Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and the stop-motion renaissance: an interview with co-director Mark Gustafson

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio may be Mark Gustafson’s first credit as principal director on a feature film, but he’s not short of experience in stop-motion animation. He got his start in the 1980s, when he served as the principal animator for the character of Huck Finn in the claymation feature The Adventures of Mark Twain, and as ‘claymator’ on Walter Murch’s dark, unofficial Wizard of Oz sequel Return to Oz (both 1985). He spent the following decades directing a number of stop-motion shorts, before becoming director of animation on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Notwithstanding some lengthy interruptions due to lack of funding, Gustafson and del Toro have been working on Pinocchio for more than a decade.

In this interview, Gustafson discusses his working process with del Toro, the recent resurgence in stop-motion animation, and what it was like to direct Cate Blanchett as a manically mischievous monkey.

It depended on the phase of production. During the writing, Guillermo and Patrick McHale would do their draft of the screenplay and send it to me; I would give them notes, and they would respond. I was involved from that stage, even though I technically wasn’t writing it.

I’ve been doing stop-motion for so long I know everybody who works in it; it’s a small world. So as we got into production I was able to go out and assemble a dream team to put this movie together – people I’d worked with from over the years, or people I hadn’t worked with but whose work I’d admired from afar. When you have someone like Guillermo involved, it makes things easier – people tend to have much more enthusiasm. And having such a good script so early on made it easier still.

At the beginning of a project, I try not to think of it in terms of animation – it’s purely about story and character. So, early on, I was simply bringing a slightly different perspective to the writing – a little grace note here and there, to make the next [scene] work. It’s hard to articulate exactly what my contributions were, as they happened over such a long period. But though the story did evolve, we hung on to the original screenplay’s key conceits all the way through.

Typically we [animation directors] do storyboards first, and then cut those to a soundtrack, so we can get a sense of pacing, tone and how the story’s working. A lot of movies change heavily during this animatic stage – you end up reinventing everything. But we didn’t need to do that for Pinocchio, as the script was strong enough. This meant we weren’t wasting resources. Nonetheless, there were differences between the page and the screen. You always find things to trim or reinforce during the animatic process.

You learn what and what not to be precious about. With stop-motion, your focus is one frame at a time, and you have to be careful not to let that one frame rule your world. It’s only important as it relates to the frames around it. So I’d learned to stand back as much as possible and keep things in context.

By nature, I’m not a technical perfectionist – absolute perfection in technique is not worth pursuing too far. Precision in emotion is much more important. Guillermo and I were really on the same page about this – the things important to him were also important to me.

There’s a tendency in animated films to do everything pose-to-pose. Everything has to be bright and broad. I’ve never really loved that; Guillermo is the same. Our mantra was, “Let’s pull back, let’s not be afraid of quiet and stillness where we need it.” The trick is that you have to trust your animators. The less you do, the more the audience has to focus on what you’re doing. There are no distractions. We knew those animators were the best, and if we made ourselves clear to them, they could really deliver for us.

We did a lot of historical research. We wanted to give the setting a real verisimilitude. The backgrounds feel somewhat real; there are no whacky angles. This was deliberate: we wanted Pinocchio to be the most fantastical element. So, in a given scene everything is somewhat recognisable and of a piece, but Pinocchio pops against that background. He’s the anarchical element that’s introduced.

We also took liberties with Collodi’s story. We often went left when he went right. We wanted a good reason to tell the story again.

You get the best animators you can find and you build a relationship with each and every one of them. You start to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and you ‘cast’ them so they’re working on shots they’re likely to excel at. You use certain animators for emotional scenes, like the ones that feature Geppetto; you use others for action scenes, like those with Spazzatura. Some animators had a real affinity with that crazy monkey.

We shot for a thousand days. In that time, not only do you learn animators’ strengths and weaknesses, you learn how to talk to them. They’re very much like actors. With some, you lay it out for them very carefully, beat by beat; with others, you just point them at the set.

A founding principle for us was giving agency back to the animators. Guillermo and I wanted them to be able to make choices, and change course if needed, when constructing the shots. We wanted these artists to bring something of their own, not feel locked in. We’d always brief animators carefully but also say, “If something better occurs or you notice something in the course of the shot, take advantage of it.” There’s danger in this approach – sometimes things can go pretty far off course – but you learn to know and trust these people.

It was pretty consistent throughout. It was the best kind of creative input – they trusted us to know what we were doing. They gave virtually no notes. We would check in with them every so often, of course, but that’s it.

Those are the two most important ones. There’s also a generation that’s now in power to say yes to projects, who grew up watching stop-motion. We’re all trying to recreate our childhood somehow.

Another reason, though, is technology. You can do anything imaginable with computers, but there’s a danger that comes with that. Stop-motion forces you to make different sorts of decisions. The sandbox being smaller makes you focus on different things, in a very good way. It’s more analogue; more like old-school filmmaking.

Not really; existing ones just became streamlined and easier to work with. Laika [the American stop-motion animation studio], for example, pushed forward the technology significantly. Compositing, particularly getting rid of rigs, has become much easier. You can really open up a [stop-motion] film’s scope – in our Pinocchio, almost all the skies were digital. We simply didn’t have the room to paint a sky. With green screen, we could use smaller units and open up the world that way. But generally we tried to keep things in-camera.

Motion control in animation has also evolved hugely. It’s got so much easier to use, and much less intimidating.

Guillermo had just worked with her on Nightmare Alley (2021). She approached him to ask if they could work together on his next project. He told her all the parts had already been cast; she said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Well, there’s a monkey…” And immediately she said, “I’ll do the monkey.”

It’s intimidating trying to direct Cate Blanchett to play a monkey. She’s squealing and squawking, and it’s hard to say, “Can you be a bit more high-pitched…?” We were just trying to get a range out of Spazzatura. He had to be angry, happy, distraught, confused – it’s amazing how much she got out of grunts and squeaks. She was completely committed to it. She really got inside that little guy’s head.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is streaming on Netflix from 9 December. It had its world premiere at the 66th BFI London Film Festival.