The Interval
The Interval was just one of the collection of Italian movies that played at the BFI London Film Festival last week as director Leonardo di Costanzo made his fiction film debut.
I caught up with the director to chat about The Interval, casting unknown actors and making the transition from documentary to narrative movies.
- The Interval is your new movie so can you tell me a little bit about it?
I made this film after a long career in documentary filmmaking and at the centre of all of my latest documentary movies have been teenagers.
But there came a point that I felt that I couldn't really tell what I wanted to tell in the documentary form and I wanted to go beyond as the documentary form can only portray what you can see. So I decided to start doing a fiction film.
I based this film on my personal experiences with teenagers as I had met a lot of them - as had my co-writer Maurizio Braucci.
So we started thinking about this film and we just wanted to have these two characters and to put them inside one space.
In the end we were lucky to be able to have a lot of fun telling a story. It was plain story and we just had to decide what the characters were going to do and how.
- As you say this is your first fictional film after working in documentaries so how have you found the transition into a different form of story telling?
I tried to take all the good and fun things that I had experienced in documentary filmmaking and put them into this fictional form.
To me the most important moment was the actual moment of shooting - the film had a very well defined script and we had worked a lot with the actors in rehearsal - because we always wanted to leave room for improvisation.
The meaning of improvisation to me is to try and let the randomness of life break into the performances in order to give a special meaning to what we were doing.
- You cast none experienced young actors in the roles of Veronica and Salvatore so I was wondering why you chose to go down this path - because it is a bit of a risk?
Yes it is risky but I also think that that is the significant part of it. During the casting process I also interviewed teenagers who did have a background in acting schools but I realised that it was very difficult for them to go beyond this surface of everything that the acting school taught them; they had this standardised moving and gestures and so on.
I preferred the non professional actors because they were fresher in the way of acting. I would say that it is almost like if we shot the film twice; the first time was in a theatre when we did all of the rehearsals for the film and the second time was when we shot the actual film on the set.
The problem was when a none professional actor finds a way to express a gesture then they might not be able to reproduce it and my fear was exactly that - that all of the rehearsals that we did in the theatre before could somehow kill their spontaneity.
But we were very lucky because the change of space from the theatre to this abandoned building where the film was shot made these actors act in a very different way; they used their bodies and their voices in a very different way.
Within this change of location they re-invented their way of acting. It is what I would call an improvisation that I did willingly because they really knew what their characters were about and then they were free on set.
- The film is set in an abandoned building and I got the sense when I watched it that it took away the distractions of the outside world and let you focusing solely on these two characters - how much was that the desired effect?
This was exactly my desire because I didn't want the external reality to put a wall between us and the characters and the actors.
In a way we can say that it is easy to portray Naples as a city because there are a lot of films that have done it but at the same time I think it is very difficult for the very same reason.
We would rather evoke this external reality and we didn't want to film it in a straightforward way as we wanted the audience to create this reality.
So the external world is just like a counterpoint to what happens on screen within this enclosed space.
As I said before there are lots of films that portray Naples and are set in Naples and so we tried to evoke it a different way.
- How have you found the response to the movie so far?
In Italy the movie went very very well with the critics and the audiences. But the most interesting thing is the different interpretations the Italian audience had of the film; someone had an interpretation of the film that was quite similar to mine while someone else had a very different interpretation of it.
It is almost as if everyone could tell a different story every time based on my story.
I would consider it an open film and so I am always curious to listen to the different interpretations that the audience has.
- Finally what is next for you?
I am still thinking about it and I don't really have a clear idea about where I am going next.
I am just following and promoting this film at the moment and so I am only thinking about a future project at the moment.
Check out our review of The Interval here
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw