Director Guillermo del Toro: ‘When dialogue is impossible, parable becomes more urgent’

People still say no to Guillermo del Toro. Even after winning multiple Oscars as recently as 2018 — when his monster movie romance The Shape of Water won Best Picture and del Toro Best Director — and with his new animated version of Pinocchio a notable success, studios balk at his grand, fantastical passion projects. “I’ve had three passes in the last year,” del Toro says. “One just last month.” He smiles. “I learnt long ago the natural state of a movie is to be unmade.” He asks if I remember the baseball film Field of Dreams and the famous line, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ “I would add: ‘Or not.’”

Today in London’s Covent Garden Hotel, del Toro takes the long view. Some of that is just down to personality. A genial, large-framed man of 58, his prodigious imagination has turned an obsessive love of pulp, horror and science fiction into sophisticated, thought-provoking cinema. (His CV includes, among others, the heartbreaking Pan’s Labyrinth and boisterous Hellboy.) But the scale of his invention is matched by his pragmatism about the movie industry, acquired since his emergence in 1990s Mexico.

“You have to accept the film business isn’t a monastery,” he says now. “It’s a fish market.” On Twitter, del Toro once posted a glossary of the language used in marketing campaigns to describe directors. Visionary, a word often applied to him, he translated for the public as: “Sometimes makes money.”

But the response to his latest film has added to a calm sense of qué será, será. The collective esteem of audiences, critics and awards voters (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has been nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar) marks quite a vindication for a film he tried to get made for 20 years. Ultimately, it was backed by Netflix, the presence of one of cinema’s foremost champions at the streamer just one among many fascinating internal tensions. Del Toro’s film is about loss, not intended for kids but, he says, “great for them to watch”. It thrums with the unruly nature of real children and the flaws of actual fathers; it honours the caustic spirit of Carlo Collodi’s original 19th-century novel while relocating it to Mussolini’s Italy.

The gulf between del Toro’s wild creativity and the smooth contours of Disney animations was spotlit last year with the release of the company’s own milquetoast update on their 1940 classic. Ever the film historian, he draws a line between “titan” animator Walt Disney and the entertainment giant he founded. “Disney had such pathos and dread in his work. You have to separate the films he made himself from those his company made.” (Del Toro has had only a glancing relationship with corporate Disney: his 2021 movie Nightmare Alley was released by subsidiary Searchlight after it was acquired by Disney with the film already greenlit.)

Non-conformity is the film’s thematic north star, he says. “Disobedience is where thought begins.” The inverse is the fascist Italy that backdrops the story. Tyranny was on the director’s mind when he first began to sketch his Pinocchio. He had just made The Devil’s Backbone, his indelible 2001 ghost story, set in an orphanage during the Spanish civil war. By grim chance, Pinocchio would finally emerge with Europe shadowed by war again. “In a world where dialogue has become impossible, parable becomes more urgent,” del Toro says.

For his own parable, he turned to an old, artisanal medium: stop-motion animation. He would, he says, like the film’s success to challenge what he sees as the ghettoisation of the form. He also insisted animation specialist Mark Gustafson be credited as his co-director.

Another affable presence, Gustafson wryly notes he and del Toro would have plenty of time to build a relationship. “Guillermo first called me in 2010. My wife and I popped a bottle of champagne, and I mentally picked out my tux for the 2012 Oscars.”

Finally on-set, Gustafson was key to helping the animators do the impossible: bring vérité spontaneity to the endless pre-planning of stop-motion. “Pinocchio is about a puppet learning to be real,” he says. “So we encouraged the animators to let the puppets make visible mistakes. We wanted happy accidents. Professionally, that’s tricky.”

But before a single puppet stepped (or stumbled) before a camera, the years had already changed Pinocchio. “If I had made this movie two decades ago, it would have been different,” del Toro says. “Then, I was still speaking only as a son. My own kids hadn’t yet given me reviews as a father. Now, they are in their twenties. So the film is more forgiving as a consequence.”

Del Toro’s connection with Pinocchio is deeply personal. The Disney original became a touchstone for the director and his late mother after he saw it with her as a boy. But the new film is also the work of a man with, he says, zero interest in autobiography. “For me, those elements have to be opaque.” Yet other major-league filmmakers now regularly put their memoirs on screen. Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is just the most recent example, five years after del Toro’s friend Alfonso Cuarón made Roma, his self-portrait of childhood in 1970s Mexico City. “And I love it when my friends tell those stories. But I don’t need to live like them. They also like exercise, and I don’t!”

What Roma and Pinocchio do share is Netflix. Like many of cinema’s remaining big names, the streamer has readily supported del Toro’s auteurism. The director is upfront about his logic. “My first duty is to make the film. My second is for it to reach people. I’d have given my right arm for Nightmare Alley to go to streaming a week after cinemas.” (Released with Covid still raging, the film was a rare box office disappointment for the director.)

“And every single studio passed on Pinocchio. Not [Netflix co-CEO] Ted Sarandos.” Del Toro has also been in Hollywood long enough to know that the real problems can start when the studios don’t pass. “And they allowed me to make it exactly as I wanted.”

But more than self-interest alone explains his measured embrace of our new era. “The size of the idea matters more than the size of the screen,” he says. Discussing streaming, both sides of del Toro come into focus: the arch-realist navigating the film business as it is, and the dreamer intrigued by what it might become. “Streaming is really about film acquiring mobility. Portability. And we are still so early in that transformation. If you compare it to the history of cinema, we are only in 1920. Really, who knows what happens next?”

In the short term, his attention will return to finding backing for a project that has just been rejected: an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant. But, eventually, cinema may need to proceed without him.

“I don’t want to be doing this forever. There are aspects of life I have denied too long.” The thought is jarring. What would a machine for making films like del Toro do instead? He says he still plans to produce other people’s movies: “I like giving a playground to other filmmakers. But I also miss reading. And I want to travel to places that illuminate history.” After a career making films bound up with mortality, he sees the realities of life ahead. “I’m an infinitely curious person. But I myself am finite.”

‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ is on Netflix now

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