For a long time—decades, really—Guillermo del Toro thought his stop-motion Pinocchio movie would never get made. The studios didn’t understand his ambition to adapt the classic tale into a version where the wood boy would have to die multiple times, and del Toro gets it. “I understand how an executive’s head would explode,” he tells Vanity Fair. For years, he carried around this story, hoping to find a home for it. And it wasn’t until Netflix agreed to back the project that it finally came to fruition, resulting in a magical and emotional story, which he co-directed with Mark Gustafson. The film has won a slew of awards this season, and recently landed an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. 

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Fighting an uphill battle is nothing new for the Oscar-winning Mexican director, as he tells Little Gold Men this week. He’s had to do the same for many of his films, like Pan’s Labyrinth, and even Best Picture winner The Shape of Water. Time after time, del Toro proves that he can push the boundaries of filmmaking, whether in live-action or animation, often with a little help from his longtime collaborators (and friends like James Cameron). Listen below and read on to find out why del Toro will continue his fight for animation to be taken seriously as a medium for adults, how his bond with Cameron has grown over the years, and what other movies he admired from this past year.

Vanity Fair: You’ve had a special bond with the story of Pinocchio since childhood. How did that come about?

Guillermo Del Toro: It was the second or third movie I saw with my mother and a little later came Frankenstein. For some reason, I connected those two characters as a kid. Both of them have parents that create them and don't give them the tools to figure out the world, so I identified a lot. It felt very autobiographical for me.

Pinocchio and Frankenstein both addressed being adrift in the world as an anomaly. I didn't feel like a regular boy in Mexico. All the other boys were interested in football and climbing trees and getting into fights and, and I was interested in reading and watching movies. I was very introverted. If you can believe it, I was introverted and thin [Laughs]. I trained myself to banish one, and I naturally evolved into the other.

There were quite a few years when the film was kind of stuck in development hell, and it was difficult to find a studio to back it. What kind of things were you being told when you were being told no?

Well, the things that make a movie worth seeing are the things that make it difficult to get greenlit. I was having a meeting the other day for the next stop-motion film that I want to do, which is very giant, and they were saying, “but this is not what traditional stop motion does.” And I go, “that's why I'm doing it.” It’s perfect for stop motion, but I have to prove it. It was the same thing with Pan’s Labyrinth, with Devil’s Backbone of The Shape of Water. 

And to be completely honest, in the pitch meetings, I kept saying, “this is not a kid’s movie, but kids can watch it.” I wanted to be extra clear, which made it extra easy for them to pass because animation is kept on the children's table, at least in Western animation. 

I would think where you're at in your career, everyone should be saying yes to you because you prove that you can do these things even if they do seem difficult. But it sounds like with animation, it's a little harder to get people to think outside the box?

It is. I don't think it'll ever get easy. I think that we need to keep pushing things that are not normally done. Sometimes you fail or you don't reach an audience for whatever circumstances. It can be the movie itself, marketing, a pandemic, whatever. And then people retract very rapidly and say, “well, this movie or that movie didn't work.” But when you succeed with propositions like this, it is a miracle of great beauty. I mean, the fact that those movies that I mentioned succeeded and reached an audience in the capacity and size they did is beautiful. What I find is that my biggest hurdle after making them is marketing them. If they are marketed for what they are, an audience gets curious. If they get disguised as something else that is more accessible and more common, they don't. Unfortunately for me, as a filmmaker, sometimes I have a hand in the marketing, sometimes they don't give me that space. 

At the Critics Choice Awards, you spoke about how animation is not just for kids. Do you still feel like that is an uphill battle?

Yes, I don't think it’s a battle that is going to be won by three, four or five movies. It has to be sustained. I think it's up to the industry — we have to keep insisting on it. Particularly in stop motion, we have the same elements that are live action: we have real cinematography, real production design, real world of design, real directing, beautiful screenplay, etc. But we do it in miniature, one frame at a time. So we are to live action what Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire. We do the same steps backward in high heels.

Also at the Critics Choice Awards, you dedicated your win to James Cameron. You two have been friends for a very long time, but what does that look like at this point in your careers? Do you watch each other’s films early?

We share the cuts of our films early. Jim showed me Avatar and Avatar 2 in very early cuts. Sometimes, I help him take out — like, together we took out about 20 minutes of True Lies. He came to my editor room and helped me pare down Pan’s Labyrinth. And Shape of Water, and Cronos. Can you believe that? He’s been there for me since the first movie I made. I lived in his house for long periods of time when I was starting. I would live in the guest house. And he helped me get a negotiator when my father was kidnapped. There's the legend that he paid the ransom.

Right, I think it still says that on your Wikipedia page.

Yeah, that is not accurate. But he helped us get a negotiator from England to help us negotiate the ransom and he was there every step of the way. He is like an older brother in a way to me. I have learned so much from him. I have a great kinship with his approach. He is a magnificent brand. I'm an acquired taste. [Laughs.] There's a big difference in audience, but our approaches and desires for fantasy to be something of a different caliber in the world of cinema — they are similar.

Are there certain films from the past year that you really loved?

What I like is the variety of movies. There are things that were big in scope or ideas and they were very intimate movies. They were really small movies. You don't bet against Jim Cameron. Jim Cameron is gonna get the audience and he got it again. Steven Spielberg does a very personal movie that is full of actual darkness. It's not only about film, it's about family and forgiveness. You have what I think is going to be this generation's The Graduate, which is Everything Everywhere [All at Once]. It has been a very moving season, and I haven't landed fully because it seems to me that we were barely finished with Pinocchio when the movie premiered. It has been a season that started with Nightmare Alley, continued with Cabinet of Curiosities, then Pinocchio, and in the middle I lost my mom. And I still haven't landed any of those emotions. I'm still in the air. 

So where do you go from here? What story will you tell next?

My normal rhythm is if it's there, I take it—because I know that your latest movie may be your last movie, every single time. Careers end in a matter of months. If you take a vacation, you make yourself not bankable six months later. But this year I have made the decision of taking time to write. I have a couple of projects that are brewing, but I am going to ease myself into them. I also need to land from all of this. I need to process it. 

What would you say to other storytellers who have a story that they've wanted to tell for years and they can’t get it made?

I say often that there is that beautiful saying that I don't think it's entirely true: “If you build it, they will come.” Sometimes you build it and they don't come. But you gotta build it to find out, you know? What I think is the frustration you have as a filmmaker is that at least 60% of what you develop will not get made. I have over 30 screenplays, and I have only 12 movies, so I know the rate in the flesh. Imagine all those 20 screenplays took about 20 years roughly of my life that led to nothing. But it's practice. It's great practice and you should not be discouraged.