Paolo Genovese is known for his character-driven stories, mostly labeled comedies. Although, my feeling is that they are more along the lines of drama with strong comedy relief. In America, as he pointed out in an interview with the Italian newspaper, Il Messaggero, we call them dramedies. From his coming-of-age film, Immaturi to his southern Italian romantic comedy, Sei mai stata sulla luna to his latest film, Perfetti sconosciuti, Genovese looks past the superficiality of people and brings to the surface their weaknesses and flaws. His films have evolved over the years and have become symphonic productions in the way that they are written, directed, shot, lit and edited, accompanied with his beautiful emotionally-driven music scores.
I sat down with Paolo Genovese in April when he presented Perfetti sconosciuti at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. We talked about the evolution of his career and his filmmaking process from script to screen.
At the very beginning, I wanted to make a movie about the
secret lives of people but this was just a theme. Then as a screenwriter, the
problem was to find an interesting point-of-view. So I tried to come up with
different situations to speak about this secret life but nothing was
sufficiently interesting. One of the scenes from the old scripts was this
woman who put the phone on the table and asked the others to do the same thing
but no one wanted to do it. So the woman said, 'Good, we understand each other'.
So when we were writing, I said it could be very interesting if the other
person could put the phone on the table and they played this kind of game. And
then we thought it could be very interesting if the whole movie was about this
situation. So we changed the point-of-view of the story and tried to write a
story that would take place during one dinner around the table. We decided
on this new direction because for me the most important thing is to have an
original idea and not just a general theme, which could apply to a hundred
movies. That was a very original idea. So we tried to write this kind of
movie.
A photo-op after our interview |
I write, I physically write. I need to write. And I usually work two times a week, usually on Tuesday and Friday, and I speak about the structure, the character, the situation. I speak a lot and put it all together.. the background, where the character is from.. and then I take a few days to put all these ideas in order. Then I send it to each one of the other screenwriters. They read it and then we meet again on the following Tuesday and Friday.
In Italy, the director usually follows everything. Even if there is this bottle on the table, I would decide what kind of bottle. But I have a set very good designer and that house was an old house of a friend of ours that we completely restructured. We hired a company to knock all the walls down.. everything, even the bathroom and kitchen. We restructured everything, like in a theater but in a real apartment.
I felt like the apartment was also kind of a protagonist, especially in the way it was lit.
I designed it exactly with the
visible connection of the space- for example, where I would like to have the bathroom
and kitchen, the terrace.. I feel very lucky that we were able to do that. I saw
about 50 apartments but nothing was perfect. So in the end, we found this
one and we decided to build.
This is your tenth
feature film. How have you grown as a director from the
early days when you were doing commercials? What have you
learned along the way?
When I was a child, I always had a camera. It wasn’t an
iPhone but it was a very expensive camera. I wanted to be a director but I was realistic. My family is not from the
movie industry. So I went to university and then after, I started working for
some advertising companies. And then just for fun, I started to shoot a movie (short film).
Then I did another one and really had great success. It won a lot of prizes all
over Europe and throughout the world.. the United States, South America. It was
just a 10-minute movie. Then a producer called me and said, I would like to
make a very low budget, feature length film. The film is called Neapolitan
Spell. It’s a small film, but lucky. It won a David di Donatello, Golden
Globe, and Nastro d’Argento.. the most important Italian awards. Then I made
another one and another one. I learned the technical part of advertising on the set shooting. I stayed on the set with very important directors that
came from all over the world to shoot commercials in Italy, including Spike Lee. So
I grew (as a filmmaker) on an advertising set. I didn’t attend film school. I just went for
three weeks to the New York Film Academy.![]() |
Neapolitan Spell |
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Sei mai stata sulla luna |
My last question is about the music in your films. You
have beautiful hit songs by popular artists like Daniele Silvestri and Fiorella Mannoia.
How do you feel about the relationship between music and film?
Film is about life and for me, music is about life. Life
has happy moments and moments of sadness. If you think about it, every one of us
has a special song that we associate with a happy or sad moment of life. So for
me, they are inseparable. Music is deeply connected with the life of the person
that I would like to have in my movie. I
think that music could be an echo chamber to emotion.
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