by Gill Pringle
“Nobody knows how funny Cate is really. I mean, she is one of the funniest, most irreverent people you’ll ever meet. She’s deeply thoughtful. She’s incredibly well-read and articulate, but also she is very, very funny,” reveals Guillermo del Toro discussing how he wound up casting Cate Blanchett as a monkey in his stop motion animated epic, Pinocchio.
And, in possibly the most bizarre role of her career, Blanchett immediately agreed to voice disgruntled monkey, Spazzatura, a tormented creature with no actual words.
“It came out of on-set conversations with Guillermo in the last days of the shoot on Nightmare Alley, saying how much we loved working together and when could we do it again,” recalls the two-time Oscar winning actress whose compelling performance as a cancelled conductor in Todd Field’s drama Tár puts her in line to pick up a third golden statue.
“Guillermo thought my personality was akin to that of a cheeky 12-year-old-boy, a perfect fit for an anxious tormented money,” says Blanchett.
It’s an unusual performance given how – aside from an inspired sequence where Spazzatura “voices” marionettes – the monkey doesn’t speak per se, giving Blanchett plenty of room to play around with her vocalizations to help the audience understand what he is trying to communicate.
“We were having so much fun on Nightmare Alley, and Cate said, ‘Can I work on whatever you do next?’ And I said, ‘Well, in Pinocchio all the roles are given’. And she says, ‘Surely there’s something left’. And I said, ‘Yeah, there’s a monkey’. And she said, ‘I’ll take it’.
“And I tell you, I know this sounds glib or like a joke but, without her, it wouldn’t be the same character. She would say, ‘Tell me what the monkey is saying. Tell me what the monkey is feeling’,” recalls Del Toro when we meet in New York at the opening of his Pinocchio exhibition at MoMa, featuring all the original puppets and sketches used in the film.
Pinocchio’s co-director Mark Gustafson worked side-by-side with the actress throughout the process, “She was brilliant in that we shot it shot-for-shot; we recorded it so that she could really narrow in on the emotion exactly what Spazzatura was going through at that time,” he says.
“And when we saw it the first time in London, that’s the character that we realised connected with the audience in a bigger way,” adds del Toro.
If Blanchett’s performance was surprising, then it’s Ewan McGregor to whom the two directors are indebted, considering that they had another actor in mind for the role endearing yet pompous Sebastian J. Cricket. “Some of the characters, I can say we wrote it for them. Ewan was a surprise. I was thinking of another actor for that part, when the studio said, ‘Would you try Ewan?’ I mean, he’s a great actor, but that was not the voice in Pat McHale or my head,” says del Toro referring to his co-writer with whom he had even discussed killing off the cricket character altogether.
“All of a sudden, they said, ‘Let’s try him. He’s a great actor. What’s the worst that can happen?’ Well, the best that could happen is when we started hearing it, I turned to Mark and said, ‘Am I crazy or is the cricket now the star of the film?’”
Co-director Gustafson agrees, “It was great because we actually wound up expanding his role when we saw how charismatic the cricket could be. We considered killing him early on, just getting rid of him. I know that’s not cool.”
Discussing his initial hesitance at McGregor, del Toro says, “I found him contemporary in my head. I thought, ‘is he gonna play?’ It’s not that I didn’t want him, I wanted somebody else really stubbornly. I couldn’t see the cricket any other way. I was sure that this was gonna be one step into giving the role to the other actor. But when Ewan came in and we heard him, we were blown away.”
With Ron Perlman cast to voice Podesta; John Turturro as Dottore; Finn Wolfhard as Candlewick, Christoph Waltz as Count Volpe and Tilda Swinton as Wood Sprite, the filmmakers auditioned hundreds of boys before arriving upon Gregory Mann, 13, to voice the dual roles of Pinocchio and Carlo.
“Finding Gregory was like catching lightning in a bottle,” says del Toro of the British newcomer.
“I think when we heard him, we immediately knew. He had this sort of purity and innocence that just came right out of his soul somehow, and we knew it was Pinocchio,” adds Gustafson. “And he was nine years old when we found him, and we recorded him over a year and a half. Ultimately his voice changed, and he couldn’t do it anymore. He sounded like Ernest Borgnine,” he laughs.
In their earlier creative conversations, del Toro outlined to Gustafson how he wanted to upend one of the central ideas of Italian author Carlo Collodi’s 1883 original fairy tale, The Adventures of Pinocchio, which would be later adapted for the big screen by Walt Disney. “What was clear in my mind was that Pinocchio should never turn into a real boy, nor should that be a goal to which he aspires and fails to achieve,” says del Toro.
“When I was a kid, I said, ‘so, it means to be loved, you have to change?’ I couldn’t accept that. That’s what you do with classic material. If you can put two or three strands that are completely the reverse of what’s normally done with it, it’s not being intentionally contrarian, just realising that this material will sing in a different way if we change the key,” says the filmmaker, celebrated for his films The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Having long expressed a desire to make his own stop motion version of Pinocchio, it was only after he was approached by Lisa Henson, CEO of the Jim Henson Company that the pieces began to fall into place.
The Henson Company had acquired the rights to a 2002 edition of Collodi’s Pinocchio featuring the striking illustrations of award-winning artist Gris Grimly.
“I don’t think this movie would exist if it wasn’t for Gris Grimly’s design of Pinocchio because that’s what gelled everything for me. To me, it’s the best Pinocchio I have seen because it’s so simple and so beautiful. It has an innocence and a purity to its expressions and the ungainliness of its body is very childlike,” says del Toro.
“There’s been a renaissance in stop motion over the last 15 years,” adds Gustafson. “Something interesting has happened where you have artists who grew up seeing stop motion as children, had it ingrained in them, and they have now reached an age where they have the opportunity to dive into the medium and make a dream project like Pinocchio. Guillermo brought his live action aesthetic to this movie. When that sophistication of filmmaking is applied to stop motion, which is inherently handcrafted, you get a really powerful combination.”
Not that any of this was easy, says Gustafson.
“I learned a lot about just the passion it takes to make a film like this from Guillermo. He’s very passionate about this. This idea of Pinocchio is something that’s been important to him for a long time. And he demanded 100 percent from us 100 percent of the time. And because the material was so good, we were all very much on board with that, and we wanted to do the absolute best we could.”
The respect is mutual. “I admired him not only as an animator, but his directorial decisions and discussions we had. I think we are in sync to an uncanny degree,” says del Toro.
“The only thing I can say in absolute truth is I learned to listen more than ever in my entire 58 years of life. I said yes to Mark more than anybody including my two wives. And we would always try everything either of us proposed.”
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is streaming now.
