.Netflix
It stayed in my mind.
And it’s very different.
Meaning one morning I realized I was acting like my dad.
That was a big reckoning.
We mentioned the Disney version already, butPinocchiois a story that has been told many times in many mediums.
With your stop-motion film, what was gained by telling the story of this puppet through actual puppetry?
That was the point of going into stop-motion.
That’s why the possessive title credit does a lot of the clearing.
This is not Walt Disney’sPinocchio, this is not Carlo Collodi’sPinocchio.
This is a Pinocchio that belongs next toPan’s LabyrinthandThe Devil’s Backbone.
It’s not for kids, but kids can watch it.
BothPan’s LabyrinthandThe Devil’s Backboneincorporate the Spanish Civil War.
You said that from an early stage, you wanted to bring real-life authoritarianism into your Pinocchio story.
What do you think it adds?
Collodi’s tale was very politically loaded.
It was serving the needs of Italy at that exact time.
So its nature is political.
Now that is serving the central idea of obedience as a virtue.
So all of these things need to be balanced.
And they connect and overlap, right?
And I said, “That’s actually based on a real photograph.”
I mean, the pageantry of fascism is very show-business-like in a way.
And the father puts a real gun and says, “Shoot your friend.”
That’s the consequence.
Yeah, but it’s a very angry recreation.
This guy is a drinker.
He isn’t really concerned with the way people perceive him.
But he ends up accepting Pinocchio’s imperfection.
You mentioned some of the connections between Pinocchio and Frankenstein.
They’re also both stories about creating life and what it means to be alive.
Why did you want to foreground death so much?
These are things that I find interesting about them, that you could tackle big subjects.
I have a quarter left, and that’s if I’m lucky.
Our time here is important.
It is the only time we have to make things better for ourselves and others.
It’s a conclusion to that thing.
The central idea of Pinocchio that you give life to something that didn’t have it.
That is also, by the way, central to the notion of stop-motion animation.
So everything is of a piece.
It’s a masterpiece.
Yes, I watch it every autumn now.
Is that why you wanted to work with him on this?
When I sawOver the Garden Wall, I felt like I had found a twin.
So I called him up and I said, “Would you be interested in collaborating on this?”
And I pitched him the main ideas onPinocchio.
For example, he didn’t like the idea of it being a reincarnation story.
He said, “How can we fight that?”
Because he shouldn’t turn into Carlo, we have to keep Pinocchio Pinocchio.
I really love that line I came up with, “the wooden boy with the borrowed soul.”
So these are the things that make collaboration with him great.
Geppetto is asking the Sprite to resurrect him again.
And the Sprite’s like, “Real boys don’t come back.”
And he’s like, “Don’t I know that?”
Then it leads to the thing that made the movie the hardest to finance, which was the ending.
I kept saying, “It can be beautiful.”
Of course it was the same withPan’s Labyrinth.
Everybody was like, “No!”
Life and death are embodied in the two fairies thatTilda Swintonplays, representing life and death.
How did you think through these designs?
They’re such intricate chimeras.
Yeah, that’s exactly the right word.
The wings come from Judeo-Christian mythology, which is very much illustrated in colonial Mexican paintings.
The configuration of wings is different from a seraphim to an archangel.
Guy Davis and I also tried to evoke the Mesopotamian sculptures of winged bulls.
And the solution we came up with for this was silver masks.
So life and death have sort of the same silver mask and you might only perceive their voice.
Then in the animation, we gave them very different body language.
We designed them to be sisters, but very different.
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