Garrone looking for Italian Pinocchio

(ANSA) - Giffoni Valle Piana, July 20 - Italian director Matteo Garrone said Wednesday he is still looking to cast a young Italian actor to play Pinocchio in his next film project.
    Garrone, who was at the Giffoni Film Festival to receive the Truffaut Prize, said he has held auditions in Catania, Naples and Rome, and that the character won't have a specific regional accent.
    The director said the shoot is scheduled to begin next spring, with an expected theatre release in 2018.
    The Roman filmmaker who made a breakthrough with his 2008 movie Gomorrah based on the book by Roberto Saviano about the Naples Camorra mafia said he's related to the city of Naples by blood, as his grandmother is Neapolitan.
    "There's also a bond due to all the opportunities that Naples offers in terms of faces and personalities," he said.
    Garrone has filmed The Embalmer, Reality, and The Tale of Tales as well as Gomorrah in Naples. "I'm always happy to go to a place as richly evocative as Naples - you just have to try to impose order amid the chaos," he said.