The Film That Lit My Fuse is a Deadline video series that aims to provide an antidote to headlines about industry uncertainty by swinging the conversation back to the creative ambitions, formative influences and inspirations of some of today’s great screen artists.
Today’s subject is Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican-born writer/director/producer whose stop-motion animated film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a frontrunner for the Best Animated Feature. As painstakingly generated as it is breathtaking, the stop motion tale of the famed wooden boy takes a decided detour from the iconic Disney film, even though they both used the Carlo Collodi story as reference. An accomplished world creator with films like Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Nightmare Alley, Pacific Rim and The Strain, del Toro’s career highlight is The Shape of Water, which won Best Picture and also won him the Best Director Oscar. He directed Pinocchio with Mark Gustavson, and Pinocchio returns del Toro to the father/son stories like Frankenstein that he loves to tell. Here, he explains it all in his irresistible way, including the films & series that influenced his sensibilities as filmmaker. That journey began in Mexico and then moved to Hollywood after his father was kidnapped and ransomed, with help from his dear friend James Cameron.
