01  SUMMER 2025

Some seven or eight years ago, a strange conspiracy formed between the one who writes these lines (classified as ‘left-wing’), the Mac-mahonians in their prime (labeled as ‘right-wing’) and young cinephiles (the more avid the younger they were) in order to impose in Paris the name of Vittorio Cottafavi as that of a great filmmaker. And does Michel Delahaye remember having praised (rightfully so) the battle between reds and whites in Le legioni di Cleopatra as the work of a filmmaker who knows how to ‘see death as a poet and as a republican’? ^[1] Well, it was precisely since then that Cottafavi’s films disappeared from the screens.

Indeed, there were some misunderstandings: the Cottafavi ‘wave’ was linked to that of the peplum, a kind of work which he took on not without interest but which, ultimately, fascinated him less than its results pleased us. And for those who had seen his previous works (I saw everything by him that was distributed in France, and nothing is uninteresting), he remained the author of the admirable Traviata 53, or of Una donna libera (a prelude to the Astruc of La proie pour l’ombre), for which his fame could have promptly been immortalized by the historians. To the eyes of lazy exegetes, however, it would have rested upon absurd ‘wagers’: transcribing La dame aux camélias into economic-boom Milan (Traviata 53), or making the only ‘optimistic’ adaptation of The three musketeers (Il boia di Lilla: Constance is saved, but the real hero, Milady, is stupefied, paralyzed from the opening credits because of an unavoidable death: the film is the ‘psychoanalytic’ retrospection of her career...), or even having Constantine the gangster die due to a lack of trust in his mistress (Avanzi di galera, where the subject of all three episodes is that portion of trust without which love dies).

So, some speak of calligraphy, others of a distance in regard to genre — meanwhile, Cottafavi’s elegance has nothing to do that with that of the ‘great tailors’ of cinema, nor with that, heavier and less jerky, of Lattuada in his best moments — as if this distance would always be a negative quality, regardless of the unfortunate Boileau-esque (see Boileau-Narcéjac) aspect of this notion of genre, which demonstrates the shocking backwardness of film criticism compared to art criticism. I have no qualms about saying the very opposite: if Cottafavi touches the essence of cinema, it is because he understood its discontinuity. In the whole world, including Bois d’Arcy, ^[2] there are perhaps no more than a hundred sound films in which each shot and each moment is simultaneously effective and beautiful in itself. Even Messalina, which he disowns, has admirable elements, such as the tightening of the space during the bloody orgy in the end, the extras playing the same role as the suitcases and twin beds of Boetticher’s Legs Diamond. The ‘sudden apprehension’ [saisissement] (which I already discussed in regard to both of his Ercole films, in “Le peplum et la cape”, Positif, 50) is the key to this cinema where nonchalance is merely apparent, and where the economy of means is a paradoxical desire for luxury and will (the Baudelairean calm here is always the result of some resolved crisis, even if the endings are deliberately melodramatic or tragic). Furthermore, the intelligence and precision of Cottafavi’s intentions exclude, as far as he is concerned, all resort to ‘chance’: if a spirit guides him, it is the awareness of this very spirit. The real drama of his films is the Goethean drama par excellence: to the Moment then, I say: / ‘Ah, stay a while! You are so lovely!’. ^[3] But the secret mutation of quantity into quality demands a certain persistence of the basic material. In the absence of unimaginable re-releases, Cottafavi’s tenacity would be confined, despite him and despite us, merely to our remembrance, if not for I cento cavalieri finally showing up! ^[4]

— Gérard LEGRAND.

You were ‘discovered’ by French criticism when you were directing seemingly ultra-commercial films. How did you feel about that?

Happy, but also surprised because I considered all the films I’d made until then (it was 1954 I think, when I got Cahiers’ critique of Traviata 53 [written by Truffaut]), all those films, except maybe precisely Traviata 53, almost like a nutritional necessity. With the exception also of my first film, which I directed, at least for a good portion of it, according to my own ideas, and which was called Fiamma che non si spegne. But French criticism’s attitude moved me because I had the feeling I’d obtained certain results along a very well-defined line, even if the subject and the genre didn’t correspond to my desires. From the ‘mélo’ I strived for something truthful, internal. I aimed to film [cinématographier] the soul, secret feelings. I think the camera lens is more intelligent than our illusions and that, maybe, it is capable of seeing, it surely sees inside the characters more easily than the regular eye. Besides, the swashbuckler film amused me because I experienced a somewhat childish feeling when diving into this genre. Even if it did not correspond entirely to what I wished to do, I never despised these genres.

And also that allowed me to affirm some of my own tastes (which I hold on to this day, which perhaps means I haven’t aged that much), notably for the mix of tragedy and comedy. In the swashbuckler film, we often just barely touch comedy. I’d jump head-first into it. Tragedy was the main material of the genre, with all the deaths, revenges, etc. Melodrama was more or less the same thing but in reverse: these stories of women who end up committing crimes or suicide because of their relationships with men and society perhaps could offer a slight possibility for humor, linked to an affectionate feeling I had for the characters — a benevolent humor. The melodrama has strict rules. I don’t know if I respected them. What I wanted, in the first place, starting from a schema Italian audiences accepted, was to internalize the story: not the events of the story, but the reactions of certain characters when faced with the events of the drama. The stories were a bit stupid, or they had a mechanism that was guaranteed by the success of other films in the same genre. I did not fight against these restrictions. In these screenplays, the twists and turns of the story were banal, but what they had in them that was extraordinary, what I wanted to unleash, was the human participation in suffering. I envisioned that mainly through the female characters: the soul of a woman is more interesting to me, it is a more sensitive soul, more capable of penetrating pain; anyway, more capable of achieving complete exasperation within pain. This is why we decided to change Traviata 53, which was adapted from La dame aux camélias, transposing it to the industrial Italy of today. The matter of money became more important, there were big interests behind it; the father no longer does any sentimental stuff, instead he says ‘I’ll pay you and you’ll leave’ to his daughter. That renders the story more credible and it allowed me to better delve into the interiority of a woman. A woman who, incapable of imposing herself in any other way than through her beauty, undergoes the violence of the society that surrounds her, of men who wish to use her like an instrument of power. We know very well that an Italian industrialist loves to flaunt his mistress, with her splendid jewellery, etc. because that proves his economic power, the fact that he can easily throw money away, etc. This woman, she is destroyed as a woman, she becomes nothing more than the concretisation of a certain power. She tries to save herself through love, but the system holds her back, crushes her, and it is only after having ground her to pieces that the men realize they touched something sacred — a woman’s feelings. Her death involves the participation of the remorse of the two men who killed her.

In Traviata 53, sudden lyrical impulses break a serene rhythm…

I try to always share the feelings of my characters, up to the moment when they are mature enough to no longer explain themselves, but to literally share their feelings in communion. It’s the same thing in I Cento Cavalieri. There are wordless sequences which don’t serve to propel the story forward, but which go beyond it. The scene of the wooden Christ, for example. It’s as in life: there are precious moments that don’t repeat themselves, when man acquires an exceptional percentage of vitality, of intuition, of lucidity.

Some of your films, such as Il boia di Lilla or Traviata 53 seem more worked-out than Nel gorgo del peccato…

That comes from the fact that I wasn’t really interested in Nel gorgo del peccato. You know, there is a matter of nutritional necessity in these films, and I don’t forget that. If I had been able to do what I wanted to do, then I wouldn’t have shot 10% of the films I directed, but I tried, every time it was possible for me, to find a center of interest in the stories that were suggested to me. But I couldn’t force their limits, except for Traviata 53, which I really like.

What about certain sections of Avanzi di galera?

Yes, some parts of it. Unfortunately, Avanzi di galera was an episodic film, and I didn’t yet know how to be more dry, more concise in what I directed. If I had more experience, if I’d thought things out more, I’d have been more precise in regard to the story and more of an improviser when directing the actors. The first episode was really melodramatic. It was about a surgeon who’d been convicted and couldn’t continue with his old life. His wife helps him, and he succeeds in performing an operation precisely on his wife, who’d been in a car crash. It was very melodramatic but very well-constructed. In the second, Eddie Constantine played a gangster and he was really worried about it, because his role was that of a defeated man. He was beaten up, he had terrible things done to him in order to make him confess where he’d hidden his loot before going to jail. In the end, when he arrives near the place where he’d hidden the gold, in a river, he realizes the gold is no longer there. He probably didn’t know rivers very well, and so the current must have taken it to the sea or a fisherman must probably have found it. But his mates think he found it and they shoot him up. The third was the one played by [Walter] Chiari, and it was more comical. He’s an innocent man accused of theft. When he leaves prison, he realizes he’s been pardoned, but he does not wish to be pardoned. He wants his revenge against the man who did the theft. It was the best episode: neorealism with a little bit of humour. But Italian audiences mostly enjoyed Eddie Constantine’s story.

Had you seen Constantine in Godard’s film?

Yes, I really like Alphaville. I really like Constantine who, with that face of a terrible man, capable of anything, is almost frightened by everything that surrounds him. He’s suspicious of the most normal things. A door for him becomes a danger, and that creates an extraordinary atmosphere, even more with the shocking voice they gave to the computer, a terrifying voice. There really is the feeling that something is possessing us, that it is forcing us to do what it wants, and in Constantine’s eyes there is simultaneously fear and the will to fight.

Do you like science fiction a lot?

Oh yes, I think that in modern literature science fiction will take on an exceptional importance. I leave aside certain writers who go beyond science fiction, such as Borges in La biblioteca de Babel — those are typical elements of science fiction elevated to the level of great literature. But there are also less great authors who have a freedom and a creativity that are almost lost in the contemporary novel. The great inventions, the discoveries of the imagination, nowadays practically only exist in fantasy literature. And science fiction can be social, that is, it can envision new societies, with all the consequences that can have on man as a singular individual. It can also be allegorical. For me, the first attempt at science fiction can be found in Lucian’s dialogues. In France, science fiction is born with Cyrano. Nowadays, I really like Asimov, whom I prefer to Van Vogt, but the work that’s interested me the most is [Walter M. Miller Jr.’s] A Canticle for Leibowitz — a religious sociological novel, incredible as it may seem.

Is there a sci-fi influence in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide or I cento cavalieri?

Perhaps not in I cento cavalieri, but surely in Ercole. The very theme belongs to science fiction. We can assume that, after he’s killed by his son, the blood of Uranus, falling to Earth, will form Uranium.

But in I cento cavalieri, the invention of the armour is the science fiction of the year 1000...

Yes, if we see the film with the mentality of a man from the year 1000, then it’s science fiction. The origins of the total war, of the total weapon.

Let’s go back a little bit. When you started making films, one of your big projects was [Calderón de la Barca’s] Life is a dream...

Yes, as you can see, I was already thinking of historical films... But the producers to whom I suggested the story didn’t even acknowledge me. So, in order not to bore myself too much, I accepted the films they offered me. This happened many times. I wrote a story I really liked, He marched into the shade of the valley [in French, Il marchait dans l’ombre de la vallée], and even [Alfredo] Bini, who is a very courageous producer, told me it was abominable, that he didn’t believe such abominable things could enter my mind [Laughs]. I examined my conscience right away. Perhaps it was the way of expressing these ideas that rendered them wholly terrifying. You know, the problem for an Italian director is always the same: either he achieves a certain commercial result and is able to impose whatever he wants, or he is so supported by the critics that he is able, with great effort, to force the hands of producers. Antonioni was able to impose what he wanted to do, but he paid a high price for it for many years. Me, I had neither this luck nor this merit. And, that being the case, either I accept it or I rebel. Rebellion consisting of not filming anything.

But at the time you made really commercial films, didn’t you?

Oh no, look, my films never made much money and, precisely, the producers reproached me many times for treating popular stories in a not very popular manner. The peplum films all did very well, but my last film [I cento cavalieri] did not deliver the expected results. It was a really difficult film to make. The producer pushed one way, I pushed another. I pushed more than him, which allowed me to do what I wanted: to free the historical genre from the facts of history. I was able to realize Brecht’s ideas in a spectacular cinema, a very difficult thing to do, because in the theater there is the physical presence of the actors, there is something which can force the spectators to remain seated, without becoming dreamers who identify with a character, with an action. Cinema is a magical media, one that establishes such a secret complicity with the spectator that he can at any time free himself from his isolated condition and dive into the story. By adapting Brecht’s ideas, I expected the spectator of I cento cavalieri to not pick a side, to remain distanced in relation to what he was being shown. I don’t know if I succeeded. The spectator was completely displaced, diverted. He didn’t find the traditional events which he is accustomed to. Besides, there was no hero, no good or bad guys, no people who are right and people who are wrong. Everybody is right and wrong, and the hero is often pathetic, somewhat comical and ridiculous. The real hero, Don Gonzalo, is even more ridiculous. The mix of tragedy and comedy alternating without discontinuity, the intervention of our world of today in the context of the year 1000, this backward jump of our society, of our politics, of our ideas reflected in the faces of Spanish Arabs and Christians are all quite disturbing. Furthermore, there are experiments which the spectator does not easily accept, such as in the final battle [when the film turns black and white]. The spectator thinks to himself: ‘what’s going on, this is a low-quality film’. He doesn’t understand that it is intentional, in order to show that, surrounding the man who is about to kill his fellow man, the very elements of Nature, even the most visible ones, disappear. We no longer see who’s friend or foe, because only the colors differentiated the two sides. And then, in the moment when he’s about to kill, there is a concentration, a desire to suppress something that should be reflected internally, and so we eliminate color: the most visible link connecting man to Nature, to the world surrounding him. And, during the battle, there’s no more heroic music, but instead a flamenco piece accompanying the massacre, with castanets and clapping hands... This didn’t bring me anything from the point of view of the critics, who didn’t even see the film, and audiences were left cold. Of course, the coldness of the audience leads me to think I obtained some results in regard to my Brechtian experiments, because they really were very cold! [Laughs] But it did not obtain from them moral or social observations, which was one of my goals. Maybe I didn’t achieve my goals, while perfectly succeeding in my methods... Fortunately, I never said I was doing Brecht, so at least Brecht’s name remains intact! [Laughs]

So, now you’ve chosen rebellion?

Yes, I had a choice between two solutions: force, by obliging a producer to do what I wanted, or refusal. Many projects were proposed to me, an unbelievable amount of westerns. I had this one which could pass as a western, but I did not want to do it. I felt lost. Because I did pepla, I did Hercules, I did swashbucklers, I did things that were really linked to Italian tradition, to Italian culture.

Even Hercules?

Yes, Hercules is a Greek god, but us Latins adopted him. We accept him very well. Meanwhile, the western is a classical genre. I really love some westerns which for me are fundamental works. But I had the impression I was doing a trick, a fakery. A fake western, like a counterfeit. Nowadays I’ve changed my mind somewhat, after seeing the films of Sergio Leone, who mixes a certain prosopopoeia, a quite Latin characteristic, with a baroque, excessive worldview; he knows how to give to the type of western he makes a very original style. Maybe more Japanese than Italian, but anyway, it’s got nothing to do with America. He deliriously plays on the exasperation of the wait, on the redness of the blood that stains a whole shot. Ten people get killed at once. He is the great master of the wait. He can hold the audience’s breath for ten minutes, when he could have just showed what would happen right away. People stare at each other, almost paralyzed... Besides Leone, I think there are two or three westerns all’italiana which are not to be entirely rejected. Damiano Damiani made a film, Quién sabe?, which isn’t bad at all. And then there is another... I forgot the name of the director, but you’ll find that in your files: a film with Tomás Milián playing an Indian who must get his revenge [Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti]. My western was called Un metro de sombra [in Spanish, A meter of shade] and it took place in a small republic in Central America, during a revolution. This revolution wasn’t brought forth by the people against the government, but set off by the agent of an oil tycoon who wanted to put his hands on the country’s oil. And once he gets what he wants, the whole thing collapses again, because another oil tycoon launches a new revolution. The people who fight don’t know they are fighting not for their country, but for black gold. The headquarters of both armies are in offices, maybe in New York. A ‘meter of shade’ under the Equator is fundamental for survival. But the oilmen must have a lot of power over film producers, because they always told me this story couldn’t be made, that there was no way it could interest audiences. I believe it didn’t interest the oilmen...

Speaking of your Ercole films, you were saying they belong to a certain Italian culture. Do you respect this culture, or were you trying to mock it?

You know, mockery is one of the elements of love. If we don’t love something, then we also don’t feel like mocking it. That nowadays Hercules seems a little ridiculous, that’s a fact, but you think he wasn’t ridiculous in the times of Greeks and Romans? Look at the legend: the son of a god, extremely strong, who was forced to clean all the shit in the Augean stables... That’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it? So, I think we might as well have some fun. Besides, he was a true Hero, but with a mundane side to him. In Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, I really liked his desire to never fight. In La vendetta di Ercole, there were also many comical things. His whole work in the fields, replacing the animals, bringing down all by himself a tree that four cows couldn’t move. Hercules is a half serious, half farcical man, but farcical in a good way. Don’t you see a Gallic element in my Hercules? He’s no Astérix, but he’s someone who’s really part of a tradition. He’s one of ours... meanwhile, a sheriff is someone who maybe we can identify with, but who’s farther from us. I have the feeling Hercules is a character whom we know intimately. He’s a friend.

Were there Hugolian reminiscences in Broderick Crawford’s character [King Eurystheus in La vendetta di Ercole]?

Maybe, but don’t you think Victor Hugo belongs to this same vein? He’s a great constructor of history and myths. Besides, he was also great at farces. I’ve recently staged one of his plays, Mille francs de récompense, which is a really joyful farce, with an extremely Jacobin humour, isn’t it? And what about Mangeront-ils?? It’s a dramatic poem which we never know if it’s serious or paradoxical. He was an old, indomitable Jacobin who watched over France from his isle.

The idea of history seems very important to you. How did you come to be aware of its significance?

That’s very hard to say. When I was young, I already had some ideas about history which I’ve held on to. I believe history is often intangible, that the historical event is actually more secretive than what the books say. You think it was hunger that drove Attila to Italy? I don’t think so. Behind that expedition was a spiritual thirst, a desire to discover truth, all the while knowing the resources to discover it were lacking. And a whole people marched towards where the sun seemed to be. There are also more intimate events. You know of Pascal’s paradoxes, well, Pascal’s truths, because Pascal never wrote paradoxes... Cleopatra’s nose, maybe that was a disease. Who knows how many times smallpox didn’t change the course of history... When I was young, I read in a book that Alexander had pacified Persia. It was very beautiful to read that word, ‘pacify’... Some years later, I found out he had killed all the men, enslaved the women and deported everyone, and so it was pacified. And this discovery arose in me a feeling of hatred towards the ‘great characters’ of history, while the small ones are their victims.

Is that why the notion of death is so important in your films?

For me, death accomplishes many things: it brings the great characters down to the measure of the small ones, no more earth being necessary for one than for the other; it interrupts the development of the ideas of the Greats, and each interruption allows for an examination of everything they did, everything they said. That allows for the possibility of calling things into question. It’s also a sacred moment, perhaps that of the supreme liberation of man. I always tried to give it its due. Furthermore, I noticed that in Shakespeare, in particular Antony and Cleopatra, the deaths were very varied. The man of the people, the soldier, the farmer, he’s hit, falls dead to the ground and that’s it. Meanwhile, the Greats always speak at length before dying. I’ve applied that to my films. The poor people die all at once. Poof! They are hit, they stop moving; meanwhile the Greats make a show of their own personal death. They see themselves from outside, they are representing themselves, and don’t realize they are dead. In I cento cavalieri, the general does not realize he is dead. It is only after saying ‘We won... Am I wounded?... At last, I can show the marks of my courage’ that he suddenly realizes he can no longer see: ‘I can’t see anything, it’s dark here…’ he tells his son, who answers him, pitifully: ‘Yes, it’s night.’ — ‘But... I’m dying! Am I dying?’, and he falls to the ground. He wanted to be one who could show the marks of his courage, that is, to lose an arm or an eye in battle, a purely rhetorical evidence, and this ambition erases all his lucidity. The Sheikh, he doesn’t say anything when he dies. He pulls out the sword the dwarf stuck in his back and stares at his own blood on it, then walks with the sword in his hand until he falls, as if by staring at the sword with his blood shining under the sun he understood the exact moment he went beyond his human limits, that is, his physical presence in this world. So there are these two deaths, the rhetorical death of an ignorant and poor Christian and the conscious death of a very cultured, refined, philosophical man, as the Arabs of the time were — the most civilized people in the year 1000.

It was by passing through mythology that I became aware of an attitude towards history. A critical but positive attitude. To use historical elements not to offer the knowledge of something, but to obtain a stance, forcing an examination from the author and the spectator. We must be contemporary to the events we are narrating, that is, we must live not only the historical event, but live entirely in the moment, we must place ourselves in the very heart of the event. We managed that very well with the secondary, historically less important characters — but who can still be heroes...

Ettore Manni [Curridio] in Le legioni di Cleopatra?

Yes, that’s just it. It’s a character who brings liveliness, who sets the plot in motion. It’s the victim of historical events. With I cento cavalieri, I wanted to go further and render the Great characters equally lively. So I invented historical events which did not exist. It’s more or less certain that something like what happens in the film happened in Spain, though we can’t say where exactly. It was a phenomenological attempt. The arc of the events does not exist while we live their history. It’s formed only afterwards. So I rejected preamble. Perhaps that’s a flaw. Each event, when it’s being produced, seems devoid of context. And then the fact that the characters all belong to certain categories — bandits, workers, landowners, monks, Arabs, soldiers, the Count of Castile and his court — increased this aspect of contemporaneity. The Count of Castile is a very important character. He’s the politician who loses contact with reality, with his people, with historical reality, a man who abstracts himself completely. And the more powerful he gets, the more he distances himself. He becomes so abstracted, so rarefied, that he can happily develop his theory of man and war: war is a dirty, stinking thing, full of blood, sweat, dust, and it’s better to do a tidier war by keeping the combatants at a distance. He envisions a war without soldiers. Each one can die peacefully in their own house or working in the fields, and he envisions the possibility of the atom bomb. That’s what happens when heads of state reason abstractly about a whole people without seeing the singularities that make it up.

But isn’t the objective of the historical film to contrast the side of the world this abstraction might represent with the mundane aspect of those who’ll get caught in the middle of this muddle?

Yes, precisely, that’s it. I want to do a film along these lines... I agree. It’s a symbolic idea in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide: the soldiers all with the same face, while Hercules, the dwarf and Manni are all very different.

When did you begin putting Brecht’s ideas in practice?

I believe I started doing it unconsciously, then I discovered some of my attempts somewhat intersected what Brecht had unleashed in the theatre. Perhaps in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, which is a double-sided work, I pushed harder in that direction. In I cento cavalieri, I wanted to apply Brechtian precepts from the beginning, from the process of writing the screenplay. To do Brecht in the cinema one must start from the script, it can’t be done only through the direction. It wouldn’t correspond to the internal style of the work. One cannot mix the moral and critical stance with the sentimental stance. Likewise, an actor doing Brecht must act as if he were three steps behind the character, observing the character and repeating what he’s doing. It’s an exchange, a mediation operated by the actor between character and audience.

Brecht also worked on popular subjects, such as the gangster film... It must be taken into consideration that to do ‘Brechtianism’ isn’t just to do Marxism. It is to examine, from the dramatic, political and social point of view, the events one is narrating, while narrating them in a paradoxical manner; I could say one can do Brecht even while displaying ideas opposed to those of Brecht. In I cento cavalieri, the theme is clearly stated. There are peasants who work and earn nothing for this work while their bosses use them to get richer. The film opens with a brawl set off by protesting peasants, and that’s when the Arabs arrive. That interrupts the popular movement, because they impose a very strict discipline. As for the bandits, they are, in their own words, the products of war, the shit left behind by war when it passes: ‘everything the war leaves behind, like cows when they pass by’.

None of that is ever theoretical. On the contrary, there is a sort of physical joy in the film.

Because in the very core of the tragic or serious moments, absurd or comical details arise. I wanted to show that sometimes men can pursue terribly dramatic actions in a very comical way. So, in the battle between the Arab horsemen and the troops of Don Gonzalo, the Arabs are very disciplined, all aligned, perfect examples of an organized army facing an enemy incapable of organizing itself. The Arab commander stares silently at everything that’s happening in front of him, while Don Gonzalo gives a series of orders in a burst of grandiloquence. It’s a total mess, because everyone executes his orders really badly and with a lot of noise. To that I oppose the very simple gesture of the Arab commander when he says ‘attack’, and his troops charge in a single movement. When Don Gonzalo sends his men, he berates them, yelling ‘attack’ several times. The preparation for the massacre is thus rather funny. Even in the middle of the carnage, there are some moments of paradoxical humour. Likewise, when we see a few horsemen approaching an Arab detachment and suddenly deploying in formation, revealing they were actually many but hidden one behind the other, it’s almost a gag. I had to find an idea for an ambush that would also be a genius move for Don Gonzalo. So, it was quite fun to show three men who seemed to wish to surrender themselves suddenly multiplying into many. It’s the same principle as a folded fan — it looks like a stick.

Did you have many problems in this film?

The Italian producer and the distributor cut 600 meters for the release. The 600 meters for which I loved making the film. That didn’t turn out well, because one could feel the rest of the material was filled with the same idea. It didn’t change anything in the film’s atmosphere, and in addition to that it rendered some ideas more confusing. They wanted to turn it into a swashbuckler at all costs, which was a mistake.

Was Messalina also meddled with?

Messalina? No, not at all. It’s a film I don’t like very much. I find it too ornamental. The very story of Messaline doesn’t seem that interesting to me. I couldn’t see how to give life to her character, to make it mutable. Everything in her was too calculated. What interested me were the experiments I was able to do in Technirama, a system I used in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide. The character of Messaline didn’t really interest me because she was a pathological case. She lacked humanity. She was a deranged woman from the start. She could only see in herself, never outside herself; incapable of love or hate, but doing both simultaneously. That’s why she had the men she loved killed, she strived for absolute power. What I prefer in the film are some scenes that take a close look at the life of Romans at the time. The sequence in Rome during the festivities, when we see two actors on a small stage performing Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus. There are people sitting on benches, on the ground, and the poor actors who don’t even have a set perform on the porch of a house, as happened for popular shows at the time. The people who couldn’t pay for the arenas watched these plays.

What was your actual work in Le vergini di Roma?

I worked on the script with Léo Joannon, then I started shooting for two weeks. I can’t say I shot what I wanted, because from the very beginning I was clashing with the producer. Then I found a way to remove myself from the film. I directed the sequence of the bridge defended by Horatius Cocles, some scenes in the fields of Porsenna, a few crowd scenes at the forum and the girls crossing the river, at least the part of the scene in the sewers. When I saw the cut, I was a little furious. They didn’t use the material. It was a really long and complicated scene. The more the girls traversed it, the more the water went up, dirtier and dirtier water that reached as high as their breasts and the horses’ heads. And I’d also filmed some really disgusting shots of sewer rats running away, scared off by the horses next to the girls. That suggested the strength of their will.

Was it you who had the idea of feeding Louis Jordan with apples, watermelons and raisins?

Yes, it was an idea that was in the script, in order to give a ‘Gallic’ nonchalance to the Gallic leader. He’s a man who takes food and women seriously. He does not consider war with the same enthusiasm. When he must do it, he does it very well, but before that he doesn’t want to bother himself.

One of your films, Toro Bravo, was released in Spain without you finishing it.

Yes, it wasn’t finished due to a lack of money. I saw it and I don’t like it. The original idea was interesting. It was the story of the final week of a fighting bull. It showed what we never see in bullfighting films, that is, the real life of bulls, of the herd, their relations with the people who breed them. There were some really impressive shots. While the bulls are roaming a field, we see passing behind them a ten-thousand-ton ship, also in the field. The Guadalquivir river is really close, but we don’t see it. The field obstructs the view of the river, and the ship seems to sail on grass. My performers weren’t actors, they were real bullfighters.

Do you feel like you were influenced by Spanish culture?

I think not; more so by French culture. Of course, being Italian, I still had some definite influence from Spanish culture, because for centuries we were occupied by the Spanish who came from France. But northern Italy is mainly influenced by France, directly or indirectly. Even after France’s direct political influence vanished, our writers and poets still continued to be marked by French literature. Furthermore, during the nineteenth century, a large part of Italy was occupied by the Austrians, that is, by a culture very distant from the Italian soul, from the Italian tradition. And in response, it led people to search for aspirations to freedom in French culture and in France itself. I used this idea in a play I did for television, whose title, translated from the Emilian dialect, is ‘Either France or Spain, as long as we eat!!!’

It was a play inspired by the theater of masks. The two main characters are Spanish Captain Matamoros [‘Moor killer’] and French Captain Taillebras [‘arm cutter’]. The Captain is a typical mask of 16th-century Italian theater. The two Italian characters are servants, the Harlequin and Brigel, who take the hardest blows in the battles. Sixteenth-century Italy was a perpetual battlefield, even with the pope’s interventions. In the play we have this character, a legate of the Pope, who tries to arrange a peace between the Captains. It’s a really joyous play, in the commedia dell’arte genre. In this play, I tried to use masks in a way different to tradition. I started from the principle that, with a mask on his face, a man can say certain things he couldn’t normally say: the powerful would punish him immediately, would send him to prison. But with a mask, anything goes. In the play, the harlequins have a mask hanging over their chests. They do the play with their faces uncovered, but when they start telling some truths they cover their faces with the mask, which was a way to warn the audience.

In television, you tried many times to revitalize the staging of classical plays, such as The Trojan Women, Antigone…

I don’t want the audience to receive a ‘classical’ play with all that this implies of reservation, of distance. We must consider that, in television, the show never ruptures everyday reality, the room, the house, the objects. Suggestion is thus weaker, but there is a temporal permanence. In the cinema, the size of the screen gives us almost hyperbolical possibilities. A real close-up, in the cinema, is something terrifying, a giant head crushing us. We see details in the skin... Meanwhile, on TV, a close-up is physiologically identical to the spectator. That gives it an intimacy... We listen to that face as if it were a friend. The same thing happens for the wide shot.

In Rome, you were shooting a program on [Adolf] Eichmann and preparing a staging of Don Juan...

Eichmann belongs to this series in Italy that we call ‘investigation-theater’ [teatro inchiesta]. It’s about events that are close to us, dramatized but with continuous interruptions, inserted documents, interviews, in any case explanations of what happened. It’s a genre where the transmission of information and drama get mixed, something well-suited for television. We haven’t arrived at a precise formula yet, but it’s really interesting. For this series, I also did a program on the 20 July plot against Hitler.

For me, Don Juan is Molière’s most beautiful text, the liveliest, the most important. It has been staged very few times. A few productions with cuts due to censorship at the time when it was written; then, for centuries, we were shown a revised text, in verse, which wasn’t written by Molière but by a young poet whose name you’ll have to research because my memory fails me — he was Racine’s nephew [it was actually Corneille’s brother Thomas]. This was only discovered at the beginning of this century. It is a bit like the history of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Perhaps neither text was constructed in an orthodox way for the public, they were rejected by the public. I remember Louis Jouvet’s performance as Don Juan, which was extraordinary. In Italy, we staged this play for the first time in 1948. For ten years I tried to stage it for television. When I found the actor, I finally did it: it was [Giorgio] Albertazzi, who created an admirable Don Juan, and Sganarelle was played by another formidable actor, [Franco] Parenti. You surely know him in France, since he came many times to act in Paris.

You conceived a very curious complex of sets...

I wanted to use the set in a way that can’t be done in the theater. We built a round, white wall, which surrounded the scene. All the scenes take place inside this wall, the forest, the beach, the tomb of the Commander. That gave it an atmosphere identical to that of an arena. We enter it and we only leave it after the death. We did some minor adaptations for television, but without touching the text: for example, when the Commander comes for the first time to Don Juan’s house, Don Juan asks Sganarelle to illuminate his exit. The Commander answers that those who have God’s light don’t need light, and at the same time he moves his hand, leans it on the table and leaves. His hand imprints a mark where it rested on the table, and this mark burns. Seeing the smoke, Sganarelle is immediately terrified, and then he tries to get rid of this supernatural evidence through earthly means: he throws some wine and starts hitting it, going from terror to buffoonery.

You worked with Giorgio Albertazzi in Vita di Dante.

Yes, we did three broadcasts on the life of Dante and Albertazzi played Dante. It’s another genre that suits television well: the documented life of great characters. To that we add excerpts of their writings, and we place everything in a historical context. A very spectacular style must be maintained in order for the audience not to lose track of the theme because of all the historical and artistic observations. Above all, the spectator must be able to see in the character the side that is closer to him. People were surprised to find out that Dante had children, a wife, that in Florence he wasn’t considered a great man but rather a pain in the ass, a revolutionary. He fought, he was really tough. He was exiled because he couldn’t be accepted in that society of the rich and powerful that was the society of Florence back then — fortunately so, because the Divine Comedy wouldn’t have been written if he had remained in Florence and had obtained what he desired politically. The spectators discovered someone very different from the poet who was forced upon them in school, and they better understood the meaning of his verses, which were spoken and recited in the voice of Albertazzi, who’s extraordinary when reading the verses. He knows how to render the musicality of the verse and how to unleash its meaning clearly.

You also adapted White Nights, with Monica Vitti.

Yes; Monica Vitti is a very refined, very sensitive actress. Maybe more sensitive than professional. Her character in White Nights has a terrifying, excessive sensibility, and she played it admirably. She seemed like a blade of grass shaken by the wind of her passion, by the wind of her thirst for freedom, for love, by the fear that her love was nothing but an illusion.

What do you think of Visconti’s film?

I really like Visconti’s film, except perhaps for one thing: the girl’s account of her love story, of her life with her grandmother, is shown in a flashback. I think that this part of Dostoevsky’s story is much more poetic, much stronger if it is told only by the girl, especially when this girl is Monica Vitti. Dostoevsky’s text wasn’t supported by an image, but by the expressive strength of a face. Thus we experience a much more [inaudible] feeling.

You’ve made a film after a short story by [Carlo] Cassola [Il taglio del bosco] which we can consider as the first truly neorealist film, for it was shot with live sound — a unique achievement in Italy.

Yes, it’s the sort of luck we sometimes get on television. The audience isn’t a problem. No producer would have ever financed a show adapted from a story where nothing happens except for the lives of lumberjacks working in a forest. The secret key to the story is the pain of a man whose wife died a few months previously and who cannot quit his job. He can’t communicate his sentiment to his colleagues because he’s just a lumberjack. He doesn’t even know what’s going on with him, he can’t express himself, he cannot find the words. He’s an invalid of sentiment. The film ends with him returning home after seven months of work. He quits his job because nothing could make him forget his pain. We can reproach Italian neorealism for having used people from the streets but with actors’ voices dubbing them. That gives a strange result: a very real face with expressive limits and, on the other hand, an extremely modulated voice, with an extremely subtle diction which does not correspond to the face. There is one exception: the first version of Visconti’s film La terra trema was performed in dialect. I don’t know if he used actors for the dubbing, but I think most of them weren’t professionals and spoke in Sicilian dialect. So, in my film, I decided to do it live, with real countryside lumberjacks, speaking with their own accent, their own dialect — that is, if it is possible to call Tuscan a dialect when it is at the origin of the Italian language... We made the public accept it and that’s a positive result.

You had one of your favorite actors at your disposal, Gian Maria Volonté. The others were Enrico Maria Salerno and Albertazzi...

They’re very modern actors. Italian theatre is a bit conservative, academicism reigns, the work of actors who please themselves with the same lines, the same diction, the same vocal cadence with the same effects. The actors you mentioned are able to step away from themselves in order to take a better look at the character and to bring him to the public. With Salerno I also did Humiliated and Insulted, another Doestoevsky, and also used him in The Trojan Women and Antigone. In it, he played two roles: first, that of Haemon, the king’s son and Antigone’s fiancé; then, after he gets killed, there comes a messenger who narrates Haemon’s death to the king, and it was Salerno again. Dressed in the messenger’s clothes, but keeping the same voice and the same face, he tells his father how he was killed. Volontè has now become a western star. He’s a really good killer. I’m going to direct Stevenson’s Prince Otto with Albertazzi soon. Salerno can be extraordinary when working in a comical register; I did an Italian play with him, not very good, but we worked hard on the text and it was startlingly successful: it was called La spada di Damocle and he played a really stupid soldier. These are the people who revitalize Italian theater, alongside directors such as Strelher, who’s a real genius. He discovers new actors, or uses old ones who were thought to be outdated and extracts new effects from them. He has understood Brecht admirably well and his Threepenny Opera seemed to me more Brechtian than the Berliner Ensemble’s.

Prince Otto is a remarkable novel, but very little known.

Sometimes an author’s lesser known novels are the best. Anyhow, it’s a really joyful book, very entertaining. It’s the story of a principality 15km wide and 20km long, with a castle. The prince laughs at politics, which seem ridiculous to him given the size of his land, and he leaves the affairs of state in the hands of his wife, who aims first and foremost to go to war against the neighboring principality, hardly bigger than theirs. His prime minister brings a captain from Prussia who’s immediately appointed as colonel, in the hopes of one day making him a general so he may prepare an army of 200 soldiers for the blitzkrieg. The prince can no longer stop these events, because he has no more power. So he decides to launch a revolution against himself. The government is overthrown, he exiles himself and life goes on. It’s a satire of militarism, but no longer in a Brechtian but in a Lubitschian style. You know, really small men who want to do really great things. The idea for the military project I got from the story of Pichrocole, by Rabelais. It will be a really farcical film, which I’d like to shoot simultaneously for TV and for the cinema, while waiting to be able to direct some old projects.

Interview by Gianni Rondolino, 8–9 January 1980. In Gianni Rondolino, Vittorio
Cottafavi, Cinema e Televisione (Capelli Editore, 1980), p. 55.