Truffaut and Hitchcock: ‘The Wrong Man’

The Wrong Man (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Meeting with journalist Lillian Ross in New York when he was presenting ‘The Soft Skin’ (La peau douce) at the New York Film Festival in 1964, Truffaut discussed the book of interviews with Hitchcock that he was preparing (and that was eventually published in 1966). 

Truffaut talked about his devotion to the work of Hitchcock, whom he referred to as ‘the greatest director of films in the world... Each week for the past few years, I have been going to see at least two of his pictures. “Vertigo” I see at least every two months. … The more I see of Hitchcock’s pictures, the less desire I have to see pictures other than his.’ 

Truffaut went into considerable detail about how much he learned about filmmaking from Hitchcock, in terms of what can be described as the professional and technical aspects of filmmaking, such as:

the principle, extremely important, that an emotion must be created on the screen and then must be sustained—on the technical level as well as on the emotional level. … It is so important to sustain it, even after the character eliciting the emotion leaves the room, goes off the screen. There is so much to learn from Hitchcock—how to keep the camera on the character you want the audience to be interested in, and not cut, even when the character walks all the way across the room.

Truffaut’s engagement with and enthusiasm for Hitchcock’s work did much to establish Hitchcock as a serious cinematic artist, in contrast to the cultivated image of Hitchcock as the master of suspense with its connotations of Hitchcock as a mere technical director. 

The following extract from an early essay by Truffaut on Hitchcock’s ‘The Wrong Man’ takes Hitchcock’s thematic concerns seriously, focusing on significant obsessions of Hitchcock’s: culpability, guilt, the double, while drawing an interesting parallel with Robert Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’.

Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and of English humor. There is very little suspense in it and almost no humor, English or otherwise. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock's most stripped-down film since Lifeboat; it is the roast without the gravy, the news event served up raw and, as Bresson would say, "without adornment." Hitchcock is no fool. If The Wrong Man, his first black-and-white film since I Confess, is shot inexpensively in the street, subway, the places where the action really occurred, it's because he knew he was making a difficult and relatively less commercial film than he usually does. When it was finished, Hitchcock was undoubtedly worried, for he renounced his usual cameo in the course of the film, and instead showed us his silhouette before the title appeared to warn us that what he was offering this time was something different, a drama based on fact. 

There cannot fail to be comparisons made between The Wrong Man and Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné a Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped). It would be foolish to assume that this would work to the detriment of Hitchcock’s film, which is sufficiently impressive right from the start not to have to beg for pride of place. The comparison is no less fascinating when pushed to its utmost, to where the divergences between the two movies cast a mutual light on each other. 

The point of departure is identical: the scrupulous reconstruction of an actual event, its faithful rendering limited solely to the facts. For Bresson’s film is as far from the account of Commandant Devigny as Hitchcock’s is from the event reported in Life magazine. The reality, for both Hitchcock and for Bresson, was simply a pretext, a springboard for a second reality that is the only thing that interests them. 

Since we are discussing the elements they have in common, we should point out that, faced with an identical problem, although they were seeking different solutions, Bresson and Hitchcock coincided on more than one point. For example, the acting. Just like Leterrier in Bresson's film, Henry Fonda is impassive, expressionless, almost immobile. Fonda is only a look. If his attitude is more crushed and more humble than Bresson’s man who is condemned to death, it is because he is not a political prisoner who knows he has won to his cause half the world who thinks as he does, but an ordinary prisoner in criminal court, with all appearances against him and, as the film goes on, less and less chance of proving his innocence. Never was Fonda so fine, so grand and noble as in this film where he has only to present his honest man's face, just barely lit with a sad, an almost transparent, expression. 

Another point in common – indeed the most striking – is that Hitchcock has almost made it impossible for the spectator to identify with the drama's hero; we are limited to the role of witnesses. We are at Fonda’s side throughout, in his cell, in his home, in the car, on the street, but we are never in his place. That is an innovation in Hitchcock’s work, since the suspense of his earlier films was based precisely on identification. 

Hitchcock, the director who is most concerned about innovation, this time wants the public to experience a different kind of emotional shock, something clearly rarer than the famous shiver. One final common point: Hitchcock and Bresson have both built their films on one of those coincidences that make scrupulous screenwriters scream. Lieutenant Fontaine escapes miraculously; the stupid intervention of a hostile juror saves Henry Fonda. To this authentic miracle Hitchcock added another of his own making, and it will doubtless shock my colleagues. Fonda (in the film, he is of Italian descent and is named Balestrero) is lost. Waiting for his second trial, he cannot find any proof of his innocence. His wife is in a mental institution and his mother tells him, ‘You should pray.’ 

So Fonda kneels before a statue of Jesus Christ and prays ‘My God, only a miracle can save me.’ There is a closeup of Christ, a dissolve, and then a shot in the street that shows a man who somewhat resembles Fonda walking toward the camera until the frame catches him in a closeup with his face and Fonda’s superimposed. This is certainly the most beautiful shot in Hitchcock's work and it summarizes all of it. It is the transfer of culpability, the theme of the double, already present in his first English movies, and still present in all his later ones, improved, enriched, and deepened from film to film. With this affirmation of belief in Providence – in Hitchcock's work, too, the wind blows where it will-the similarities culminate and cease. 

With Bresson there is a dialogue between the soul and objects, the relationship of the one to others. Hitchcock is more human, obsessed as always by innocence and guilt, and truly agonized by judicial error. As a motto to The Wrong Man he could have used this pensee of Pascal's: “Truth and justice are two such subtle points that our instruments are too dull to reach them exactly. If they do reach them, they conceal the point and bear down all around, more on what is false than on what is true.” 

Hitchcock offers a film about the role of the accused man, an accused man and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with documentaries except its appearance; in its pessimism and skepticism.  

– Francois Truffaut, ‘The Wrong Man’ in ‘The Films In My Life’

Claude Chabrol: The Art of Suspense

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

Born in Paris in 1930, into a comfortable middle-class family, Chabrol was evacuated during the war to the isolated rural village of Sardent in central France. Already a film enthusiast, he set up a makeshift cinema in a barn where he projected German genre films, which he advertised as American ‘super-productions’.

After the Liberation, he returned to Paris, where he studied first pharmacology, then Law, while, at the same time, immersing himself in the thriving cine-club scene. At the Cinematheque Francais, he met Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, and was soon invited to write articles for Cahiers du Cinema. A devoted fan of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, he collaborated on a book about Hitchcock with Rohmer which became the first serious study of ‘the master of suspense’.

Backed with money inherited by his wife, Chabrol wrote, produced and directed Le Beau Serge in 1958, a film often cited as the first New Wave feature. Shot over nine weeks in Sardent, using natural light and real locations, the film portrays a detailed picture of working class life in a bleak provincial village. Reflecting the influence of both Rossellini and Hitchcock, the film plays on the theme of ‘the double’, with it’s two young protagonists, Francois (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Serge (Gerard Blain), mirror opposites locked in a power struggle. Le Beau Serge was well-received, winning an award at the Locarno film festival, and a lump sum of money from the Film Aid board, which enabled Chabrol to start production on his next film before the first had been released to the public.

Les Cousins (1959) again featured actors Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, as a pair of polar opposites, in a plot that effectively reverses the action of the earlier film. This time Blain plays the outsider, a visitor from the country to Paris, who struggles to find a place in his cousin’s social set, just as Brialy found it difficult to re-enter the closed world of the village in Le Beau Serge. Otherwise, however, it is hard to believe that the two films came from the same director. In contrast to the long takes and lyrical landscapes of his first film, Les Cousins is brash, fast-paced and urbane, with an undercurrent of biting satire.

Les Cousins was another critical and commercial success, earning a Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival, and becoming France’s fifth largest box office success of 1959. Chabrol’s innovative approach to financing became a blueprint for other filmmakers to follow. Meanwhile, the production company he had set up, AJYM, was now able to support the debut films of Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient) and Eric Rohmer (Le Signe Du Lion). He also served as a technical advisor for Godard on A Bout De Souffle (1960). By using his success in this way, Chabrol was instrumental in getting the New Wave up and running; which in turn contributed to the press reports of unselfish interdependence and collaboration within the movement.

Chabrol’s next film, A Double Tour (1959), was a first excursion into the thriller genre, and displayed many of the concerns – murder, deception and obsession – that would dominate his later work. For his next film, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), Chabrol assembled a strong female cast including Bernadette Lafont and Stephane Audran. The film, which follows the lives of four young women working in a shop in Paris, again combined documentary realism with Hitchcockian suspense. On the surface, an easy-going comedy/drama about the love-lives of four working girls, the humorous tone is soon offset by an undertone of tension. Its detailed depiction of Paris and memorably enigmatic ending, make this one of the masterworks of the Nouvelle Vague. 

Chabrol’s subsequent releases, Les Godelureaux (1960), L’Oeil Du Malin (1961), Ophelia (1962), and Landru (1962) failed to recapture his earlier success – until the release of Les Biches in 1968 inaugurated a series of film classics which established Chabrol’s reputation. (newwavefilm.com)

In the following extact, Claude Chabrol discusses his early films with Mark Shivas for an article first published in 1963:

Le Beau Serge (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

Mark Shivas: What do you think of your first film, ‘Le Beau Serge’, these days?

Claude Chabrol: I still quite like the opening, and I quite like the village, La Creuse, where I stayed during the war. I hate the film’s ending.

MS: It was symbolic, though, wasn’t it?

CC: But it didn’t come out very honest. In my mind it corresponded to something quite precise, something one often comes across in the world, but...

MS: What were the things that mainly interested you in the making of the film?

CC: First of all, there was the village which I knew well, and I liked the people there very much. That part of it I enjoyed doing a lot. But at the same time I was learning the technical side, and that lost us lots of time!

MS: Haven't a lot of documentary things about the village been cut out during the montage?

CC: At the outset, the film was at least two and a half hours long. Luckily I showed it to some people and they said, ‘Aië, aië!’ so I cut three quarters of an hour. And in comparison with the original scenario I’d already cut half an hour. So it could have lasted three hours. It was cut mainly in the transitions, and then there were two things which took up a hell of a lot of time. The cutting was done so that the film could be more successful commercially, but I took care to make sure that the topography of the village was respected. So in order to get from one place to another, even if it meant going right across the village, one went right across following the guy or whoever it might be. That took plenty of time!

Then there were things like the baking of bread and scenes in the bistro with people talking among themselves that had nothing to do with the subject of the film but seemed to me to be indispensable at the time. You see, even the tables of the bistro were of very old wood, and so much wine had been spilt on them that they had a unique color. Henri (Decaë) had rendered this color so well that I would have liked to have it in the film. But then everything would have been interminable.

Le Beau Serge (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: Had you ever worked with actors before? Rivette began, for instance, with actors in a short film.

CC: No, I hadn’t done anything interesting. Short films aren’t really the same. But for Le Beau Serge I mainly chose friends and old hams. In using these people, I realized that I liked barnstormers and actors who exaggerated a little. I always encourage them to grimace. If you are afraid you go (makes expression of horror by shrinking back with eyes popping), if you are happy you go (throws up hands in glee)! It’s because of this taste of mine that from time to time actors grimace. The ones I used in Le Beau Serge were good, but not good at that.

MS: Do you prefer to use their natural mannerisms?

CC: Yes, there was the way in which Jean-Claude (Brialy) runs. That was very useful to me. It was when I saw him run like that I made him wear the scarf, because it suited him. Gerard Blain rolls his shoulders like this…when he walks, so I told him to walk faster to accentuate the fact. Little guys with complexes about their size often do things like this to make them look bigger. Hawks must have noticed this too in Hatari! On top of all this rolling motion, he was often supposed to be drunk as well, seeming to lean on one leg first and then the other.

MS: Did you have more technical than acting problems?

CC: I had my main problems with that infernal device they call the camera-blimp! That was dreadful. All the same, there are one or two things I like. In the camera movements there are some that don't serve any purpose: when a man walks across the main square, I put down all the tracking rails I had, maybe four hundred, five hundred meters of rail! I had already intended to do lots of camera movement – travelings which started here and ended there, crossing the main square, ending by going through a door into a house! Fantastic! As the camera followed the actor through the door, he was obliged to walk on the rails – clack, clack, and you could see them too! Then we had to go through little doors inside which there was no room for anything much more than the camera. Poor (Jean) Rabier, he had a hell of a time working on the framing.

Les Cousins (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: What was it about the subject of ‘Les Cousins’ that interested you particularly?

CC: I had both Les Cousins and Le Beau Serge prepared at the same time, in fact; I had the idea for Les Cousins but I couldn’t do it because it would have been too expensive. Construction-wise Le Beau Serge was at once too long and without enough incident for its length. The pieces about the father-in-law were added later. Les Cousins was just three pages long when written down. The situations were more compact. It has more construction. Le Beau Serge was economical, and it was good on the village, but the story was rather tricked up. The people in Les Cousins are real.

MS: What do you like especially in ‘Les Cousins’?

CC: I’m very fond of the tomatoes à la Provencale, and I quite like the second surprise party. The man who breaks the chains... things like that. The background to the party... nothing quite like it on the screen for twenty years... I think I broke all records there! Madness. There’s everything there – Wagner, girls with bare feet, the lot!

MS: Weren’t there repercussions from that film?

CC: Not particularly. There was a little. People didn’t think there were any Fascists in France then: they were that stupid. Now they can see that it was true.

MS: The characters?

CC: I like the character played by Brialy, and Carolus (Blain), quite well. It’s sad that a chap as frank as he ends up a victim of his own foolishness.

Les Cousins (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: Is (Paul) Gégauff’s part in it mainly concerned with the characters or with the construction of the script?

CC: It’s not the construction which is Paul’s part, but the dialogue, which is real Gégauff dialogue. It succeeds in saying in two pages what would have taken me four to say. That’s very useful because it allows you to do a lot more in the same amount of time. And also by Gégauff are one or two little things such as the scene where they talk about the erotic quality of their skin. The whole story depends on this, he would say: it’s a story about skin texture. He wrote that scene in about half an hour.

MS: Didn’t he have any ideas as a scenarist?

CC: No, no, no ideas of construction.

MS: So the symmetrical construction of the film is your work?

CC: Yes, I like symmetry. I like it when everything comes together at the end, but one mustn’t strive for symmetry. It annoys me to strive for ‘rhymes.’ It’s good working with Gégauff because he takes a delight in destroying casuistry. I like what Paul does.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: What was it that appealed in the subject of ‘A Double Tour’?

CC: I read Stanley Ellin’s book when I was doing my military service and there was one thing which I found very remarkable then: a chap who’s very conformist and then suddenly takes off rejoicing into nature. The subject was impossible. There was one thing in it about a key which locks a granary. I have never understood whether the important thing was that it was locked or that it was unlocked! So I cut that out. And I amused myself with the mythological aspects of the story: Leda, and there were swan references in the house! Then there was the scene of the row between the man, Dacqumine, and his wife, the first version of which was refused by the Hakims who were producing the film: it was much more horrible than the scene we eventually shot. It was entirely physical with the bloke saying to his wife, ‘You look a mess, your armpits smell bad,’ and other nasty things. Finally there was the character of the Hungarian, Laszlo (Jean-Paul Belmondo). He interested me. But at the same time, this was a mistake because the film would have done better at the box-office without him. It didn’t do badly, but without this bizarre guy, spectators would have been less upset by the film. He was a worrying element, spending his time saying and doing outrageous things to offend people.

MS: In ‘A Double Tour’ André Jocelyn plays the role of a person who excludes or destroys beauty, a person who seems to crop up quite a lot in your films – ‘L’Oeil Du Malin’ and ‘Ophelia’ as well.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

CC: Joselyn represents a certain type in French society — the son of a good family, rather degenerate, a bit queer. Jocelyn is good at portraying that kind of character.

But let’s imagine a young chap who’s intelligent, sensitive, kind, handsome, who lives in a milieu which is unintelligent, insensitive, ugly, hard, and yet he cannot abandon the milieu because his roots, his family are in it. When he comes face to face with something that contradicts what he has been brought up to, it’s inevitable and normal that he will try to destroy it. In L’Oeil Du Malin it’s a bit different: the wish for destruction comes more from the man’s mediocrity than from anything else. The reaction is to turn their destruction outwards, preferring to fire on others. One finds the same sort of thing in present day politics – the young people who have become plastiqueurs. I’m sure their origins aren’t so different from those of the Jocelyn character in A Double Tour: they’re people who have problems inside themselves, inside their families. That sort of character interests me a great deal.

MS: It’s the opposite in ‘Ophelia’, isn’t it, a bit like ‘Vertigo’, where the character wants to make his dream concrete and thus destroys the real thing?

CC: It’s very much like Vertigo, and that’s a film I admire very much. I saw it again when I was making Ophelia and I found it totally unbearable. I found ridiculous arguments so that I could say to myself, ‘What is all this driveling nonsense?’! But the arguments that I used to myself when I was making Ophelia were ridiculous.

MS: ‘Vertigo’ certainly had its influence, because there were things in ‘L’Oeil Du Malin’; there were very similar shots.

CC: Oh yes.

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: And the color in ‘A Double Tour’... the field of poppies. You said that the main problems were Decaë’s.

CC: There’s one thing which I hate about color films... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer’s money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn’t any color. The hell with that! I like to have the screen full of color, twenty colors on the screen at once, fifty colors. There are no dominants despite what people have said.

MS: It must have been awful for Decaë...

CC: Yes, but the result was very faithful... and it was horribly complicated. I mean the golds and the interiors, with the windows with the colored glass giving the faces three colors at once. The relationship between the interiors and the Provence exteriors was very important, and coordinating the ideas of the decorator and costumier, the cameraman and the director, are specially important in color movies, and much more difficult than for a black and white film. I like making black and white films in natural surroundings, but I much prefer shooting a color film inside a studio where the colors are easier to control. Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen. It’s pretty complicated, but not so much for me as for the cameraman. I say to him, ‘You see this, you see that. I want that exactly rendered as it is. Is that possible?’ In the studio there are no troubles about the sun going in!

A Double Tour (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: ‘A Double Tour’ is very exact on the colorings of the south of France.

CC: It was also very important to get the decors right for the South. There were family photos in the house we used, and the paternal grandfather of the house looked exactly like Dacqmine.

MS: Were you happy with the actors there?

CC: That was rather complicated. Everything was prepared, the locations were chosen and all that. My first choice for Leda was Suzy Parker but she didn’t fit in with the decor at all. So Antonella Luaidi was chosen. The plot had to be modified a bit... she became an Italian who had known a Hungarian in Japan. Rather remarkable! I also wanted Charles Boyer for the Dacqmine part. On the other hand Madeleine (Robinson) was just what I had wanted.

MS: Jean-Paul Belmondo’s gastronomic orgy was quite something...

CC: Yes, I’ve often noticed that in films people don’t really stuff themselves full when they’re eating. So now I work on the principle of having at least one meal in all my films. After all, one must eat. And after all, again, it’s very scenic. It’s difficult to put across on film, to get everyone in the shot without cutting to and fro. I’ve often thought of having a table made with a hole in the middle for the camera to film meal scenes!

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: ‘Les Bonnes Femmes’ is perhaps your most ‘symmetrical’ film.

CC: Symmetrical? From the symmetrical point of view it’s symmetrical!

MS: In the montage or what?

CC: In my last version there was a final quarter of an hour of flashes of people in the street leaving their work between six and seven. That was cut. At the outset it was more symmetrical. The whole thing came full circle.

MS: Most people either think that ‘Les Bonnes Femmes’ is a masterpiece, or they’re violently against it.

CC: I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid. From that moment on I can hardly be reproached for making a film that is about stupid people. I don’t think that it’s a pessimistic film. I’m not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. When we wrote the film the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools. But at the same time we could see little by little that if they were foolish, it was mainly because they were unable to express themselves, establish contact with each other. The result of naïvety, or a too great vulgarity.

People have said that I didn’t like the people I was showing, because they believe that you have to ennoble them to like them. That’s not true. Quite the opposite: only the types who don’t like their fellows have to ennoble them.

Les Bonnes Femmes (Directed by Claude Chabrol)

MS: But the cinema is an art of identification and that makes it annoying for the spectator. And that is perhaps the reason for the film’s failure commercially.

CC: As the film shows vulgar people, who explain themselves instinctively without any kind of mask, so spectators and critics talk about ‘excess.’ But the girls aren’t shown as idiots. They’re just brutalized by the way they live. They’re simple girls who are impressed by savior-faire, by people who do things, tricks and conjurors for example. Maids and shop girls love this sort of thing. The poetical side doesn’t really interest them. You see much more grotesque things going on every day than you do in Les Bonnes Femmes. Actually it wasn’t a group of girls in the film. In effect it was one.

Les Bonnes Femmes is the one I like best of all my films. I like Ophelia too, but I prefer Les Bonnes Femmes.

Ophelia was not quite what we wanted. I think it was shot too late. It should have been made sooner and nearer the time when I had the idea. And then it wasn’t shot just where I would have liked: the chateau I had wanted had been sold and that was annoying. And we had changed the scenario around too much by the time the film was made. But I like Ophelia very much...

MS: What is the difference between the projected version of ‘Ophelia’ and the present one when finally made?

CC: I pushed it more towards having fun. And then the original version was more serious. I had the film Hamlet interposed in it. I put the guards back in and a bit where they chase Jocelyn, who puts on a cap and scarf to make them think he’s breaking into the grounds of the chateau. I was obliged to change some of the scenes between Ivan (Jocelyn) and the girl (Mayniel). I’m very fond of Juliette, but she wasn’t quite what I had in mind at the outset for the part. I wanted a girl with a sort of angelic quality, more ethereal, so that one should understand the impossibility of any erotic quality there. I like the little film within the film and the reception that goes with it because it’s more normal than the rest of the film. The hero is normal in comparison with the rest of them. He’s not at all mad. In the context of all the other monstrous people around, the relationship of Jocelyn and Mayniel is not at all strange.

– Mark Shivas interviewed Chabrol for Movie, No. 10, published in June 1963. Text copyright © Mark Shivas.

Il Divo: Interview with Director Paolo Sorrentino

Il Divo (Directed by Paolo Sorrentino)

The filmmaker and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino was born in 1970 in Naples. His debut film as a screenwriter, The Dust of Naples, was released in 1998. He started making short films at this time, including L'amore non ha confini in 1998 and La notte lunga in 2001. His feature-length directorial debut, One Man Up (L'uomo in più), earned him the Nastro D'Argento award. 

He achieved international acclaim in 2004 with his psychological thriller The Consequences of Love (Le conseguenze dell'amore), which follows a lonely and reclusive businessman named Titta as he develops feelings for a beautiful waitress named Sofia in the café where he goes every morning to solve puzzles in the newspaper while avoiding contact with other customers. As Titta and Sofia grow closer, she learns the reason for his secrecy: he once lost money owned by the mafia on the stock market and is now a drug addict in thrall to the Mafia. 

Sorrentino's follow-up feature film, The Family Friend (L'amico di famiglia), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. It is the tale of a cruel loan shark who develops an obsession with one of his clients' daughters. 

Sorrentino's subsequent film, Il Divo tells the story of fabled Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister, who faced accusations of conspiracy, Mafia involvement and state terror. Starring Toni Servillo as a chillingly vampiric Andreotti, the labyrinthine intrigues of Italian politics are used to explore the inscrutable personality beneath the controversy. 

The film, which received the Cannes Film Festival's Prix du Jury, reunited Sorrentino with Toni Servillo, who plays Andreotti, from The Consequences of Love. 

With Il Divo, Sorrentino establishes a distinct political lineage of postwar Italian cinema, evoking the works of Francesco Rosi, Elio Petri, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a debt Sorrentino himself  acknowledges. Of relevance is the fact that all of Il Divo's main Hollywood cinematic intertexts are either gangster films or have criminal psychopaths as protagonists: e.g., Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs; Scorsese's Taxi Driver; and De Palma's The Untouchables.

Il Divo finishes with a dramatisation of one of Andreotti's many Mafia collaboration trials. The scene opens with a tracking shot that echoes the bravura sequence toward the conclusion of The Consequences of Love, inaugurating the scene of Titta di Girolamo's trial by the Mafia in a direct inversion of Andreotti's trial here. The tracking shot in il Divo is fundamentally identical to the previous one, as it starts with Servillo framed in medium close-up from behind, moving down the courtroom corridor with the Steadicam following at a constant distance. 

Sorrentino came to the attention of a wider audience in 2013 with the release of The Great Beauty, a stunning picture filmed in Rome that earned him an Oscar, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. This philosophical film that established Sorrentino's international reputation begins with a remark that encapsulates it: "To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength”. 

The Great Beauty could be described as a journey into the heart of Rome, led by Toni Servillo's main character, an ageing socialite, writer, and journalist who strolls through the streets of Rome, observing the lives of its inhabitants, young and old, rich and poor, and reflecting on his own life and past experiences. The film gained notoriety for Sorrentino's artistic arrangement of breathtaking images of Rome. The film is also a mirror of Rome and Italy's decadence, particularly the decadence of the upper class, and is often linked to Fellini's legendary La dolce vita.

The following interview with Sorrentino on the making of Il Divo took place at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

Directors from all periods have recounted Italy. Do your films talk about the south of Italy, or the country in general? Do you consider yourself a southern director? Do you see yourself as belonging to the tradition of political directors like Rosi and Rossellini?

PS: First of all, I’m very curious about other people. About their psychology, their feelings, their foolish, crazy or routine behavior. I’m interested in characters more than anything else; in real life, and therefore in films. These people who intrigue, fascinate or disgust me, may be Italian and therefore representative, albeit partially, of Italian society, and sometimes symbolic of it, as in the case of Andreotti. Political directors like Rosi and Petri are giants who can never be equaled. You can watch them, but not imitate them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make political films today. On the contrary, we must. Only we have to find a new approach to keep pace with today’s cinema, which has changed so much since the days of the above-mentioned directors.

You depict a corrupt Italy in your latest film. Has the situation improved since the Andreotti years?

PS: Apparently not. But no one talks about corruption in Italy today, although it exists and proliferates. I think people don’t talk about it because Tangentopoli (Bribesville) was a shock for us. A revolution that did not limit itself to deciding who was honest or dishonest, but, consciously or not, changed politics and the previous political class, with endless polemics, backlashes and terrible personal tragedies.

The characters in your films always exist outside the system, like the singer Tony and the soccer player Antonio, in ‘One Man Up’, the exiled man in the pay of the Mafia in ‘The Consequences of Love’, the squalid usurer in ‘The Family Friend’, and now the exceptional politician. Is marginality a source of inspiration to you?

PS: What you’re saying about marginality applies to my previous films, but not to ‘Il Divo’. Indeed, the opposite is true for this film. Andreotti is anything but marginal. He’s a man of power who knows the ways of the world better than others, who knows how to integrate, to take the lead or to blend in, according to which is most advantageous. He is a man who combines cunning with intelligence at the highest most unimaginable level, which has enabled him to govern Italy for many years.

Aside from marginality, your characters, and therefore your films, are always marked by loneliness and melancholy; why?

PS: These feelings are often seen as negative, while they have always been genuine feelings for me, ever since I was a boy. Melancholy and loneliness stimulate the imagination and fantasy. Moreover, they’re universal feelings that we all have to reckon with sooner or later.

Your protagonists are always very ambiguous but they have a human side, though well-hidden, despite their apparent immorality. Can you explain this paradox?

PS: I don’t believe in precise, univocal definitions when it comes to individuals. People change with time and according to the situations in which they’re involved. You can be human and ambiguous at the same time. I don’t see the individual as monolithic. We are all extremely vulnerable, but very good at adapting and faking.

As a director you have a certain tendency to embellish the ugly. Why is that?

PS: It’s not something pre-established. When you tell a story you’re faced with a series of situations, actions, habits, landscapes. It doesn’t really matter whether they are beautiful or ugly in real life, because a film must necessarily have an aesthetic quality, which, for me at least, has to be gratifying. Cinema has the extraordinary power to change the aesthetic perception of tragic or horrific events. The great war films do not neglect the horror of war, but undoubtedly give it a ‘wonderful’ aesthetic image.

So, is a director’s point of view moralist, in the sense of the moralists of the eighteenth century, as opposed to libertine? For instance, do you think moralists see love as a power and libertines see it as a weakness?

PS: Since I’m absolutely crazy about pop music, whose lyrics are loaded with the word ‘love’, I would simply say that love is a power for everyone.

I get the feeling that for you, the sentimental weakness of your characters is their hidden
strength, and their humanity derives from this weakness. Do you think humanity springs from weakness?

PS: Individual weaknesses or failures can, in many cases, be a means of redemption for a person. It’s simply that an individual becomes stronger when faced with a spectre or when he realizes how low he has sunk. Unfortunately, it’s not a fixed rule. If it were, there would be no more suicides.

Regarding your movies…  How does seeking formal beauty enrich your screenplays?

PS: In various ways. There’s no fixed rule, thank goodness, otherwise a film would be boring.  However, I’ve always liked cinema that strives for formal beauty, and have nearly always remained indifferent, as a viewer, to films that suffer because they appear to develop randomly, haphazardly, even when the latter is simply a technique: The crane in ‘The Consequences of Love’; the loan shark sewing the bride’s dress in ‘The Family Friend’; Andreotti walking along the street in ‘Il Divo’.

How do your create your scenes?

PS: I plan them, at home, before shooting the film. I prepare them twice: first, after reading the screenplay, solely in relation to the story; second, after doing the location scouts, which give me more precise, detailed visual elements for creating a scene. I rarely improvise on the set, and only if I have a brilliant idea. But brilliant ideas are so rare. And they can often be wrong. I imagine the film while sitting in an armchair, and then I draw the storyboard. Besides, that’s what a filmmaker’s supposed to do: imagine the film before it exists. I project it in my head beforehand, and it is always more dazzling and precise than the end-result.

Tell us about the actual shots, which appear to be very important to you. Do you always work with the same cinematographer?

PS: Everything’s important in a film, not just the shots. Even the sound man’s mood or the quality of the catering. Any microcosm, in this case a set, can fall apart for the slightest, most insignificant thing. It’s absurd, but it’s a fact. A single shot, if well-thought out and balanced, can enthrall and say more than ten pages of dialogue – that’s why shots can’t be left to chance or delegated to others. Because it’s my job to make the film communicate and, God willing, to enthrall the audience. I always work with the same cinematographer because, naturally, he’s very good and because an understanding with the crew, and first and foremost the cinematographer, is essential to doing a good job.

How do you compose your shots? Your characters always seem like tiny figures in a vast
setting.

PS: I sit down and imagine the shots, while keeping the scene, the dialogue and the meaning of the scene fixed in my mind. I repeat, I imagine them. I imagine the lenses that are required, the angles, the height of the camera, the camera movements and the characters, and where the focus will be. All these variables are directed towards a single goal: making the scene work according to the presuppositions established in the screenplay. I imagine these things pretty accurately, and make any corrections on the set, together with the cinematographer.

Your direction conveys a vision of the world that is derisive, pathetic and political yet full of hope. How do you explain this paradox?

PS: My ‘vision of the world’ (that’s a bit high-sounding) essentially pivots on irony, which I aim for constantly. I look for it everywhere. I don’t know if it works. Life is tragic enough, and irony is the best antidote.

This is your third film with Toni Servillo. Tell us how you work, how you direct him. How did he get into the part of Andreotti?

PS: My way of directing Servillo has become increasingly minimal with every film. I don’t mean that I no longer direct him, but we know each other so well that we understand each other immediately and there’s no need to explain everything in detail. These are the advantages of knowing one another. I think the secret of our partnership, which, all things considered, is a fruitful one, is trust. An indispensable element, especially when the character is as delicate and charged with meanings as Andreotti. I was very struck by Toni Servillo’s way of getting into the Andreotti character. I had
prepared a lot of footage of the real Andreotti for him, but he chose not to watch it. He preferred to go with the screenplay and the fundamental characteristics I had chosen to depict Andreotti. I think the most difficult thing about this character is his impassiveness, his extreme restraint, because thoughts and moods had to be communicated with the slightest changes of expression while maintaining that impassiveness. So it was certainly not an easy part to play.

What about the scene in which Andreotti confesses while looking into the camera Is it a dream or a fictitious element that has nothing to do with History with a capital ‘H’, since we know Andreotti has never confessed? Maybe this scene will cause a scandal in Italy...

PS: For me, it is a dream. It couldn’t be otherwise. But it is also cathartic, for the film-goer and, perhaps, for Andreotti. I don’t know if I’ve touched on the truth, but, as the author of the story, I felt that, at least for a moment, I had to divert my objective gaze from the character and the events, and hazard an interpretation of things, establish a political, and not a penal responsibility. Regarding the latter, I never presumed to act the judge.

Another scene that conveys the character’s ambiguity is the one in which Andreotti and his wife are watching the Italian pop singer Renato Zero on television: filming the characters in tight close-up seems to fine-tune their emotions.

PS: This is another key scene in the film. I attempted to apply to the Andreottis a ‘dizzying’ dynamic that can occur in any couple’s relationship, in other words, that terrible feeling that the person with whom we’re sharing our life is a complete stranger. It’s an agonizing moment, which leaves us feeling completely lost. I’m sure it happens to all couples who’ve been together for some time. When Andreotti’s wife experiences this doubt it inevitably gives rise to a thousand more. They are no longer the usual doubts, like if your spouse is cheating on you, but doubts concerning the fate of a state, of a country, of millions of ordinary people, because Andreotti wielded so much power over the years that he decided many things in Italy.

Tell us about your relationship with music, which is an important element in your films. It’s amazing how it actually seems to be part of your way of filming. Would you say that your film language is musical?

PS: I’d like it to be musical, but I doubt that it is. Instead, I use the emotions that music arouses to write a scene more effectively. I need music to write a screenplay. It can create dizzying emotions, and a certain feeling of power or suspense – which helps me to create scenes that I want to be powerful or suspenseful. I don’t write a single word until I have a new ‘library’ of sounds that are right for the feeling of the film I’m going to develop. Inevitably, a lot of the music that has inspired the writing of a scene, winds up in the actual film.

– Interview with Director Paolo Sorrentino; via emanuellevy.com