BIO
Giacomo Battiato
While navigating the final stretch of life’s journey, a natural inclination compels every sentient being to start fearfully untangling their skein of memories and confront their shortcomings. To stride towards one’s metaphorical winter, content with past accomplishments, is a luxury reserved for Zen Buddhist mystics. For the rest of us ordinary mortals, such serene satisfaction is often a folly only indulged by the foolish.
To feel less foolish, I decided to untangle a few strands of my memory’s large, tightly wound skein in public (even if I’m the least “public” person I know.) I could have never done this if my third wife, Anna, hadn’t lovingly tried to gather material I hadn’t conserved or some that I’d thrown away since I never like anything I make or have made, except my daughter and son. But my daughter and son are obviously not only the product of my endeavors alone.
1. Beginnings
I was born in a makeshift hospital under falling bombs in a village next to Verona. You got there by crossing the Adige River on a barge since the bridges had been destroyed. This village (Zevio, now a municipality with 15,000 inhabitants, twice as many as back then) is known for having given its name to a notable painter, the son of a Frenchman who lived there between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Stefano da Zevio. His wonderful Adoration of the Magi is at the Pinacoteca of Brera in Milan.
My mother was from Lombardy, and my father was from Sicily. Anyone who wants to know more about my beginnings can read Icarus Hanged in the Public Diary files.
I’ll begin to unwind this skein of memories after my painful adolescence, painful enough that it gave me a free pass to pursue my artistic ambitions. At the age of 21, I was a student of Modern Literature at the University of Milan, writing poetry and, at the same time, working at the publishing house Mazzotta Editore. There were three of us, and we did everything, from coming up with ideas for the books, composing them, and even delivering them (we’d load hundreds of volumes into the car and bring them to various distributors). I remember books on Surrealism and Pop Art, as well as An Anthology of Decadent Literature, which I edited.
One day, I stuffed my poetry into a large envelope. I had obtained the address of Fernanda Pivano, the translator of many great American writers and the author who brought the Beat Generation poets to Italy. I sent my poetry to her without ever expecting to receive a response. I was wrong. A phone call came: “Hello? This is Fernanda…”
She liked my poems and decided to publish some in her literary journal, Pianeta Fresco (Fresh Planet). She invited me to her house, and I became friends with her husband, the well-known architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. Ettore was about 25 years older than me, but he would get just as excited as someone my age when we talked about creating images, cinema, and photography. Cinema and photography were my second greatest passions after literature. A film career could only be a distant dream for someone from Milan because the film business was all in Rome. But film clubs in Milan were very active, and I would go as soon as possible. But that wasn’t all: I further indulged in the hobby thanks to my young wife’s approval. We had received wedding gifts, loads of silver that we heartily disdained. I found a goldsmith willing to buy all of it by weight. I loaded all the silver and junk into a bag and took it to him. All he had were small scales for weighing gold. So, we went next door to the butcher shop that had a large Berkel scale. I still remember the expression on the faces of the Milanese housewives as they watched us dump an absurd assembly of silver jugs and pitchers onto the scale. With the proceeds, I bought a Beaulieu 16mm and began to learn how to shoot film. I then tried, with that camera, to narrate the Milan suburbs, which, back in those years, were growing into desolate cement scapes.
2. From Poetry to Advertising
Ettore Sottsass was the official designer for the (then) great Olivetti. He had conjured up the world’s first portable typewriter in plastic, not steel. It was red with two yellow eyes. Ettore called it Valentina, like the heroine in Crepax’s comic books. It now graces museums such as the MoMA in New York and the Galleria d’arte Moderna in Rome, a certified “object of design”.
In a fit of madness, Sottsass decided that a young man, a certain Giacomo Battiato, should curate the advertising of his new avant-garde project. The Olivetti executives were even crazier when they didn’t blink an eye and, fully trusting Sottsass, did not even ask for my CV. I convinced them that such an object should be launched on the streets of London, the stomping ground of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. So, that’s what happened. I won’t dwell on the nitty-gritty of the production of these commercials nor my meticulous study of every detail of filmcraft. I was terrified of being found out as a neophyte who knew nothing of technique. Since I looked even younger than my age – early twenties-- I grew a beard so the English film crew would take me more seriously. And that’s how, as a self-taught rookie, I found myself directing with Alex Thompson as my DP, who had been a cameraman for Lawrence of Arabia and would go on to be DP of Jesus Christ Superstar and Excalibur. I enjoyed it very much. It was as if I had been framing shots and telling stories through image, movement, and light since I was a child. Things went better than good for Valentina, who became an icon, and for me. From one day to the next, I became a highly sought-after advertising director. A new and unexpected career had opened up before me. I worked like crazy and learned more and more every day. I won several awards, though I don’t remember which; for many years, even when I started to make films, I never attended award ceremonies. I considered it a petty ritual aimed at narcissism, and the narcissism of artists is pathetic. Even when talking about themselves and explaining their work, artists – whether painters, writers, directors, or others – often come off as pathetic. If I am falling into this same cloying vice by writing this short autobiography, please forgive me, for I am getting old. Some things are certain. I’ve always loved working, as much now as when I started. I have always avoided the more social aspect, which probably damaged my career, but I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve always paid more attention to the games I’ve lost than the ones I’ve won, to criticism rather than praise.
At the end of the rebellious 1960s, working in advertising was almost considered shameful for a politically engaged young man (hard to believe today). It meant selling yourself to the enemy: “capitalism.” I overcame this guilt while still being ashamed when I won the Golden Lion at the advertising festival in Cannes and two Oscars for commercials: the One Show Gold Award, awarded by the Art Directors Club in New York, and the Andy Award of Excellence, awarded by the Advertising Club, again in New York. I did not attend these three ceremonies and never collected the awards.
The Argentine architect and designer Emilio Ambasz became curator of the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He asked me to create a “fresco” of the masterpieces of the best Italian designers, a film to project in a loop for visitors entering the Museum. I staged an epic, long single take from a crane that started at Piazza del Duomo in Milan and went through the Galleria, where the works were exhibited (a tower for each piece of design). The shot ended inside the Teatro alla Scala, where the works were displayed on stage. This itinerary took us past the greatest icons of Italian design. For two nights, we blocked the center of Milan, the pulsating heart of creativity where most Italian designers worked.
I spent several years in the fast-paced business of advertising and industrial documentary filmmaking, traveling all over the world, earning good money, working with the greatest cinematographers of the day, and honing my self-education. I could fill a volume with comic and even hallucinatory accounts of my experiences during those years while working on documentaries in the forests of central Africa, among snakes, scorpions, and other amenities in the company of a cinematographer who was just a little older than me but still a rookie himself, Vittorio. One day, he’d become the legendary Vittorio Storaro.
At some point, I stopped to look in the fateful mirror and asked myself: “Is this really what you want to do?” No, of course, it wasn’t. I wanted to tell stories. I had moved away from the publishing world where I had started, but now I possessed the tools of filmmaking. I started over again. I abandoned the large film crews, the great DPs, and the 35mm cinemascopes, and I began to film documentaries and cultural programs with small film crews, small cameras, young technicians, and a low budget.
3. After that Pivot, a Few More Steps: Boulez, Giulini, and The Expressionism
I love music, so I spent a year following and filming the work and thoughts of two great musicians, Carlo Maria Giulini and Pierre Boulez. Boulez was at the peak of his artistic and professional life, conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Orchestra, and guest conductor of the greatest orchestras in the world. He was also one of the most influential composers of the time. For many months, I felt almost like I was dating the "genius." When filming concerts, I would always focus one camera only on his hands. I would edit the material myself. The music seemed to come out from his fingers, even the final notes of the tiniest of instruments! No gesture of his hands was emphatic, generic, or mechanical. The effect was unreal and magnificent. The notes and the instruments called upon to play them were an integral part of the conductor’s nervous system. I’ve never seen anything like it with other conductors, whether live or through a lens.
I filmed a conducting class at the Juilliard School in New York. A young student conducted (also with bare hands, without a wand, like his teacher) the Prelude of Wagner’s Parsifal. I put a camera on their four hands. The student’s gestures looked inaccurate and confusing compared to Boulez’s, so confusing that, exasperated, Boulez started to slap the young man’s hands while the orchestra slid into cacophony. What a shot!
Pierre Boulez was the ultimate example of obsessive discipline and dedication to one's work.
Carlo Maria Giulini was different; he was a romantic—a great conductor of romantic music whose gestures were even romantic, in the tradition of Furtwaengler. At our first meeting, when Giulini's wife saw me (I looked like a young kid and, more or less, I was), she jumped back with a start, unable to contain herself, “How is this possible? Carlo Maria worked with Visconti at La Scala, and they‘ve called you to direct a film portrait of him?” I replied that it was not my fault if they had chosen me; perhaps Visconti was otherwise engaged. I spent much time with Giulini (and his wife, who followed him everywhere he went) and with the greatest orchestras in Europe and the United States. I interviewed him on long walks on the shores of Lake Michigan and in the woods of his beloved Dolomites. I had an idea: I wanted to explain the role of the conductor in making music to audiences. In an old pub in London, I had Giulini meet David Hemmings, the star of Antonioni's Blow Up. David (who was later a director, although many may remember him as an actor playing Cassius in Gladiator, one of his last roles) had a musical background and had been a young interpreter of Benjamin Britten’s works. What did I ask Hemmings to do? While standing in a smoky pub in front of pints of beer, I asked him to recite the same passage from Shakespeare’s Richard III several times and, each time, took a completely different approach: aggressive, whiny, painful, furious, sad, etc. Each time, he acted the monologue in an exciting but completely different way. A conductor does the same thing in front of a score; this is interpretation. The notes on paper are the same – just like the words in the Shakespearean text – but in their transformation into sound, they can communicate various emotions. One was not necessarily better or more correct than the other.
The German co-producer of these profiles of musicians was satisfied with my work, so he asked me to explain Expressionism in a one-hour filmed profile. I would have accepted this job even if he hadn’t paid me. I gave myself a challenge: I would not use any form of didactic narration. I won the bet. The revolutionary force of the paintings of the two strands of Expressionist painting, Der Blaue Reiter in southern Germany and Die Brucke in the north, spoke for itself, and I commented on it using Expressionist music. I staged fragments of expressionist theatre and a piece from Schoenberg’s Erwartung, filming it in Munich while also inserting snippets of expressionist cinema. With no thanks to me, but thanks to the painters whose works I photographed and filmed in all the German museums and the musicians and directors of that magical and difficult time in German history, this strange and visually rich film won The Mifed Grand Prix, or so the producer told me. I didn’t know what this prize was, nor did I go to collect it. However, this deep study of expressionism was perhaps the most significant of my many apprenticeships.
4. I Meet Dante Spinotti, and a Brotherhood Starts
After having had these experiences, I met a cinematographer my age from Friuli who was working for RAI Television in Milan. He would ride in from the hinterland by train in the morning, punch his timecard, and wait for a call in the "cameramen’s room”; the call might be for a dramatic TV series or to film a ribbon-cutting ceremony. We forged a bond so great we were like brothers, and once I moved to Rome, I did everything I could to have him move down, too. And at one point, he did. The man I am talking about is the two-time Oscar nominee (L.A. Confidential and Insider), Dante Spinotti. RAI's Milan office was to produce a series of short readings from the great novels of world literature with Franco Parenti (a great actor). The program would be aired in prime time immediately after the evening news and be called Eight Pages. I told the producers that television was not radio, and filming an actor behind a lectern, no matter how good the actor might be, was not something I was willing to do. I made a counterproposal: I would stage it not as a reading but use excerpts from the novels that had dialogue and Franco Parenti dressed and made up as the different characters would act all of them so that after everything was edited, Franco would be performing with himself playing all the characters. They accepted my proposal, Parenti was enthusiastic, and, I was told, the program inspired a large number of viewers to read those novels. This is where the brotherhood with Dante started. We shared the same view about the aesthetics of the photography, and the same passion for Cinema.
5. I Move to Rome
It was the early seventies. Here, my professional and personal memories become a larger and more entangled ball of yarn. One day, while I was still in Milan, the phone rang (I swear this episode is true). At the other end, a RAI executive in Rome told me he had seen my work and would like to meet and work with me. We set up an appointment. I took a train (which took endless hours back then) and arrived for my appointment at the main offices of RAI. The executive’s name was Sergio Silva (he later spearheaded the TV series La Piovra - The Octopus, known the world over). We started collaborating on Il Marsigliese (The Man from Marseilles), written with Luciano Codignola (a playwright and translator of Strindberg), inspired by actual events happening in the current war among organized crime groups to gain control of smuggling and where deaths of Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Marseille gangsters were piling up. The two young protagonists of Il Marsigliese were Frenchman Marc Porel and Vittorio Mezzogiorno in one of his first major projects. Obviously, I asked Dante to come down to Rome and join me in this adventure, but he told me he did not feel ready to change his life completely yet. It was a low-budget shoot with a tight, hectic schedule. I moved to Rome with my wife and daughter, cutting all ties with Milan, and while shooting this film, I kept having nightmares that it would be a total failure and, therefore, a catastrophe in my personal and professional life.
In making Il Marsigliese, I used an almost aggressive narrative technique for the times, certainly unknown to Italian television. The three-hour film was divided into three parts and broadcast on three consecutive Sundays. On those Sundays, half of Italy stopped, and after that, I did not, as I feared, remain out of work. The film won one award for Best Director and another for Best Thriller. I didn’t go to get them (just like I never went to get the ones I won for commercials). Why? Arrogance perhaps? Rejection of the conventions by a young anti-conventional activist? Or was it my deeply buried insecurity that I could have done a much better job and did not deserve any awards at all? The real prize came when I was told that Luchino Visconti, already an old man then, had watched all three episodes of the film and sent a note of his appreciation.
After Il Marsigliese, I was given a chance to write and direct my own story. Out of this opportunity came Un Delitto Perbene (A Classy Crime) another three-part, three-hour film. As in the previous one, we shot on color film (Kodak, 50 ASA), but it would be broadcast in black and white. This film tells the story of a brilliant young doctor from Milan, married with children, who wakes up one morning with amnesia lying next to his dead lover, her throat slashed. He had no reason to kill her. Or did he? Had his double life become unbearable for him? Or, did the girl who suffered from angioedema, Quincke's edema, have a sudden attack in the night in bed with him, and his vain attempt to save her life by making an incision in her windpipe fail, shocking him to the point of fainting and losing his memory? It was a psychological thriller. The actors were Claudio Cassinelli, Anna Maria Gherardi, Cecilia Sacchi and Renato Scarpa. The RAI center in Milan produced the film, and I worked with Dante Spinotti again. We studied, experimented, had fun, and slept little. Dante recounts this experience in his autobiography The Dream of Cinema, published by La Nave di Teseo in 2023.
6. Light and Shadows. My Extravagant Professional Biography Takes Form
When it comes to “light,” I realize that in talking about my films, I tend to pay particular attention to the directors of photography who have worked alongside me. If “cinematography” etymologically means “writing in motion” and “photography,” as Vittorio Storaro has tirelessly reiterated, means “writing with light,” an essential symbiotic brotherhood forms with those who provide me with the tools to “write in motion with light.” However, this doesn't diminish the fact that this writing truly comes to life and only makes sense when you have a) quality scriptwriting and b) the magical collaboration with actors.
I was asked to direct Martin Eden from Jack London’s novel, an international co-production written by Jack London’s biographer, a refined English writer named Andrew Sinclair. At the time, Sinclair was living with his very British family in Malibu. I went to stay with him for a few weeks for the final revision of the script. And there was an earthquake. We were isolated for several days. The oceanfront home had a large crack running through it. Day after day, the crack in the floor widened so that we saw sand when we looked in it. We moved all the furniture to the side of the mountain and kept writing. Andrew, good Englishman that he was, did not break down because the house was not his; it was rented.
Martin Eden is an autobiographical novel containing two pivotal ideas of the old American vision of life. The first, I will say in Latin: “Nihil difficile volenti” (Nothing is impossible for the one who wants), and the second: “What matters is not to reach the goal but the struggle to get there.” So, the protagonist of the novel, a rough, poor, and semi-illiterate sailor, happens upon a poem and a beautiful, refined woman. He is dazzled and decides that one day, he will be a writer, and only then will that woman love him. His is a thankless battle: He starts to study and tries to write, starving and making sacrifices, but he obtains nothing but rejection, contempt, and insults. After a long struggle and going through hell, he fulfills his dream and becomes an acclaimed writer. At that point, he is rich, celebrated, sought after, and even loved by the woman who had once rejected him. But at this point, Martin has been emptied out: He is disgusted by everyone and everything, and he kills himself by drowning, plunging to the bottom of the sea. The film lasts five hours, divided into five episodes. They told me it was a great success in many countries and one of the first European TV series to be sold to an American cable station, CBS, if I remember correctly. At the New York screening for the distributors, they asked, stunned, how I had filmed the San Francisco Bay without any modern buildings. We did not have Computer Generated Images back then, and you could not erase anything from images. I explained that, after studying the mapping of the Bay area, I had found a precise spot by Lake Como that corresponded with it, and (fortune favors fools) there were still paddle boats from the early twentieth century, which we used. With great pleasure, I can report that two talented writers, one Roman and the other Emilian, confessed that watching this film when they were young boys inspired them to become writers. Dante Spinotti was still in Milan and could not come. The DP was Pasqualino De Santis (I had already shot commercials with him). Pasqualino had won the Oscar for Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet; he was the cinematographer of almost all of Francesco Rosi’s films and had been Luchino Visconti’s DP for Death in Venice. He was a difficult personality and was a tyrant with his assistants. I would scold him for it because, actually, he was a man with a big heart, but he was shy, and his obsessive passion for his work tortured him, causing him, in turn, to torture his collaborators. When he was filming Death in Venice, his assistants had to develop clips of each of the shots from that day in the hotel bathroom at night. Pasqualino wanted to check the quality of light in each frame immediately. The next morning, his assistants showed him the clips of developed negative and he would show them to Visconti. The camera crew lived a life without rest on that set.
Pasqualino told me about an emblematic episode from when he was still paying his dues as a young man, an anecdote I am sure Spielberg would love. When Pasqualino was very young, he started out as a shopboy. From time to time, he would work for a shop that rented out camera equipment for the movies. One day, they called Pasqualino in and sent him to Cinecittà, where a colossal was being shot to bring them another camera. The camera was the legendary American Mitchell. I used it once in England: it was wonderful for its history, its weight, and for how incredibly impractical it was. The model entrusted to Pasqualino was mammoth and could only be used with an equally heavy crankhead. Every morning, young De Santis would arrive with the camera at Cinecittà, mount the big guy, and get ready to take it to the set where many other cameras were shooting. A few days later, Pasqualino arrived at Cinecittà and set everything up, but no one called him onto the set: they didn’t need the mammoth camera. The same thing happened again the next day and the next. Pasqualino was afraid they would tell him that they were done with the colossal camera and that he did not have to show up anymore, which meant he would be sent home and no longer be paid. He confessed to me that he kept arriving early in the morning with the camera, hiding in a bathroom so the organizers would not see him and therefore couldn’t cancel the camera rental. He would then sit on the toilet seat for hours, holding the heavy Mitchell in his arms and the header and lens case at his feet.
Pasqualino died while clutching onto a movie camera in the snow in Ukraine on the set of The Truce. Before we left, we had spoken to each other on the phone: “Giacomo, when will we get to work together again?”
Pasqualino would shower me with affection and esteem and scold me because I was ‘too good’ and you cannot be good in this profession. Yet all his goodness was on display when he would call me his young Italian David Lean. One day, while setting a sequence in Martin Eden, he told me: “You are the first director who has asked me to place the actors’ faces in the sun and - what is even more worrisome is that I keep listening to you!” I had explained to him how the California sun burned and wrinkled the faces of the old Californians. Our protagonist was Christopher Connelly (Paper Moon); along with him were my then inseparable Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Capucine, Flavio Bucci, Andréa Ferréol, and Delia Boccardo, a beautiful and talented actress who deserved a much more substantial career.
Among the many memories that tie me to this experience, I cannot omit this: one day, Christopher Connelly was being driven to set by a young assistant who later became a very good production manager and is still my dear friend. They were going down the via dei Fori Imperiali, by the Roman Forum. Suddenly, Christopher asked the young man to stop the car. He got out, reached the curb facing the Roman Forum, collapsed on the ground, and began to sob. My young assistant, worried, went over to him, asking whether he was ill. Christopher (originally from Wichita, Kansas) pointed to the Roman ruins in the immensity of the Forum and told him, in tears, “This is too much for me!”
I made another film for television, in Trieste, with Pasqualino De Santis as DP: Il giorno dei Cristalli (The Day of Broken Glass). The protagonists were Vittorio Mezzogiorno and Francisco Rabal. Spinotti, who had not been able to participate in the venture, called me after seeing it in a state of genuine enthusiasm. I don’t remember what triggered his enthusiasm, which I didn’t share (I’ll ask him if he still remembers). Maybe it was the formal approach. I was going through a bad period, an existential crisis, and I did not consider the film successful. At all.
My next experience was with Spinotti, and it was successful: Colomba, from the novel by Prosper Mérimée. This remarkable writer, a polyglot, a translator of the great Russians, a painter, and an archaeologist, wrote two striking portraits of women, Carmen and Colomba, both inspired by true stories. Colomba is a tale of vengeance that Mérimée had heard while touring the wiles of Corsica, the Island of Beauty, as an Inspector of Historical Monuments. In order to move around the rocks, run on the mountain slopes, and cross the gorges on horseback, I decided we needed a Steadicam. In Italy, Steadicams were not available yet. My friend, a successful photographer from Milan, bought one at his own expense, took a quick course with Garret Brown, its inventor, and joined us on the set of Colomba. I used that Steadicam and abused it. Dante’s cinematography was amazing, as was the cast: Anne Canovas (at the time a very young actress with great talent), Alain Cuny, Umberto Orsini, and then the passionate and gifted Elisabetta Pozzi. The actor, Alain Cuny, was a "special" human being.
I lost the letters Alain wrote me after the film during an unfortunate move. As an actor, Cuny has had his ample share of praise, yet something happened that I’d like to recount. On set, we had horses trained, especially for the cinema. A camera could get right up by their eyes. You can place a deafeningly loud wind machine next to them, a projector, or you can shout or even shoot a gun in front of them… these horses always keep their composure. Well, in the film's final scene, the character played by Alain, an old man crazy with grief for the death of his two sons he himself sent to die, approaches Colomba. She’s sitting on her horse enjoying her revenge, the death of those two. Sweating and covered in flies, Alain moved toward Colomba, whispering his curse and staring at her with mad hatred. The intensity of the hatred in his look was so powerful that it caused this horse, accustomed to everything and never bothered by anything, to back away and then rear up. Not only was I amazed, but everyone was.
Ruggero Mastroianni was the editor of the film. One day, he told me, “I’m sorry, Giacomo, but you just have to stop. All your colleagues, whether famous or completely unknown, when they come by the editing room, they start getting excited about what they see, pointing: 'Look at the wonder of this shot!' 'But this sequence is magnificent!' 'Look at what a great director I am!' You’re the only one who ever makes comments like: ‘This could have been better, I should have done this or that, I don’t like anything here, here, it’s not good.' Stop it, Giacomo!” That’s just how I was and how I’ve continued to be. I’ll just skim positive reviews, but I will reread any negative and insulting reviews a hundred times. Masochist? Perhaps a simple awareness of my faults and limits and my constant desire to do better.
7. Hearts in Armour
I’m going to talk about a film that for some became a cult classic (they still talk and write to me about it even after more than forty years) and by others is cordially detested. It was undoubtedly highly controversial: Hearts and Armor — a Vides production by Franco Cristaldi and Nicola Carraro, distributed by Warner Bros. The conflicts around the script inspired by the famous Chanson de Geste were many and unpleasant, both in Rome and in Burbank, California. In a booklet of memories, one of the two Italian screenwriters hired by Vides to write the movie insults on me. He doesn’t deserve an answer. I leave to him all his acrimony, ignorance and vulgarity. He doesn’t know that, though the screenplay was based on a fascinating pitch, once written it was considered unpresentable by Warner. And it was. There was a rush as the film was already in preparation, leading multiple people in Los Angeles, myself included, to put their hands on it. Unfortunately, and this is a fact, the final result did not improve by much. The story of this conflict is one that still bores me, and I certainly do not want to bore you with it. The result of the conflicts was that, with too much presumption, I decided to make a purely visual film, a dazzling Hollywood version of Pupi Siciliani, the Sicilian marionettes, all shot on Mount Etna.
“Who do you want for your DP?” Cristaldi asked.
“Dante Spinotti.”
“And who is he?”
“The right guy.”
“What do you mean? You've worked with several Oscar winners now, and we don't have financial problems: give me a big name.”
“Dante Spinotti.” And I added, “Since it costs you a lot less than hiring one of the 'big guys,' pay for him to stay in Los Angeles before we start so we can catch up on the cutting-edge technology.”
That’s what we did. We made a film with a poor script and a cast of mostly 'beautiful' rather than 'good' actors (I’m a bit ashamed of this choice) the famous “Sicilian marionettes”. However, some say the visual impact was breathtaking. It had three nominations to the David di Donatello (director, cinematographer, costume designer) and was distributed in many countries worldwide. After that film (which, if I remember correctly, the British Cinematographers Association called “one of the 100 most beautifully filmed movies in the history of European cinema”), Dante left for Los Angeles, this time more or less for good. Nanà Cecchi, who got the David for the costumes and armor, was immediately called by Richard Donner (who had seen the film in Hollywood) to design the costumes for Ladyhawke.
One of the admirers of the film was Antonio Pasqualino, a renowned doctor from Palermo, professor of anthropology at the University of Berkeley. He is the founder of the Association for the Preservation of Popular Traditions, and author of the famous book “The Ways of the Knight”. His passionate enthusiasm for the film and for its tribute to the Sicilian string puppets theatre is unforgettable. Umberto Eco, in his essay “Ten Ways of Dreaming the Middle Ages” rides across four centuries of medieval fascination. He meets, among many others, the great poet Ariosto and Darth Vader. When he arrives to today (1985) he quotes the novelist Malerba and Hearts in Armour. He says about the film: “Sicilian String Puppets” with faces recalling the homosexual liberation movement, and a visual imagery inspired by the paintings of Eleanor Fini and Fabrizio Clerici. Perfect. He also says: “Like all dreams, the medieval one too risks to be illogical and a place of wondrous discrepancies.” It is true that we don’t dream about the Middle Ages because it is the past, but rather because it is that imaginary place where all the key element of the European civilization melt.
Hearts in Armour is only a visual game but, 36 years later, chance will lead me to another medieval dream with a quite different spirit and weight, and with Eco himself: the eight hours from The Name of the Rose.
9. Blood Ties
In 1985 and 1986, I directed Blood Ties, which I wrote with the journalist and writer Corrado Augias. I believe this was the first time that Sicilian judges who were under police protection due to threats from the Mafia were ever mentioned in a film. While writing the script, I spent a day in Palermo with the judge Giovanni Falcone, whose name, at the time, was known only to insiders. RAI produced the two episodes, and Viacom acquired the project after just screening rough cuts and distributed it worldwide, uniting the episodes to make a single film version. In the United States, it was released on Showtime, where it was featured on prime time for months. The New York Times wrote: “Directed with a lean intensity by Giacomo Battiato, ’Blood Ties’ can still make the rest of us sit up and watch in horrified fascination. If ‘Blood Ties’ works better than some others, it's because Mr. Battiato, making the most of his Palermo locations, powerfully captures the prevailing claustrophobia of the situation. Once caught in this organization's net, there is no escaping. Movements are followed carefully on different continents (…) The more ambitious of Italy's television productions are noted for their extraordinary sumptuousness and beauty. If the process used for ‘Blood Ties’ can get more of that product on American home screens, more power to it.”
I’d like to mention briefly three things. Firstly, working with such an extraordinary actor as Brad Davies was a pleasure. When you, as a director, finally get on set to see an actor in character, you can have three possible reactions. The first possible reaction is disappointment. I have felt this (albeit very rarely), and I would be in despair while also feeling like an awful director. I would no longer be able to think clearly about the arc of the scene, horrified at my inability to pick an actor and/or the lack of time I had devoted to rehearsals. The second possible reaction is finding the actor giving you the performance just as you imagined it would be. Excellent, you have the confirmation that you have made the right choice and that the final result will correspond to your expectations. Then there is the third case. The actress or actor begins to play their first important scene, and you, the director, are amazed. You realize you’re getting a huge gift because they give you more than you ever thought or imagined. Well, this has happened to me more than once, and I felt great joy and gratitude. With Brad Davies, it happened. We remained friends, exchanging letters, until his death (from AIDS). I also lost those letters, unfortunately, when I moved house after a difficult divorce.
The second story related to this film concerns another actor in a minor role (he was the father of the character played by Brad Davies): Michael V. Gazzo. Today, only theater and film history buffs probably remember his name. Michael Vincenzo Gazzo was born in New Jersey in 1923 to a family of Italian immigrants (whose surname, in all likelihood, had been vulgarly deformed or invented at Ellis Island: “Cazzo,” in Italian, is a vulgar expression for “prick”). Michael Gazzo had been nominated for an Oscar for his role as Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather (Part Two), but more importantly, he was the author of a huge Broadway hit, a play about morphine addiction in Korean War veterans, A Hat Full of Rain. Gazzo had also been an influential teacher at the Actors Studio. In short, he was a man of great qualities and merit. So, we were shooting in December in a giant abandoned factory in Brooklyn. It was -4 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of time was spent that morning trying to make the lenses usable since they’d come out of their cases completely fogged because of the cold. One of the scenes we had to shoot that day was where a Mafia henchman, in a fit of rage, beat the old man Michael played. By chance, just before the scene, a production assistant informed me that Michael had a heart condition and already had had a heart attack. I became very worried. We shot the first take. The scene went well, just as planned, so I said it was good, and thank you. Slumped on a stool and still panting, Michael called me over and whispered: “Giacomo, you’re not saying that the first take is good just because you’re worried about me, are you?” I replied that no, I was thrilled with the scene and that there was no reason to repeat it, given the violence. But he insisted, “Giacomo, this is your movie; you don’t have to think about me. You have to think about your film. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. If you want to do another take, do it!” I don’t get emotional easily, but I could feel my eyes welling up with tears. Perhaps Michael reminded me of my father. I did not do another take.
One last memory of this film. In those years, at the Venice Festival, there was a section dedicated to television films worthy of the Festival. Blood Ties was among them. I went to Venice for the screening and returned to Rome as soon as possible. My issues with crowds, glamour, and the associated business of show business have been a constant all my life. A week later the phone rang: run to the airport, your flight to Venice is about to leave, you must be there tonight, you won the Golden Lion for television. At this point in my professional life, I decided that I could afford to accept a prize and gratify the narcissism that, whether we like it or not, lurks within all of us. So I obeyed, obviously surprised and happy, and I decided I would make myself enjoy this recognition. I didn’t even have time to think I might need a tie, so I left. Once I got there, I was on the motorboat when they informed me that it was an award ex-equo with Ingmar Bergman, who, along with Kurosawa, I considered and still consider my favorite director, a legend. His film in competition was The Blessed Ones. I immediately thought I was unworthy of accepting the award next to him and wanted to return to Rome. Bergman (not only a great director but also a tremendous psychosomatic who would live to be 89 years old) was feeling (or perhaps believed he was) ill, so he would not be there. I had not seen his film in competition (a bleak story of marriage and madness). When I was called to the stage, I accepted the Lion but did not say a word except “thank you,” and then I ran to the hotel. My wife recently found a photograph of me accepting the award wearing a sad expression; next to Bergman, whether he was present or not, I felt like an absolute zilch.
10. Anthony Quinn, Stefania Sandrelli, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow and Other Greats
A producer (not the most pleasant of people making movies at the time) called me and told me he wanted to work with me. This happened in the second half of the 80s. I suggested a story that I wrote about a violent relationship where the man ends up killing his female partner. “Interesting, strong, maybe a little tricky for distributors because the audience does not seek out these stories. But, sooner or later, we will make it!” This was more or less his answer. In the meantime (that “sooner or later” never came), he told me that I had to help him with a problem: he had signed a contract with Anthony Quinn to shoot a film about Stradivari, the famous violin maker, but he was afraid of the Mexican-Irish star and didn’t like the script. The luthier from the city of Cremona had many children, and so did Anthony Quinn; the actor wanted to work with his sons just like the famous maker of violins, cellos, and double basses had. The producer in question, therefore, asked me to direct the film with this great actor who had started his career ten years before I was even born. Intrigued by the idea of working with Zapata, Zorba the Greek, Zampanò (from Fellini’s La Strada), and Barabbas, coupled with my love of music, made me say yes. I asked Visconti’s screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico to rewrite the script, and she wrote a screenplay that she defined as being “à la Roberto Rossellini,” implying that the details of life, of their life, no matter how trivial, constituted the plot and drama in the film. I directed it with great respect. Along with Tony Quinn and his sons, Valérie Kaprisky and the marvelous Stefania Sandrelli were in the cast. Yes, Stefania is an incredible actress indeed. You don't realize it on the set while she is acting, but when you see her later on the screen, you discover magic has happened and that the characters she plays have a simple, profound, spiritual humanity. It is astounding. I regret not having had other opportunities to work with her. The DP was Tonino Delli Colli. Tonino was not only a great director of photography (with Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Fellini, among many other greats) but also a sincere and authentic man. I remember that on the first day of the shoot, right after I said “Action,” I heard a rumbling behind me, someone mumbling. I immediately shouted, “Cut!” and noticed that the muttering was Tonino chatting with the gaffer. But how could this be? We're shooting! I've always demanded absolute silence on the set. Later, Tonino came to apologize: after being on Fellini's sets where a chaos of sound before and during filming was part of the game, he had fallen out of the habit of the sacredness of live sound recording.
As many know, Anthony Quinn was an exuberant, generous actor and human. He had his own personal portable set chair, and it was very high. He had one made for me, the same height, and always wanted me to sit next to him. In the moments of pause, we sat close, perched up high, like two birds on the wire, and he would tell me about his life (dreams, mistakes, women, moments of glory, and suffering). I don’t have a very positive memory or opinion of the film, but I do of my time spent next to Tony.
The following year, I was offered another period film, an international co-production (three hours for television and a two-hour film for cinemas). This is one of the few films I genuinely love (and critique less), Cellini: A Violent Life, based on La Vita, the autobiography of the Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. It has been said that this is the first document of the Modern Intellectual talking about the artist’s alienation and his rebellion to the alienation. The screenplay was by Vittorio Bonicelli, an extraordinary man for his culture and manners, and who at the time was a RAI executive. Among other films, he was also co-writer of De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Whoever might want to know more about Benvenuto Cellini and what his life represents for me (and anyone who makes the arts, whether willing or not, their profession and source for their daily bread) can read the piece that I wrote about him in my Public Diaries on this website, entitled “Clever, Cocky, and Pissed-Off. A Genius.”
Dante Spinotti came in from the United States. His cinematography in this film was amazing (we are still asking in vain for the negative to be restored). The Oscar winner Gianni Quaranta was the brilliant art director and Nanà Cecchi was the costume designer. We narrated the Renaissance (and did it very well, as Moravia wrote in one of his last reviews). The process was exciting and happy. In the cast, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Sophie Ward, Ennio Fantastichini, Florence Pernel, Maurizio Donadoni, and many other talented actors. Cellini was played by the young French actor of Polish origin, Wadeck Stanczak, brought to prominence by André Téchiné in the film Rendez-vous, which won Best Director at the 38th Cannes Film Festival. Wadeck had extraordinary qualities as an actor; unfortunately, health problems destroyed his career, which started off brilliantly. Sir Ben Kingsley played the crazy warden of Castel Sant'Angelo prisons at the time of Pope Paul III Farnese. When we wrapped, Ben Kingsley could not stop hugging me, thanking me for making him play “the most magnificent madman imaginable.” As for Max von Sydow, the fetish actor of my fetish director, what can I say? I have never met a more discreet, dedicated, and humble person. I could fill several pages on this film (which was told chronologically in the extended television version and instead through flashbacks in the version for theaters), but I do not want to bore readers.
11. Back to My Beginnings: the Literature
Despite my happy professional experience while making Cellini: A Violent Life, those were not happy years at all in my personal life. I took a break and wrote a novel (Fuori dal Cielo – Out of Heaven). Being a novelist was what I had wanted to do since I was a student, but the randomness of life took me elsewhere. At that time, I no longer had any link with the publishing world, which, unlike today, looked rather badly upon people in the entertainment business. So, after writing the novel, I chose three or four publishers I liked and did precisely as I had thirty years earlier when I mailed my poems to Fernanda Pivano. I stuffed the manuscript with a short letter of presentation in an envelope and sent it without expecting anything. The publishing house Marsilio chose to publish it, coming out with two editions, and the book won the Domenico Rea Prize, the First Novel Prize at the Turin Book Fair, and ranked as a finalist at the Premio Stresa in fiction.
Two other novels followed L’Amore nel Palmo della Mano (Love in the Palm of My Hand), edited by Mondadori, and 39 Colpi di Pugnale (39 Stab Wounds), Gaffi Editore; my fourth novel is almost finished, and, in the meantime, I tossed one in the garbage. If anyone would like to read more about my activity as a novelist, you can explore the section dedicated to it here.
12. Back to Films
I made a film “that went against the audience,” as someone once described it to me, in the sense that in the early 90s, the subject of rape was avoided at all costs. Very loosely inspired by the much talked about Diary of a Rapist by Anna Maria Pellegrino (not the food writer and cooking teacher who shares the same name). The film was an Italian-French-Spanish co-production starring a young Roberto Zibetti, Isabella Ferrari (particularly intense and exciting, and later nominated for the Golden Globes for this role), and Marisa Paredes. With the young DP Roberto Forza (also nominated for the Golden Globes for this film), we mixed dark colors and black and white, shot with a Handycam. Cronaca di un amore violato (Chronicle of a Violated Love) had me travel a lot. The film took part in a large number of festivals (Berlin, Montreal, Moscow, Stockholm, among others) where I accompanied it, taking part in debates and collecting the painful stories of women who, in tears after the screening, recounted similar stories of rape. I found some fairly recent commentary on this old film of mine, written by a professor of psychiatry at the University of Naples: “Battiato directed a courageous film that, at the time, scandalized audiences because of the subject matter and splitting reviewers. Rather than telling the usual story of urban decay and setting the story among the marginalized in the outskirts, the director entrusted the role of the rapist to the classic boy next door who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Rome and who, for the whole film, never repents or feels remorse for his crimes.”
I wouldn’t make this film today the same way I did then. But perhaps, in its time, with all the limitations, it was not as useless a film as many were back then.
13. The Octopus (8 & 9), Young Casanova, Entrusted
A merry (so to speak) respite in television followed. Sergio Silva (who produced my first film, as I’ve said) asked me to shoot two seasons of La Piovra (8 & 9) set in the 1950s, which would be prequels to the famous series. I could not say no to him. I worked hard and enjoyed myself. My wife Anna had taken me to see Luca Zingaretti and introduced us, and he joined the cast in an important role. From that moment on, I owe her for her invaluable help casting all my films and coaching many of the actors I worked with. But there is more: Anna sat by me, watching over me, advising and correcting everything I have written. She has advised me in the past, and she still does, and she always will. Whenever I have not listened to her, I have been wrong.
With my friend Roberto Forza as DP, we scurried around Sicily for several months. This was the third time I shot a film on the Greek-Norman-Arab island I am bound to by my paternal roots. One of the two series of La Piovra won the Prix de la Critique and the Nymphe d’Or de la Meilleure Fiction at Monte Carlo, and “almost” everyone lived happily ever after.
Many years later, I met the Russian director and playwright Ivan Wyrypaev (He had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival with Euphoria). When he heard that I was the one who had directed those seasons of La Piovra, he hugged and kissed me. As a film student in screenwriting and directing, the series served as a great school, or so he said. I looked at him skeptically and did not reveal that when the series aired, a young Italian director whom I did not know personally was quoted in a newspaper saying everything bad there is to say about that work of mine.
My next project was The Young Casanova, played by (young) Stefano Accorsi. The wonderful Cristiana Capotondi, only twenty years old, was also in the cast. It was an Italian-French co-production produced by Roberto and Matteo Levi, with whom I have always worked in great friendship and harmony.
It was a joyful (at least for me and for those who worked with me) and faithful transposition of the first chapters of the Histoire de ma vie by Giacomo Casanova. I wrote the two scripts together with a young author, Nicola Lusuardi. We shot the first part in Venice and the second in Paris with two film crews and two sets of collaborators. I wanted two different atmospheres, both as far as the spirit of the story was concerned and in terms of the light and atmosphere, just like the two distinct worlds that are narrated. I consider the so-called Memoirs of Casanova (a large volume often misread or not genuinely read by the many people who talk about it) a great book of history and custom. The first part of the account of his life, his youth to be exact, is full of curiosity, lightness, intelligence, and vitality and should be mandatory reading in schools. On the other hand, Casanova is a much-hated character (Fellini is among the haters) whose story has been altered and falsified and, therefore, has often suffered a damnatio memoriae, which I consider unfair.
In 2002, I made a two-part film based on a French novel by Loup Durand, Daddy. In Italy, the title became Il segreto di Thomas; in English-speaking countries, Entrusted, and for Germany and Austria, Im Visier des Bösen. Magnificent performers: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Thomas Sangster (many know him for Nanny McPhee, Love Actually, The Game of Thrones and The Queen’s Gambit, to name but a few, but then he was little more than a child), Giovanna Mezzogiorno (I was moved not only by her acting but also because every time I looked at her I would see her father and her mother pregnant with her back when I had worked with Vittorio), and then Stephen Moyer, Ken Duken, and Claire Keim.
When Thomas Sangster won as best actor in Monte Carlo, on the podium, he declared: “This is the most beautiful day of my life!” The applauding audience burst out in laughter: he had just turned 13.
While casting the film, I was warned: “Beware of Brandauer!” Known for his turbulent character, he’d often contest everything and everyone; they told me he once smashed an entire set out of anger. Having him in the cast meant the film’s insurance would be more expensive. Brandauer read the script, and his agent said he liked it. Before deciding, I asked to meet him at his home in Vienna. I wanted to talk to him about how I was thinking of telling the story and how I was used to a respectful and harmonious set. Most of all, I wanted to read the script with him: “If there are passages that you don’t like, lines that don’t convince you or anything, tell me now, and we can discuss it because when we’re on set, there would not be the time nor the right atmosphere for debate, only space to work and work well.” It was very agreeable to shoot in the south of France; no arguments there. Klaus Maria was mesmerized by the skill of young Sangster with whom he acted and challenged to chess. As usual, he was wonderful and nominated for a Romy Award.
14. Karol
I then had a truly unique experience as a writer and director. The producer, Pietro Valsecchi, asked me to direct a miniseries on the life of Karol Wojtyla, the Pope, who was 84 years old at the time. I thanked Valsecchi and refused, explaining that I was not the right person for the job: I never paid much attention to the Pope or his story, even if I was well aware of his role in the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Yes, I knew a bit about the Catholic religion since I had gone to a Jesuit school, but I was and am an adamant atheist.
“That’s exactly why you have to do it.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Pietro Valsecchi isn’t someone who takes no for an answer. He insisted. And I insisted on saying no. And so, he insisted again, pressing me to reconsider. In the end, both out of curiosity and so I could articulate my refusal more intelligently (to myself, as well), I read not what had been written about John Paul II but what he himself had written when he was young. His poems and early plays highlighted themes of pain and evil. I realized it was possible to tell the story of a boy who had lost his mother, became an actor, studied philology and literature, became politically active, and was ready to create a family, dedicating himself to the theatre and literature, but who, after having lived through the horrors of war, decided to abandon everything and dedicate his life to the defense of the innocent and suffering. An intelligent journalist, Gianfranco Svidercoschi, was very well acquainted with the life of Wojtyla, the Polish priest, former actor, and mountain climber who then became Pope. He told me many events that made up the story of his life, setting up an intriguing opportunity in my eyes as a layman where I could debunk clichés and misinterpretations about the Pope that still exist today. I posed two conditions: the first is that the actor be Polish and not American, as they were planning. I did this because, as I understood it, Karol Wojtyla was a patriot; he was, in every respect, grounded in the cultural, political, and moral history of his land. Piotr Adamczyk was chosen to star, which was a very wise choice. He gave an excellent performance, becoming his character to such a degree that, after the Pope's death, John Paul II’s friend and secretary even started to call Adamczyk ‘Karol.’ My second condition was to make sure there was no censorship or Vatican interference in the film. Svidercoschi had me meet one of the Pope’s secretaries who told me this, more or less, “The Holy Father sends me to tell you that, since he is a public figure, you are free to make your film as you please, according to your point-of-view. We will impose nothing, but if you need any information, ask us, and we will gladly give it to you.” And so, I agreed. I told Valsecchi yes, and we left for Poland, along with a good DP, Gianni Mammolotti, and an Italian actor I enjoyed working with, Ennio Fantastichini. We embarked on a complex adventure to create six hours of film. I have endless stories to tell on a personal and professional level about this experience, but I do not think I should overstep my welcome in terms of ranting. So, let’s move on.
15. In France
Prompted by some exciting proposals, I moved with my family to Paris, where I lived for several years. I’d like to talk about two films I shot for Canal+ on political issues based on actual events. I hold these two films close to my heart: Resolution 819, which deals with the search for the truth behind those responsible for the massacres in Bosnia, starring Benoit Magimel and Karolina Gruszka, and L'Infiltré (The Lying Game) starring Jacques Gamblin and Mehdi Dehbi (who would then go on to star in Messiah). The Lying Game tells the true story of the hunt for the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal (late 1980s), the reasons behind his terrorist activity, and the cynicism of the French secret services in this operation.
Igor Luther, a Slovak cinematographer trained at the Prague film school, was the DP for both films. He was the DP for Schloendorff’s The Tin Drum and Wajda’s Danton. We shared a prosperous, profound alliance, two tormented souls who loved what they did and shared a vision. Unfortunately, Igor did not take care of his health.
Resolution 819 won the Audience Award at the Amnesty International Festival at The Hague and the Audience Award at the 3rd Rome Film Festival in 2008 (but it was not distributed in Italy. Too many corpses? Too much pain?); it also received an award from the French Senate. I will say only one of the very many things I’d like to say about this film. When we were invited to screen it with the producer Georges Campana in the vast, packed main square in Sarajevo, at the end of the screening, Georges and I found ourselves literally covered with flowers from the mothers, widows, and daughters of the victims of the massacre we had narrated. Both of us, grown men, burst into uncontrollable sobs. We were not ashamed of sobbing. There was every reason to cry over that evil, and tragically, there would be even more sobbing at seeing the carnage and pain happening now.
The Lying Game was nominated for Best Drama at the 2012 International Emmy Awards. This film never found distribution in Italy either.
However, the French Ministry of Culture (Minister Aurélie Filippetti and President François Hollande) surprised me by inducting me into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
I met up again with my producer friend Matteo Levi: he had bought the rights to a novel written by Simon Wiesenthal (Max and Hélène), which tells the story of when he found a Nazi criminal he had been hunting but did not unmask him. Matteo asked me to write the script and direct this small film for RAI. And I did.
My beloved Ennio Fantastichini was Wiesenthal. The other wonderful protagonists were Carolina Crescentini, Alessandro Averone, and Ken Duken.
16. The Name of The Rose
We returned to Italy in 2017 and dedicated two years to The Name of the Rose series Matteo Levi courageously and passionately wanted to produce. Eleonora Andreatta, then the head of RAI Fiction, supported the project with her intelligent determination. As it went along, the series would gain German co-producers and American distributors who made the production financially feasible. Umberto Eco had been very disappointed by Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film with Sean Connery even though it had also been very successful (and deservedly so, for the quality of its realization). However, the film staged the thriller around which the novel was built, missing the central themes in Eco’s novel. We had 8 hours of film, so there was ample time and space to transpose the iconic novel. By contract, Eco could see the series once shot and edited and then decide whether to remove his name in case he did not like the adaptation (thirty years earlier, when he saw the edit of the film, he refused to put his name on it, demanding that the opening credits be written so: “From a Palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s Novel...”). In his contract with Matteo Levi, if he deemed the final result unsatisfactory, he could have the credit “loosely based on...”. Only if the 8 hours of the series were faithful to the spirit and themes that had motivated him and were close to his heart would the opening credits read, “From the novel by...”
When Matteo Levi called me to ask me to embark on this venture, the screenwriter Andrea Porporati had already been working well with Eco, but, in the meantime, the great author, unfortunately, passed away. A good British writer was called in to “internationalize” the scripts, but unfortunately, his writing did not work. In any case, we started pre-production and the complex casting process where I wanted, as much as possible, for the actors' nationality to correspond to the nationality of the characters imagined by Eco. So, we discovered our Adso in the young German Damian Hardung. The production company Palomar, which Matteo Levi had joined, introduced me to a cinematographer whose work I loved, the Irishman John Conroy: ours was a splendid, affectionate partnership.
Pre-production had, therefore, already begun, but in the meantime, I was asked (at the request of the distributors) to rework the scripts. It was not just a “polish” but almost a complete “rewrite.” I was overwhelmed. John Turturro had agreed to play William of Baskerville. During the day, I would be in the production office, while at night, I would write and, via Skype (Turturro lives in Brooklyn), discuss the film and his character with him. John immersed himself body and soul in his role (he even hired a dialogue coach to work on his accent). He proved so proactive and committed to everything regarding his character that I was more than happy to include his name among those who had contributed to the script. His performance is, in my opinion, stunning for the adherence to the character imagined by Eco.
My meeting in London with Rupert Everett was quite an emotional experience. He had just directed and interpreted the film on Oscar Wilde. Rupert looked as eager to play the evil role of the Inquisitor in The Name of The Rose as a young actor aiming to have his first great part. As everyone can see, he did it marvelously well.
My account of making the series (where I was simultaneously a writer, showrunner, and director) could fill a small novel; it was comic, epic, and punctuated with grotesque and painful moments. I will spare us all. I am pleased to mention what the American actor Michael Emerson (known by most for his role as Benjamin Linus in Lost) said. Michael (who played the Abbot) wrote a series of posts on his website that I could condense more or less like this, “I am the happiest man in the world: I am in Italy, in Rome, playing a magnificent role in The Name of the Rose. I am surrounded by a cast of great international actors, but I must say that I am “floored” by the skill of the Italian actors.” He was referring primarily to the three main actors, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Stefano Fresi, and Greta Scarano, but he told me the quality of the work of the other Italians, even in the minor roles, had “astounded” him.
To finish the story about Eco’s opening credit in the series: Once the eight episodes were done, Matteo Levi rented a movie theater in Milan for one day to show all the episodes, four hours in the morning, lunch break, and then four hours in the afternoon. The Eco family, his editors, and his historical consultants attended it in order to decide. I still remember that day as we were awaiting their judgment; my dear Steve O'Connell, the editor, and I were locked in the editing room overlooking Via Cassia, where we had worked for months. From the window, we could observe incongruous parrots loudly fighting on the branches of an umbrella pine. The response was the best we could hope for. They were enthusiastic about what we had made and how faithful it was to Eco’s spirit; they authorized us to write, in the opening credits, “From a novel by Umberto Eco.” And so, it was. The series won the Golden Globe and was seen, I’m told, in over 180 countries.
17. And then…
During the Covid lockdown, I worked with an American producer on a project I deeply cared about. I wrote, studied, documented, rewrote, and rewrote over and over again, growing more and more passionate. Eventually, the whole thing ended up going in the proverbial drawer, or rather just filed away in my computer. This was not the first time this had happened. I will not talk about that. All I am saying is that if instead of citing all the work that has seen the light, we compiled the history of scripts written yet never filmed, books thought yet never finished or published, symphonies only heard in our heads but never played and listened to, or paintings only dreamed of or those set fire to, etc., etc., it would be like the first property of multiplication in mathematics: Varying the order of the factors the result does not change. A great Hollywood tycoon put it more or less like this, “If I had said no to the films I said yes to and yes to the films I said no to, I would still find myself just the way I am now: with the same balance of losses and gains, of spitting and applause.”
And, so, here we are in 2024, fearfully watching the stupidity and violence of many men in power and those who follow them. This is the central theme of a monologue in “3 parts” I wrote for the theater: Dioggene. It debuted in December 2023 with the breathtaking interpretation of Stefano Fresi.
To be continued... for a while at least…