He [Giorgio Venturini] asked me to work for him and suggested to me things that weren’t really what I wanted. However, for example, Il Boia di Lilla interested me very much because it was Dumas’ world seen from a different angle, that is, seen in a single page. In other words, not The Three Musketeers but the story of Milady, which is told in just a couple of pages: her background, the story of the brother of the hangman of Lille whom she corrupted, and all the rest. I inserted an ironic element in it, which was born out of my studies on Brecht. I aimed for estrangement, to the extent that it was obtainable: and I was a fool, because cinema leads to dreaming, to identification with the story’s hero. If we continuously ironize and fracture the story so that the spectator can examine the events in order to judge them, then we kill the cinema. So, my Brechtian experiments led me to the ultimate disaster that was I Cento Cavalieri in 1964. My attempts at this began as soon as I saw myself in front of the characters with their period costumes and swords: in them, I saw beauty and ridicule. Nothing better than swashbuckler movies to establish, maybe even somewhat haphazardly, the contrasts and contradictions of heroism and cowardice, of love and sacrifice, of erotism and interest.
Interview recorded by Gianni Rondolino, 8–9 January 1980. In Gianni Rondolino,
Vittorio Cottafavi, Cinema e Televisione (Capelli Editore), p. 55.
Il boia di Lilla (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1952)