Narrator: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinnochio is set in Italy in the 1930s, when the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was in power. To arrive at the design for the town and different buildings, the film’s designers conducted a great deal of historical research.
Director, Guillermo del Toro: Even the most stylized building in the movie, which is the Fascist Recruitment and Training Center, was from a photograph of a real place that had the giant M at the entrance for Mussolini.
Director, Mark Gustafson: The design of it is very stark, very cold, very intimidating.
Guillermo has a fascination with fascism, with the way that it distorts society. I think everybody thinks they know the story of Pinocchio. What appealed to me about this particular version was that it really turned the original material on its head. That material suggested that obedience was really important—“be a good little boy and everything will be okay.”
Our version questions that. Should we be completely obedient? Should we always do everything that people tell us to do?
Guillermo del Toro: We wanted to create a story about a world that behaves like a puppet and obeys everything they’re told, and a puppet that chooses to be disobedient and finds his own morality, his own soul, and his own humanity by that disobedience.