Guillermo Del Toro sees his Frankenstein as more Pinocchio than a classic horror
Frankenstein director Guillermo Del Toro has claimed the monster's story is "like Pinocchio".
Guillermo Del Toro wants his Frankenstein to be more like Pinocchio than a traditional horror story.
The 60-year-old filmmaker has opened up about his interpretation of Mary Shelley's iconic 1818 novel - which will star Oscar Isaac as scientist Victor Frankenstein, and Jacob Elordi as the legendary monster - and he insisted he never thought of it as a scary movie.
He told Variety: "No, I didn’t.
"It’s a story like Pinocchio, about a creature that is created by his father and thrown into the world, sort of into the deep end of the pool.
"He’s attempting to learn to swim by not drowning. Frankenstein is a song of the human experience. It’s the story of a father and a son."
Del Toro admitted there is a lot of his "own biography in the DNA of the novel and in the DNA of the movies".
Indeed, the director has been wanting to make this film for three decades, and through Netflix he's finally got his chance.
He said: "It took 30 years. It’s a movie I wanted to make before I even had a camera. "There’s the DNA of Frankenstein on Chronos, on Blade Two, on Hellboy. And we were developing it at Universal before they passed.
"I pitched it everywhere. It’s been my Mount Everest to climb."
The film will premiere at Venice International Film Festival later this month, before a big screen release on October 17, followed by its Netflix debut the following month.
Del Toro explained how he originally planned the project as "two movies", each focused on a different character's viewpoint which would "contradict" each other.
He recalled: "I originally wanted to make the same movie from two points of view and sort of contradict what you had seen in the first movie with the second one.
"But I decided it was much better to have a movie where there’s a hinge moment shortly after the creation, where the perspective shifts and you follow the creature in his travels after following Victor for the first part."
Del Toro noted that he's always felt a "spiritual" connection to the monster.
He added: "When I saw the James Whale Frankenstein as a kid, I completely emptied my soul into the creature. I thought, 'That’s me.' "It was a religious and spiritual moment for me. As a kid, I was very Catholic, and I thought I was seeing a saint or a figure of myth that represented me.
"Even at that early age, I felt, 'my God, this is so soothing for me to see the creature and his innocence.' He was an outsider. He didn’t fit into world."
