Guillermo del Toro: ‘Childhood now is an absolute certainty that the doomsday clock is ticking’

“I’m pretty sure the world is not about to end,” grinned Guillermo Del Toro, “but you never know.”

The Pan’s Labyrinth director was in playfully apocalyptic spirits last night at our Telegraph Extra readers’ screening of Pinocchio – his stunning stop-motion adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale, now in contention for Best Animated Film at both the Baftas and Academy Awards.

Set during the rise of Mussolini in inter-war Italy, it’s part of what Del Toro describes as the current surge of “end-of-days cinema”, in which filmmakers seem compelled to reflect on their own beginnings – see Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans, Bardo, and so on – and how easily the state of childlike innocence can be smashed.

Here are edited highlights of our conversation – and if you’d like to hear the next one in person, keep an eye on Telegraph Events.

You’ve been working on Pinocchio for a very long time. Were you concerned when other adaptations came along while yours was still in production?

No, because the world moves like that. Sometimes you have four meteor movies, or four volcano movies, all arriving at once. And I felt we were pretty safe: no one else was going to do a Pinocchio about death during the rise of Mussolini. So, you know, we had a niche.

After a decade of the project being postponed or turned down, suddenly in 2018 it sprung back to life. What changed? 

Well, the natural state of any movie is not to get made: I’ve written 32 or 33 screenplays, but only 12 of them became real. But all it takes is one yes and it changes your life, and in this case the yes came from Netflix. They were commissioning a lot of beautifully weird movies at that time: Alfonso [Cuarón] was able to make Roma, and later on Alejandro [González Iñárritu] did Bardo. And I’d told them, “I can’t make this movie then test in front of families in a shopping mall in Tarzana. I’m not interested in making a babysitter movie. It has to be done in a spirit of absolute freedom.” And they said “Sure”.

Stop-motion is such a perfect medium for Pinocchio, considering it’s a story about inanimate objects coming to life…

…and, in our version, about a bunch of people who think they’re not puppets! Stop-motion is the most amazing play-set in the history of mankind. No other form of animation is so intimate: it’s an extension of the intimacy you have as a child with your toys.

If you’re doing hand-drawn, someone else is drawing other frames, and someone else again is doing the colouring. If you’re working in CGI, it’s the same thing. But here it’s like the Japanese art of bunraku [elaborate, often large-scale puppetry]: the puppeteers empty themselves into the puppets, which become extensions of them.

And you can’t just go out and rent a chair, or cast another extra. If you need something new, you have to fabricate it. In many ways, stop-motion is to live-action what Ginger Rogers was to Fred Astaire: you have to do all the same things except backwards and in heels.

Has it given you an appetite to make another stop-motion film?

Animation has given us so many indelible images over the years, but in many ways the industry wants to keep it at the children’s table. So I want to keep pushing the medium into areas that demonstrate its capacity. The next stop-motion film I’m making is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which I’m currently co-writing with Dennis Kelly [the writer of Matilda: The Musical] and we start the design process in two months. I’m shooting a live-action feature first [an as-yet-unannounced Netflix project, believed to be an adaptation of Frankenstein possibly starring Oscar Isaac]. But in the meantime we’re developing a look-book, and in about two years if everything goes well, we’ll start production.

You’ve often spoken about the influence of Frankenstein on your work. The scene in which Pinocchio comes to life definitely seems to share its DNA with the Creature’s awakening in film adaptations over the years. 

They’re twin tales: both about fathers who create sons – one out of hubris, the other out of grief – then send them out into the world but without having equipped them with the tools to figure it out. So for me, it’s basically autobiography.

There are two respects in which our Pinocchio is almost an anti-Pinocchio. One is that disobedience, rather than obedience, is a virtue. That’s what is needed in the world right now: disobedience is urgent. The other is that Pinocchio doesn’t have to change. It’s a fallacy that boys have to learn how to be real boys. It’s fathers that have to learn how to be real fathers.

As a kid, when I saw the Disney version, I was enraptured by it: I thought this guy gets how scary it is to be a child in the world. But I didn’t like that after following this beautiful character for an entire movie he was transformed into a boring kid. I didn’t want to be that way – I wanted to be the wooden puppet! It’s the same thing that happens with Beauty and Beast: you’re with this magnificent creature for the whole movie, and then at the end out comes a GQ model.

You said recently that many of the films being made now feel like “end-of-days cinema”. What did you mean by that, and do you count Pinocchio as part of it?

We’ve gone through a global pandemic, there’s war in Europe, and in the United States we’ve just had Donald Trump dismantling the idea of truth itself with his talk of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. I mean, I’m pretty sure the world is not about to end – but you never know!

We are on the verge of losing many things we’ve taken for granted, and cinema is reflecting that. The medium has split in two directions: one grandiose, and the other greatly intimate. Look at how many movies are being made right now that are veiled autobiographies – and I would very much include Pinocchio in that. It is very much about my failures in my relationship with my father, and failures as a father myself.

I’m fascinated that in three of your films – The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and now Pinocchio – you’ve looked at the rise of fascism and this end-times atmosphere through the eyes of children, which for that subject doesn’t seem like an obvious perspective.

It’s because fascism is the most grotesque of father-son relationships. It’s a daddy cult, built around a caricature of the strong man. People say it keeps coming back: unfortunately it never goes away.

The idea for Pinocchio was born exactly between The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, and I always saw it as a movie that could live in the middle of those stories. In all three films, the war exists in the periphery. The explosions are on the horizon. Because for children, those big changes are never geographically immediate, but they’re spiritually immediate. You can feel fascism enter the orphanage in The Devil’s Backbone without the army actually needing to take over the building.

How difficult was it to make sure your version of Pinocchio would be suitable for children?

Look, childhood these days isn’t how it was in the 1990s – all carefree skateboarding in the suburbs. Childhood now is an absolute certainty that the doomsday clock is ticking forward. These kids lived through the pandemic and are watching the environment collapse.

So my Pinocchio had to be one that would encourage conversations between kids and their parents: maybe about war, maybe about the death of a pet or an elderly relative. As I see it, there are two schools of parenting – one I like, where you discuss the world and come to an understanding of it together, and one where you childproof all of the electrical plugs in the room, then believing it’s safe, arm the kid with a fork. That one I’m not so keen on.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is on Netflix now