Guillermo Del Toro has revealed he approached every big studio in Hollywood to pitch his idea for a dark Pinocchio film. The Oscar-winning director says he ended up at Netflix when everyone else turned down his stop-motion musical project.

The filmmaker had a hard time selling his remake of the Italian children's novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, because the project is set to be a dark political parable set ''during the rise of Mussolini. It's not a Pinocchio for everyone in the family. Pinocchio was set during the rise of Mussolini, so do the math. A puppet story during the rise of fascism. So it is political."

He adds, ''There's no fable without politics. Rarely can you get in productive discussions in real life right now - it's so tense. It's much easier for you to listen to me if I start with 'Once upon a time...'."

The Shape of Water director even compared the titular puppet-come-to-life to Frankenstein's monster. ''He's a creature that is created through unnatural means from a father that he then distances himself from, and has to learn about failure and pain and loneliness.''