‘We have always been lied to by our leaders’

As director Matteo Garrone swaps mafiosi for marionettes, he tells Alastair Smart why his ‘Pinocchio’ is a film for our times

It’s a story we all think we know, but how well do we know it really? That’s the question at the heart of Matteo Garrone’s new film adaptation of Pinocchio. The tale of the wooden puppet who longs to become a boy was written by the Italian author Carlo Collodi in the 1880s, yet when you hear the name Pinocchio today, you’re more likely to think of Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon.

“That was a beautiful movie, but it betrayed the original story in many ways,” Garrone tells me via Zoom from his office in Rome. “Even in Italy, Collodi’s text has been forgotten over the years. My aim has been to produce a film that’s faithful to it and brings it back to everyone.”

Garrone’s live-action adaptation stars Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) as Pinocchio’s creator, Geppetto. In the title role is 10-year-old Federico Ielapi, who underwent three hours of make-up each day so as to convincingly appear to be both wooden and alive.

“The Pinocchio story is universal,” says Garrone. “People anywhere can relate to the rebellious child who, after many conflicts, eventually realises his mistakes and finds redemption. The message is quite a Christian one, really. The love between Geppetto and Pinocchio – between a father and his son – will always be relevant.”

As a boy, Garrone empathised with the mischievous Pinocchio. Now, as a 51-year-old father with a “naughty” son of his own, he empathises with Geppetto too.

Pinocchio’s adventures take him to all sorts of weird and wonderful places, from Pleasure Island to the Field of Miracles, but Collodi grounded the story in the Tuscan countryside where he lived. Garrone shot his film in the same region, scouting out landscapes and villages beautiful enough, yet also bare enough, to pass for the late 19th century.

“Yes, it’s a universal story, but it’s also a very Italian one,” says Garrone. “Collodi wrote about the world he knew: one of poor people in rural Tuscany, struggling for survival and the next meal, often in the cold.” Geppetto’s whole reason for carving Pinocchio, according to the book, was to get work as a puppeteer and earn himself “a crust of bread and a glass of wine”.

Garrone’s palette in the film is suitably impoverished. Its gorgeous, subdued colour recalls the canvases of Collodi’s local peers, the Macchiaioli painters.

Born in 1826, Collodi was a journalist who frequently attacked the powers-that-be for their indifference to the poor and socially disadvantaged. He began as a keen supporter of Italian unification (even serving as a volunteer in the War of Independence) but once that was achieved in 1870, he despaired that Italy’s leaders were as bad as the Austrians who’d preceded them.

That despair courses through in the pages of Pinocchio, a latecareer foray into children’s literature which debuted in 1881 as a series of instalments in a children’s magazine. Collodi’s initial intention had been to kill off his hero, until he was persuaded by avid young readers to revive him for another series a year later. (The instalments were combined into the 1883 book Le avventure di Pinocchio.) In one of the story’s most grimly humorous scenes, Pinocchio goes to court after being robbed, only to be sent to jail himself by the judge. “In this land,” he’s told, “the innocent go to prison.”

“Pinocchio is a dark fairytale, full of villains,” says Garrone. “I try to capture this darkness in my film.”

It is here that Garrone feels Disney’s adaptation betrayed the original text. “It’s inelegant to speak badly about other people’s movies, but let’s say that was an American product of an American cultural outlook. I’d have the same [limitations] if I, as an Italian, tried to make a version of Huckleberry Finn,” he says.

Put another way, Disney’s was a saccharine, sentimental offering. It’s very light on the poverty. Its lead character is an innocent corrupted by the world around him rather than the rash, selfish figure portrayed by Collodi and revived by Garrone.

The new film includes a host of disturbing episodes that didn’t make it into the cartoon: in one, Pinocchio’s feet are burned off, after he falls asleep by the kitchen fire; in another, he’s hung from an oak tree and left for dead by the

Fox and the Cat.

‘Disney betrayed the original story. It’s like if I, as an Italian, made a Huckleberry Finn’

It’s a tricky thing, juggling two husbands who each have no idea the other exists, but Anaïs Nin was as nimble – and daring – as they come.

Beautiful, outré and arrogant, Nin, who lived in Paris and then New York, had spent years writing provocative fiction – such as Little Birds, the erotic short stories behind the Sky series that started last week – but it wasn’t until she published the first volume of her diaries in 1966, at the age of 63, that her work caught fire.

Beginning as letters to her estranged and abusive father, which she wrote from the age of 11 and rewrote endlessly throughout her adult life, the diaries detail in graphic colour illegal abortions, incest, marital infidelity, and affairs with prominent intellectuals. Nin was hailed as one of the first women to write erotica and to push the female experience into the mainstream.

“It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women,” she said.

But it was only after Nin’s death in 1977 that the true strangeness of her life came to light. Her obituaries seemed curiously in conflict. In The New York Times, she was listed as being survived by her husband Hugh Parker Guiler. In the Los Angeles Times, she was survived by her husband Rupert Pole. A damning thread was pulled loose, and the truth emerged. Nin had been a bigamist.

She had married Guiler, a banker and artist, in 1923, at the age of 20, in Havana (her mother was Cuban). By then, she was already obsessed with the erotic, which she had discovered aged 16, when she quit high school in New York, moved to Paris and encountered the works of Proust, Gide and Rimbaud. “They overwhelmed me,” she said. “I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits… I had my degree in erotic lore.”

Soon after her marriage, while studying psychoanalysis with her lover Otto Rank in New York, she began to have sex with her own patients on the couch. She romped with John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, among others – possibly women, too. Guiler turned a blind eye – even when Nin married someone else.

It was in 1947 that she met 28-year-old forester Rupert Pole, in a lift in Manhattan. Nin was by then 44 and feeling low after being dropped by her publisher, her sales stagnant. “Danger! He is probably homosexual,” she wrote in her diary the day they met, before detailing their night of passion and her rakish new lover’s interest in eastern philosophy.

The next day, Pole – who thought Nin was a divorcee – invited her on a road trip, and brought along a fake wedding ring from Woolworths so they could register at motels as husband and wife. Nin, who declared her existing marriage an “imprisonment”, married Pole in Arizona after he proposed with a diamond ring delivered in the bottom of a glass of orange juice. The couple settled in Los Angeles, where Pole had a cottage on the edge of Sierra Madre. He spent his days cutting wood, while Nin wrote and played housewife. Guiler had been led to believe that she was at a “rest ranch” that forbade the use of phones.

Soon, however, he became suspicious, and Nin needed an alibi. So she convinced a friend to steal a pile of letter-headed paper from her university, and send an invitation to Nin, asking her to give a series of lectures. Back in New York, when Pole came to visit, Nin audaciously booked him a hotel room opposite her own apartment, and spent her time swinging between both abodes, and both husbands. (Not for nothing is the volume of her diary chronicling these years named Trapeze.)

Her lies came so thick and fast that she resorted to writing them on index cards. According to her biographer, Deirdre Bair, “[Nin] would set up these elaborate façades in Los Angeles and in

New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names.”

Eventually, Nin’s sexy double life lost its lustre. Adultery became tedious – as did her husbands. In her diaries, she bemoaned Pole’s penny-pinching, and Guiler’s dullness. “He is still,” she wrote of her first husband in 1952, “technically deficient in moviemaking, has no ingenuity… The bourgeois in him is incurable. Everything he touches takes on that inanimate quality; I struggled so he would not dress like an old man.”

In 1966, just as Nin was finding late-blooming success from her diaries, she annulled her marriage to Pole. The decision was spurred by legal logistics rather than a tortured heart – both Guiler and Pole were trying to claim her as a dependent on their federal tax returns.

Her fame filled the holes left by love, and she spent the next decade touring relentlessly. It’s possible her promiscuity was only filler all along – Nin was waiting for something bigger.

Her brother Joaquín described her as “a steel hummingbird… determined to be famous”.

Nin ended up living with Pole until her cancer in 1977, and before her death, she wrote to Guiler asking for forgiveness. He absolved her of everything. “They both realised,” Nin’s friend Tristine Rainer wrote in her book Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin, “that having half of Anaïs Nin was better than all of any other woman.”

Little Birds is on Sky Atlantic and Now TV, Tuesdays at 9pm

And can you match these films with the novels about real-life robbers that inspired them?

Writing about love is never easy, but writing well about lust is almost impossible. How can you describe the giddy thrill of that first flush of desire, without seeming ridiculous?

Then there’s the awkward bodily side of things: the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards offer an annual demonstration of all the ways it can go wrong.

This poem by Lavinia Greenlaw, from her 2011 collection The Casual Perfect, finds a solution; Greenlaw captures that whirligig of feelings by leaving direct description behind entirely, and plunging into a stream of metaphors.

Without the title, it might seem pure surrealism. But with it, each new image becomes an answer to the question of what this “Essex Kiss” is like.

The answers come at breakneck pace. It’s a dizzying fairground ride, then a series of violently clashing flavours, then a walk on the wild side of nature, before the ordinary world of lay-bys and lock-ins comes into focus, more Essexy than sexy. It ends, I think, on a note of mischievous elation: can there be any better rallying cry for giving yourself up to wild abandon than “No paperwork”?

It’s a poem about place as much as passion; the “Essex” part is as important as the “Kiss”. (Greenlaw, 58, spent her teenage years in a quiet Essex village.) “Essex Kiss” is full of the natural world, but it’s rough and messy, a place of nettles, of wattle and daub. We might be in a semi-rural landscape, but we’re still within earshot of the road.

At least, I think that’s what all this is about. Her poems sometimes leave me feeling baffled, but I don’t usually mind: as T S Eliot put it, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”.

When I first read “Essex Kiss”, I was so carried away by the heady rush of it, I didn’t have time to stop and ask myself what it meant. Perhaps that would have been the wrong question to ask. The meaning or subject is sometimes just the excuse for a poem: it’s a stepping-off point for the imagination. Elsewhere, Greenlaw writes: “It’s not the theme that interests me/ but the variation.” Tristram Fane Saunders

ESSEX KISS

A handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend. Merry-go-round? No, the waltzer. A touch as bold as rum and peppermint. Chewing gum and whelks, a whiff of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit.

The moves of a half-broken pony. A poacher’s tickle and snare.

I will lay you down on a bed of nettles and blackthorn.

Your body will give way like grain, your body will veer: smoke over a torched field as the wind takes and turns it.

The grip of bluebells.

The grip of wattle and daub.

As near as twelve lay-bys, as far as a Friday night lock-in.

By this are we bound.

No paperwork.

From The Casual Perfect (Faber, £9.99)

‘STEEL HUMMINGBIRD’ Anaïs Nin had two husbands simultaneously