Pinocchio

Director's Statement

Since the year 2000, as soon as I completed the fourth draft of the script, I've been slogging to find which would be the best and most original way to re-recount the story of Pinocchio. Abandoned. Resumed. Abandoned, then resumed, then abandoned. For what reason could Collodi have written such a moralist story for children - he who really didn't seem to be a moralist? And why a story for children? What was the point of view of the story? Pinocchio or Geppetto, the blue fairy or the cricket? I was missing the many metaphors implicit in the text and most of all the initial motivation of the author. Then my father passed away, on a November night of the year 2004. I tried to look in depth into a dialogue that had so often been superficial. I needed to understand and justify my behaviour as a "non-obedient" child. But I also needed to understand what had created his expectations in my regards, that so often I unattended... My father's memory, his way of hiding in lost and far-away certainties, looking at a war photograph, seeking in his children and in me the possibility of living what he had lived and (most of all?) of what he hadn't lived, of what he had lost - looking into my eyes, through my eyes, while I, his small golem of fat, was ruthless in my systematic rebellion to his aspirations, gifted of my own will, practically a father to myself. So I read Collodi's novel in this new light. While Geppetto carves Pinocchio, he sees himself in his own face. He imagines what Pinocchio sees when he looks at him. He realises he's becoming a father to himself. In the child-puppet he sees his past and his lost expectations, as well. He becomes emotional and nostalgic for the choices he never made. Perhaps Geppetto carves Pinocchio hoping to never end the carving? His objective is the path, his interior fantasy that creates the creation process: it's his point of view of a lost child to imagine the entire story. Regret, memory, future and expectations become Pinocchio.