Out and about on the promotional trailer for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has been offering some updates on his next two directorial projects – an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, followed by a stop motion animated take on Carlo Collodi’s classic tale Pinocchio.
“Well what it is is that book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman before I saw the Tyrone Power movie, and I loved the book,” del Toro tells Collider about his upcoming Nightmare Alley, which he also confirmed will be R-rated. “My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily – the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have – in my short films, I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real ‘underbelly of society’ type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
Nightmare Alley will see del Toro teaming with Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born), while reports have suggested that the cast could also include Cate Blanchett (Thor: Ragnarok), Rooney Mara (Carol), Toni Collette (Hereditary), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse), Mark Povinelli (Water for Elephants) and Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water).
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Del Toro will follow Nightmare Alley with his long-gestating Pinocchio project, and the director explained to Variety what has drawn him to that particular story:
“To me, Pinocchio, very much like Frankenstein, is a blank canvas in which learning the curve of what the world is and what being human is are very attractive to do as a story. I’m very attracted to it because, thematically – and I don’t want to spoil what the movie’s about – it’s about something that is in all of my movies, which is choice. That’s a theme that is very dear to my heart.
“I think [earlier versions of] the story, and Collodi’s in particular, are very repressive. It’s essentially a very brutalist fable about what a sin disobedience is. And I think disobedience is the beginning of the will, and the beginning of choice. … I think there’s something that’s very attractive about seeing disobedience as a virtue, or as the beginning of a virtue.”
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