“Bellissimo, magnifico, fantastico.” Roberto Benigni springs high in the air on a marionette stage near Rome and claps his feet together. He breaks into superlatives, barely able to contain himself, to convey his passion for the world’s most famous puppet.
Two years ago the actor-writer-director had a huge success with Life is Beautiful , the controversial but oddly endearing film about a another father and son in a Second World War concentration camp. He was first spotted leaping up and down at that year’s Cannes festival awards and the Oscars ceremony. Now he has ploughed the profits from Life is Beautiful into realising his lifelong dream of bringing the story of Pinocchio to the big screen in full, restoring what Disney took out.
We can forgive him for being a little over-excited: in this most expensive of all Italian productions, budgeted at pound;27.5 million, he not only plays Pinocchio but he has to take care of the script (working with his friend Vincenzo Cerami, screenwriter on Life is Beautiful ), direction, locations, set, everything. And it’s all his own money.
It’s not clear yet whether the film - still shooting, amid secrecy - will reach the UK before the end of 2002. When it does, its appeal is likely to slot somewhere between that of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and The Lord of the Rings .
Benigni is keen to invest in Italian traditions, so all the props have been painstakingly crafted by Italian artisans, whose skills are increasing threatened by newer technologies. The director has set up a studio workshop where the older craftspeople can pass on their skills to apprentices.
It is perhaps no surprise that the fiercely Italian actor-writer-director would be drawn to the highly moral story of a naughty wooden puppet-boy, who only becomes human when he sees the error of his ways. He collects Pinocchio figures, memorabilia and editions of the original 1883 novel, written by Carlo Lorenzini under the pen-name Collodi.
The writer was born in Florence in 1826 (Benigni is also from Tuscany). He began writing in satirical papers, which were banned in Italy under Austrian rule. After translating the fairy tales of Charles Perrault into Italian in 1875, he devoted the remaining 15 years of his life to writing children’s books.
He wrote Pinocchio as a serial for a Rome newspaper in 1881, and published it in book form two years later. Today, it is the most translated book worldwide after the Bible and the Koran.
“Pinocchio’s world is a magic world,” says Benigni. “A world of fire-eaters, talking crickets, carriages pulled by mice, and gigantic sea-monsters. This is one of the most difficult roles I’ve ever played, being a mixture of Don Quixote, Faust and Hamlet. The whole history of the world can be found in the plot.
A longer version of this review appears in this week’s TES
