XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013
Enrico Vanzina
Il gigante sfregiato
Il gigante sfregiato
"When my father, Steno, directed The Enforcers, the producers asked him to use his real name in the credits, Stefano Vanzina. It was a very good and important film, and it began the crime movie genre in Italy. I too wanted to do something different from the dozens of comedies I’ve written. Perhaps with this book I wanted to even things out with him," says Enrico Vanzina, talking about Il gigante sfregiato, a noir novel that gives a nod to Raymond Chandler ("a writer I really love, the link between film and literature") and is set in Rome. "Rome is a very different city with respect to what we normally see. It’s cosmopolitan, and each of its neighborhoods has its own ethnicity. I wanted to capture this Rome, not the Rome of the comedies or the city that Sorrentino depicts in The Great Beauty, which portray the stereotypes dominating us."
"I woke up with the plot of the book in my head, I wrote it quickly and then of course worked on it a lot. It essentially took me 40 years to write it, as if I’d censored myself until now," says the author and screenwriter.
"I have to intention of turning this book into a film, but other directors want to. I don’t care how [the film] turns out. I want to be judged on the merits of the book I wrote, and not for the adaptation that will eventually be made. But obviously I thought about how it would look on the big screen. I imagined Pierfrancesco Favino in the lead role. I called him one day to tell him that for the past year I’d thought of him as the main character. I sent him a rough draft of the book, but he never got back to me. Not even an email. The producers are thinking more along the lines of Valerio Mastandrea, but I’d also like to see Marco Giallini in the lead role. In the end, Favino will get the role."
