Pinocchio

The story of Pinocchio accompanied my childhood impressing images in my memory linked to feelings of fear, anxiety, and amazement. So I was inspired by those images, trying to make characters earthly and at the same time magical.

When I thought about the character of Mangiafuoco, I remember he scared me a lot as a child, because in the book was drawn as a terrible orc who held prisoners a group of unarmed puppets. I thought that he might has, in addition to the very long beard, a sign, a scar on his face that told about a life spent on the violence of the street, during his wandering. I’d like he was scared with his knife scar but I put this scar as a tear under the sad and wet actor’s eye.

Thinking of a dead child who became a fairy, when you are a child too, is terrifying but also fascinating. For this reason, I wanted the fairy child and then adult to be ethereal in death, beautiful, nostalgic, like Ophelia in the clear river, or as well as a beautiful preraffaellita’s woman image. The cat and the fox embodied many of my child’s fear; I imagined them, reading the book, as deformed, miserable, and evil men, so much so that they killed a child for four coins…

I hope I have made the idea well in their characterization. Reading the story of Pinocchio when you are a child you can really think that a man can survive into a belly of a whale and thus become an integral part of it. I remember that every day, during shooting, we had a lot of work but Certainly, when it was the Cat and Fox time, every one of make-up and special makeup were in panic. In fact, Massimo Ceccherini, who played the Fox, was like a baby on the chair of the dentist…never stop! 

For both characters, Even before the shooting started, I personally made the cast of the actors’ hands-on whose fingers I modeled and then reproduced in resin, the sharp and horrible nails, which the two characters have; after the masters of Mark’s staff, finished to applying silicon muzzle and ears, I continued with the application of the facial fake hairs, tuft by tuft, blending the hairline almost to the eyebrows and lengthening the animal-like bristly beard. I completed it with a nice film of dirty.

In the final phase, the characters change and appear aged and sick from the beggarly life they lead. Is funny because I realized more than fifty pairs of resin nails for fear that they would lose them everywhere…Rocco Papaleo, the actor who plays The Cat, has lost only one…so I keep the rest like a treasure!

Geppetto at the beginning of the story is a hungry and lonely carpenter with an unkempt beard, a face blackened from poverty, and his hand is injured from cold and work. His look changes when he gets trapped in the belly of the fish.  His makeup is on a green tone, I thought about a moist skin, greened by the microorganism of the sea and of the animal’s belly; a place without sun, like in the depth of the sea, where Geppetto has aged for a long stay and for the pain of loss of Pinocchio. I really hope in my heart Italian style be an important added value to the magic mood of the film.

The choice of the actress who would play the Adult Fairy was fundamental for me and with Marine Wacht, I could achieve what I had in mind: a cold color palette, based on shades of Prussian blue, IceWhite, Porcelain, and Ivory. Her beautiful hair needs eyebrows of the same color so I try to change hers with this unnatural light blue color. 

The result I wanted to achieve was iridescent skin and a lunar nuance, just a bit gloomy especially in the scene of the circus it was.
I think the magic that makes you enter a world like Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio, needs absolute attention to detail as well as characterization and exaltation of the protagonist.

In fact, around them, there is a whole village of peasants, breeders, traders, and children of the late 19th century who move and create a lively and realistic outline; their skin, often dirty with dust and earth,  their hands red from the cold, children with injured knees.

I, therefore, want to thank all the members of my staff who have worked with dedication and Harmony.