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Siberian innocence
Gabriele Salvatores and Toni d’Angelo
speak about perpetual childhood
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| 13/12/2012 |
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There are directors who slavishly regurgitate previously experimented filmmaking methods in their work, out of comfort, fear or risk, or to meet audiences’ expectations. Alfred Hitchcock, as Sacha Gervasi’s film proves, was not one of them. Neither are Gabriele Salvatores and Toni d’Angelo. In the Q&A held today at the Jardin de l’Ange, the two filmmakers spoke of their tireless search for projects that make them feel as if they are always starting out, always at the beginning of their professional journey.
Although Siberian Education is his 15th film, Salvatores said: “This is the first film I shot in English, with multiple simultaneous cameras, a schedule that had to work around another schedule, that of a star like John Malkovich, and in which there were no Italian actors. It’s almost as if it were my first film, definitely the film closest to the dream of cinema that I had as a boy.”
The production difficulties of the complex and articulated project, for which Salvatores had to recreate an entire world in all its details (as he did in Nirvana), and the harsh weather conditions, didn’t discourage the director one bit. “Siberian Education is the most important film I’ve ever made,” he claims, “from a production and artistic point of view. If I do things I don’t know how to do, putting myself out there, I have a lot more fun. Obviously, I always try in all my films to include themes that are important to me, like friendship, growth, the presence of a teacher, and in Lilin’s book I found many things that were close to me.”
Nicolai Lilin, author of the eponymous book on which the film is based, also spoke on what he found in Gabriele Salvatores: “When I got back from my military service, I needed to understand war, because when you’re in it you can’t understand it. One day a friend showed me Mediterraneo, and I found many human truths in the film. That’s why I chose Gabriele, I needed someone who could understand the depth of my book’s message to make it. There’s a song by Francesco De Gregori, ‘La storia siamo noi,’ whose lyrics perfectly capture the sense of this film.”
Just as Gabriele Salvatores seems to live in a perpetual state of cinematic childhood, constantly renewing his style, Toni d’Angelo also spoke of his desire to prove himself through diverse projects: “I’d wanted to make a noir film for a long time. I like the challenge, I like putting myself out there. I love directors who follow their own path of growth. The next film I’m going to make will be a melodrama!”
In speaking of d’Angelo’s Clara’s Innocence, all three of the film’s stars agreed that the movie has a particular noir atmosphere that evokes the presence of latent evil. “Clara is someone who doesn’t love,” said Chiara Conti, “but who wants to be loved at all cost, each time transforming herself into the person she needs to be to reach her goals. Her ‘innocence’ lies in not being aware of the consequences that her actions can provoke.”
Actors Alberto Gimignani and Luca Lionello, referring to their roles, spoke of the hidden, primordial impulses that emerge as soon as a trivial catalyst enters the picture, proving, to quote Hannah Arendt, just how banal evil can be.
The Siberian cold of Salvatores’s film and the emotional iciness of Toni D’Angelo’s Clara shroud two films characterized by an “innocent” gaze, constantly nullified by the desire to do something that has never been experimented, as in a perpetual childhood.
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