As Guillermo del Toro himself will admit, he doesn’t make it easy for studios to greenlight his projects. While his latest movie “The Shape Of Water” is earning rave reviews (here’s ours), it’s still kind of a miracle that somebody gave the director money to make a Cold War set romantic fantasy about the relationship between a merman and mute woman. Not to mention this is coming off his divisive and somewhat pricey gothic potboiler “Crimson Peak.” However, it’s admirable that del Toro dreams big, and there’s one project he has waiting to go, but course, he just needs the money.
READ MORE: The A-Z Of The Lost & Unmade Movies Of Guillermo Del Toro
Once upon a blue moon, del Toro was eyeballing a stop-motion animated “Pinocchio,” based on the book by Gris Grimly. He was going to co-direct along with Grimly and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” animation director Mark Gustafson, with Daniel Radcliffe, Tom Waits, and Christopher Walken eyed for roles, and Nick Cave scoring the picture. It sounded too good to be true, and indeed, it fell apart. But as del Toro told press at the Venice Film Festival today (via Indiewire), the movie is just sitting there, waiting to get made.
“I’ve been looking for financing for almost ten years. We have the puppets, we have the design. I always or almost always complicate my life. None of the movies I want to do are easy. And they don’t belong to anything anyone wanted to do at that time,” he said. “No one wanted to do superheroes when I did ‘Hellboy,’ no one wanted to do monsters when I did ‘Pacific Rim.’ When I announced ‘Pinocchio’ I got many calls: ‘Yeah but it’s set during the rise of Mussolini, it’s an anti-fascist Pinocchio.’ [mimes they all hung up] If you have $35 million and if you want to make a Mexican happy, here I am.”
Indeed, del Toro’s movie is trippy to say the least. Years back, he explained that in his version,”the Blue Fairy is really a dead girl’s spirit. Pinocchio has strange moments of lucid dreaming bordering on hallucinations, with black rabbits. The sperm whale that swallows Pinocchio was actually a giant dogfish, which allows for more classical scale and design. The many mishaps Pinocchio goes through include several near-death close calls, a lot more harrowing moments. The key with this is not making any of it feel gratuitous, because the story is integrated with moments of comedy and beauty. He’s one of the great characters, whose purity and innocence allows him to survive in this bleak landscape of robbers and thugs, emerging from the darkness with his soul intact.”
Damn, we’d pay to see that. And true to del Toro’s word, there are multiple “Pinocchio” projects in the works, with Disney kicking around a live action take with Sam Mendes, “Gomorrah” team Mateo Garrone and star Toni Servillo developing their own take, and Robert Downey Jr. long tinkering a version that at one point had a Paul Thomas Anderson penned script.
However, none of them are far out of the gate, and del Toro could get ahead of the pack….if someone would just give him a shot.