The thin line between life death and
He’s been doing animation since he was a kid, but it has still taken the director Guillermo del Toro 15 years to make his radical new animation, he tells Ed Potton.
Guillermo del Toro is fond of saying that he tells the same story over and over. Not because of a lack of ideas – he is one of the most imaginative writerdirectors on the planet – but because his favourite theme is so rich.
The Mexican film-maker’s work is driven by a classic preoccupation of his countrymen: the closeness of life and death, beauty and the grotesque. It’s there in his Spanish Civil War horrors The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth and in his nouveau gothic creature features Hellboy and The Shape of Water. ‘‘Tragedy and delight, hand in hand,’’ as a character puts it in that last movie, for which del Toro won two Oscars.
Now he has adapted Pinocchio, the source tale that, along with Frankenstein, influenced those films more than anything else. They are really two sides of the same coin, del Toro, 58, points out when we meet at a London hotel.
Geppetto’s puppet and Frankenstein’s monster are brought to life on ‘‘a stormy night of abandonment’’, he says in his accented but ferociously articulate English. ‘‘There’s also something really moving and eerie about the way Pinocchio learns to control his body.’’
Especially in stop-motion animation. In the film everyone has a jerky, marionette quality: Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J Cricket, Tilda Swinton’s wood sprite, Cate Blanchett’s afterlife guardian. ‘‘I found it incredibly beautiful to tell a story about a puppet with puppets that think they’re not puppets,’’ del Toro says with a laugh.
He set it in Mussolini’s Italy, which allowed him to return to two of his other pet subjects – fascism and the Catholic Church. There are comparisons
‘‘I found it incredibly beautiful to tell a story about a puppet with puppets that think they’re not puppets.’’ Guillermo del Toro
between the crucifix Geppetto has made for the local church and the apparently immortal Pinocchio – two sons carved from wood who can rise from the dead.
Geppetto makes Pinocchio as a replacement for the son he lost in the Great War, and the film is full of father figures, from Ron Perlman’s domineering government official to Christoph Waltz’s sinister circus promoter. ‘‘There is fatherly paternalistic concern in all fascist ideologies,’’ del Toro says. ‘‘They tend to be seeking uniformity, obedience. We are trying to say that disobedience is a virtue.’’
In a totalitarian world ‘‘everybody behaves like a puppet except Pinocchio’’, he says. ‘‘Who controls you?’’ somebody asks Pinocchio in the film. ‘‘Who controls you?’’ he shoots back.
The animation was done by more than 60 units in the UK, the US and Mexico; del Toro talks with such passion about the animation process that you wonder why he has taken so long to direct it (he co-directed Pinocchio with Mark Gustafson).
‘‘I’ve been doing animation since I was a kid,’’ he says, sighing. One of the first shorts he made was about a potato that murdered a family and got run over by a car. He had a company that did animation, taught animation, produced the animated film The Book of Life and created the animated series Trollhunters. The reason he has taken so long to direct one is Hollywood, he says, which he calls ‘‘the Land of the Long No’’.
‘‘For you my career happens in order: one, two, three, four, five. I tried to get this Pinocchio greenlit in many forms for 15 years and we got: ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Why wait? Because I couldn’t get the goddamn money!’’ he says with a chuckle.
One of the reasons the film was turned down is that they wanted him to make it for kids. ‘‘I said: ‘No, but kids can watch it.’ Animation is not a genre, it’s not just for kids. It’s film.’’
He hasn’t seen Disney’s awful live-action Pinocchio with Tom Hanks, he adds, ‘‘because I have been studiously avoiding other Pinocchios. There are sixtysomething’’.
Del Toro was born in Guadalajara, where his father had a car business before winning the lottery and buying a big house in which young Guillermo kept snakes, rats and a crow as pets. Very macabre.
He has seen plenty of disturbing things: the corpses of babies when he was working in a hospital – it convinced him to renounce his Catholic upbringing and become an atheist – and the kidnap of his father, in 1997.
His friend the Titanic director James Cameron stepped in with US$1 million for the ransom and his father was released after 72 days, but del Toro was shaken and moved his family to the US.
‘‘Now I am convinced that there is a beautiful Russian doll structure in the universe in which chaos contains order and order contains chaos and chaos contains order,’’ he says. ‘‘The essence of the universe is struggle.’’
That extends to his work-life balance. ‘‘I am at a point in my life when I try to only make movies that I really need to do,’’ del Toro says. ‘‘To choose is to negate everything else – you’re basically not having a personal life.
‘‘As I said at the Golden Globes, what for other people is filmography for us is biography. I never felt as elated as when I did Shape of Water or as down as when I did Nightmare Alley.’’
That last one, a Stygian neonoir starring Bradley Cooper and Blanchett, was released last year and mirrored our turbulent times. ‘‘There is no day that I don’t wake up with a sense of impending doom,’’ he says, ‘‘even though personally in my life I am happy.’’
Last year he married Kim Morgan, an American film historian, and he has two daughters from his 30-year marriage to Lorenza Newton, which ended in 2017.
With his friends Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu he makes up the ‘‘Three Amigos’’, the Mexican trio who won five of the six best director Oscars between 2013 and 2018.
Del Toro talks to them every day, he says. ‘‘We are brothers. Alejandro and Alfonso are as close to me as any family member.’’
Otherwise, he can generally be found in one of his houses with a book. His place in Los Angeles is ‘‘basically 13 libraries under one roof’’ with rooms devoted to Victorian and Edwardian crime, fairy tales, mythology, illustration, paintings, sculpture, horror, science fiction, fantasy, history, occult, world literature and comics.
‘‘I can be there every day, 12 hours a day, and I’m happy,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s another house that has secret passages and another that contains only animation books.’’
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, a horror series he created and presents, has just launched on Netflix, and in the works are an untitled werewolf western and Haunted Mansion, with Jared Leto and Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek. Ultimately, he says, ‘‘I want to end my career telling stories in animation’’.
Whatever del Toro does, it’s odds-on that it will explore that thin line between life and death.
He quotes a Mexican poem that adapts one of Virgil’s famous lines: ‘‘A voice has whispered all my life quietly in my ear: ‘Live, live, live’. It was Death.’’ This is not a man who is twiddling his thumbs while he waits for the Reaper.
‘‘There is no day that I don’t wake up with a sense of impending doom, even though personally in my life I am happy.’’
Pinocchio is in select New Zealand cinemas from tomorrow and on Netflix from December 9.