How Guillermo del Toro Sold Netflix on a Twisted Version of ‘Pinocchio’

thewrap.com:

the Pinocchio through a bevy of subsequent films, from the 1965 Belgian-American “Pinocchio in Outer Space” to 21st century adaptations by Roberto Benigni, Matteo Garrone and Robert Zemeckis.But the newest “Pinocchio,” which Netflix released only three months after Zemeckis’ film, comes from Guillermo del Toro, who pulled the character out of Disney’s world and put him squarely in del Toro’s land (a move that helped avoid any sticky copyright issues). “The Disney movie Is a masterpiece, one of the great animated movies of all times,” said del Toro, whose version of the character is both brattier and more solemn.

His way of becoming a real boy, for instance, is to embrace his mortality. “But we tried to define ourselves by what we wanted to be and not what we could not be or didn’t want to be.

I think that everybody on the entire team agreed not to revisit in a negative way what we couldn’t do or shouldn’t do. We just got to what we wanted to do.”But it was easier to come up with the model for this new, less obedient Pinocchio than it was to sway studio execs who remembered the Disney version to that vision.

That’s what del Toro and his co-director Mark Gustafson found, anyway, when they tried to get funding for their $35 million, stop-motion film.“We were definitely on the launching pad and the countdown was happening a few times, and then somebody walked into the room and said no,” Gustafson said.“We stayed like that for about seven years – in a very, very optimistic yellow light,” del Toro added. “But I think people were saying no for the right reasons – because we wanted to do something different.