Interview by Silvia Tarquini
I’d like to start with a brief overview of your training — both from a practical standpoint, where you studied and so on, but above all how your visual imagination and your visual language took shape. What experiences, images or encounters have shaped you?
I got into this world very early on, in a completely instinctive way. I was maybe eight when I discovered that my mother’s camera let you stop a shot and pick it up again within the same file, which meant you could create a kind of in-camera edit. So I started making little stories with Lego figures — a kind of very rudimentary stop motion, without really knowing what I was doing. Later on, much to my disappointment, I discovered that stop motion already existed. I realised I could get similar results using a computer to edit the footage.
By around the age of twelve, I’d started shooting little short films and editing them myself. This carried on throughout secondary school, gradually becoming more and more “serious”. I started teaching myself photography, and began by making short films that I wrote and directed myself, with friends acting in them, before going on to work with other directors. Some of those projects picked up small awards at festivals, and that allowed me to start working as DP on other people’s projects. Still independent productions, but for me they marked a steady process of growth.
By the time I finished secondary school, I was convinced this was the path for me. I spent some time abroad studying at New York University, then applied to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and was accepted. I graduated in 2021/22. My years at the Centro were essential, not just for my professional training, but above all because they let me meet people who are still regular collaborators and close friends to this day. We’re still growing together, and that’s one of the best things about this job.
I don’t consider myself self-taught, since I had a structured education, but those years before my academic studies were important. I was obsessed with experimenting: I wanted to constantly try out new techniques, teach myself lighting, and understand how images worked. That drive, that need to make things, later on also led me to develop a strong interest as a viewer. I started studying film history in depth. Among the things that had the greatest impact on me was classic American cinema of the 1940s and ’50s, but also that of the early 1960s — a period when American film language was changing dramatically.
So you came to this as a filmmaker right from the start, then — even before you’d picked up any influences from film history. Perhaps it was this need to “build stories” that led you to love classic American narrative cinema of the ’40s and ’50s. That was a cinema still largely shot in black and white, and in black and white is Il protagonistayour debut feature as director of photography. Is there a connection?
Absolutely. The black-and-white look of Il protagonista wasn’t my decision, but it excited me from the very start. When Fabrizio sent me the script, he was looking for a young, first-time cinematographer to take the project on with. It was a very small-scale production, and I think he also wanted to work with a “fresh” eye. Right from the first page of the script, there was a description of a black-and-white Rome. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something that evoked an elegant, evocative image. So the decision was there from the outset, and I immediately read it as a key to the film.
Il protagonista is a story about identity: about who we are and who we become through our obsessions, our desires, and the images we build of ourselves. It’s not just about acting, but more broadly about an attitude towards self-fulfilment that’s very common today: we often tend to identify completely with what we do, or with who we’d like to be. The film’s protagonist, an aspiring leading man, constantly moves through different situations, always playing new people, and his true self ends up almost buried beneath these masks. In this sense, black and white seemed perfectly fitting to me, because it inevitably carries with it associations of artifice, theatricality, and fiction. That’s exactly what the film is about.
On the other hand, I find black and white extremely stimulating from a photographic point of view, because it’s perhaps the purest expression of working with light: the palette opens up to the infinite gradations between white and black, and everything hinges on your ability to shape those relationships.
Visually speaking, did you and the director draw on any particular works as references?
Fabrizio and I shared a lot of cinematic references. We both share a love for a certain kind of classic cinema, and we talked at length about how to bring out, in certain moments, that theatrical quality we were interested in. In the early stages, we were even considering a more extreme approach in this direction.
Among the references were classics like Citizen Kane, taken not so much as a direct aesthetic model, but more as a starting point. One film that influenced us a great deal was The Night of the Hunter, especially for the way it uses the geometry of its spaces, and for how light is used to create an almost abstract, theatrical quality. Where possible, we tried to bring something of that approach to our own film.
Another key reference was 8½. Towards the end of Il protagonista, when the character arrives at St Peter’s, we wanted the light to become almost blinding, right on the verge of overexposure, both outside the colonnade and on the character himself. The idea was to suggest a blurred vision, an altered perception. This idea came from the fact that I’d previously learned that, in the original version of 8½, the famous spa scene had been deliberately overexposed by several stops. In fact, I only know the film from the restored version, which seems to have “corrected” that overexposure, and for that reason I’d love to track down the original version.
You mean the restoration normalised that effect?
Exactly, and maybe it shouldn’t have, because that was precisely the feeling they were going for. That’s where the idea came from to do something similar in our own film: we worked on the image so that it would come out deliberately overexposed. On set, we only pushed slightly past correct exposure, while monitoring it with a LUT at +1 and +2 stops, to achieve that effect without losing technical control of the image.
All in all, there were a lot of influences and a lot of references. We also did some interesting tests based on The Power of the Dog. I think it’s a film that’s visually much more crafted than it might seem on first viewing.
But The Power of the Dog is a colour film…
Yes. One of the things I did during prep was download a number of films and convert them to black and white, to study certain specific sequences. I wanted to see how light behaved, especially in night interiors: how it came in through windows, how it shaped the backgrounds, and how it allowed the characters to stand out against their surroundings.
Something interesting happened with The Power of the Dog. Although it was designed for colour, once you saw it in black and white, it revealed aspects that almost went unnoticed in the colour version. Certain lighting choices became more apparent, and made it easier to understand how the light had been constructed. These were valuable insights, which helped us find a visual approach able to reconcile our taste for classic cinema with a more contemporary, naturalistic style.
This richness really comes through in the film — the various sequences often have quite different characters, from the distinctly “sun-drenched” look of the opening to various scenes where light itself becomes almost a protagonist.
The goal was to maintain overall coherence from start to finish, while letting the register shift slightly, following the character’s emotional journey. In this sense, we tried to find a contemporary approach, even while drawing on references that often belong to another era.
Another film I watched and rewatched during that period was The Man Who Wasn’t There by the Coen brothers. It’s a wonderful film, and it was a huge source of inspiration for me. It manages to create an overtly classic aesthetic without coming across as nostalgic. Although it’s a film from the early 2000s, it seems to belong to another era, while at the same time remaining deeply contemporary. It works through subtraction, with visual ideas that are very simple but extremely precise and powerful.
I spent a long time studying its night scenes — the way shafts of light were used inside cars, in interiors, and in urban spaces. I remember that the evening before we shot the scene with the prostitute, I’d rewatched that very film. I think that sequence is visually stronger than other moments set in cars, precisely because of that influence.
Compared with all this preparation, all these influences, what was it like once you actually hit the set, with its tight schedules, its unexpected problems, the budget?
These references stayed with us throughout the long prep phase, which began almost a year before shooting started. Once we were on set, I almost completely stopped watching films. At that point, my focus shifted to practical and organisational matters. It was as if I’d already stored away everything we needed.
One of the most important things I learned, during this, my first feature, was precisely the ability to listen to the film as it’s being made. At first, I was very attached to the prep work and to the ideas we’d built up over the previous months. After a few weeks of shooting, though, Fabrizio and I started working differently. I knew the lighting plan inside out, we knew what we needed to achieve, but we’d walk into a location, see what the scene called for, watch Pierluigi Gigante’s work, and often change a lot of things on the spot.
We’d ask ourselves: what is this scene really saying? What’s the right feeling? What should the tone be for this shot, or for the reverse shot? And the photographic choices grew out of those answers too. The technical groundwork stayed the same, but the way we used it kept changing.
I have to say that often the best things came about exactly this way. A strong sense of collective listening had built up around whatever was happening in front of the camera. When, on the other hand, we tried to follow too rigidly what we’d prepared months earlier, the result risked looking forced. The ideas were correct on paper, but they weren’t necessarily what the film needed at that particular moment.
Could you tell us about one of these moments — in terms of lighting — when something changed from what had been planned? Which of these moments of “evolution” has stayed with you the most?
Among the most “responsive” scenes, for example, was the dinner-table scene with the “girlfriend’s” parents, when the protagonist is invited to the girl’s house. That day, we changed everything on the spot. All that was left of our plans was a push-in on an inverted slider, gliding over the table towards Pierluigi.
It all came from the feeling we got from the way Pierluigi Gigante was performing: he was playing a part, he was “on stage”, and everyone else was the “audience”. So we lit him with a beam of light coming in at roughly a three-quarter angle — very strong, very theatrical — while everyone else is lit in a more naturalistic way. It’s a scene I like even more than some others, and I think it’s right for the kind of atmosphere it conveys. The costumes communicate the same thing too: only he looks like he’s stepped out of another era.
It’s the only scene where I put a major light source inside the room, close to him, whereas normally I always try to work from outside or from above, or at least to have some interior bounce light without placing big sources.
All these insights came from what Pierluigi showed us in rehearsals. The same kind of evolution then happened in all the gym scenes with the tap dancing, which, incidentally, were longer and were trimmed down in the edit — not so much in terms of the lighting, but more in terms of the shots. I don’t know if it’s one of the best sequences, but I have memories of it that I’m very fond of, because there was a real synergy between everyone, and a lot of listening going on.
Another scene where we let ourselves be guided by what was happening was the cinema scene. The lighting was very simple, we only had half a day to shoot, and the camera setups were already fixed, but once we got there, we realised the dynamic of the fight between the protagonist and the homeless men sleeping in the cinema could be more interesting, more violent than we’d thought, and that the scene had a meta-cinematic dimension to it.
I tried not to make the practical light sources too noticeable, so I left the door open at the back, which gave me a backlight, reinforced with a direct 1.2K. That light wasn’t meant to represent the projector beam, but rather a kind of vanishing point for the character — a mental one too. I had a lot of fun with this — there are deliberately inconsistent elements: in one shot, only half his face is lit, then in the wide shot, the light is gone altogether, but that’s exactly right, because that’s the moment from which the character’s transformation springs.
So if there was a moment where we could underline “cinema” itself, that was exactly it. And black and white is a medium that emphasises and underlines atmosphere, and elevates the concept the scene represents.
Another sequence I’m very fond of is Ada’s — the mother who’s lost her son. Our character meets her at the cemetery and starts pretending to be a friend of her son’s. Everything had been planned, but in the moment we let ourselves be inspired by the way both of them were performing — especially Pierluigi, who at first moved like a kind of automaton, in a precise, strange way.
The moment when he tears up the photos is the only one where I didn’t put a catchlight in his eyes. There, his eyes go completely black — he really becomes a kind of robot, with no soul left. But that’s a very tender sequence, where once again we all tuned in to what was happening — we were like a single body when it came to deciding how to light it, how to shoot it.
The audition scene is a really lovely one — the protagonist seems a long way from the person assessing him, with a deep, deep black behind him. It’s a scene that visualises the emotional abyss and the precariousness running through him at that moment. Could you tell us something about that choice? And more generally, about how you’ve used darkness and black throughout the film?
The idea of this black limbo — completely unjustified from a realistic point of view, since in theory it should just be an audition room or an office — came about right from my first read of the script. I don’t remember any specific reference or image that gave rise to it. Simply, reading that scene, I just pictured it this way. It was consistent with the atmosphere the film was building. In the early versions of the project, there was perhaps a more dreamlike element, which was later trimmed down somewhat in the edit, but that intuition remained.
It seemed to me that absolute darkness added a particular tension to the scene. The protagonist finds himself in a space with no points of reference, and the casting director’s entrance takes on enormous weight: she’s the person his whole future depends on, at that moment. Everything takes on a different scale than it would have in an ordinary, few-square-metre room.
We shot that sequence at the De Paolis studios, on a huge, completely empty soundstage. The idea was simply to light only what we wanted to see, and let everything else sink into darkness. The door at the back is left slightly ajar, with the light sculpting just a few details. Pierluigi is lit with a very soft source, but the shadow side of his face plunges into absolute black. There’s not even a backlight. The table too
…just barely emerges, thanks to a blade of light on the floor behind it. Nothing else. It’s an extremely simple setup, but simplicity often produces stronger, more evocative images. The scene is long, carried by an excellent performance, but I think that sense of estrangement also comes through in the atmosphere we built together with Fabrizio. The viewer senses they’re in a suspended place — a kind of limbo, as I said.
There’s another aspect that matters to me too. The script was full of surprises, of constant shifts in expectation. The viewer is often caught off guard by the protagonist’s actions and by what happens around him. I tried to carry this idea over visually too: you’re in a small room, waiting your turn for an audition, you open a door and suddenly find yourself in this immense, black space. It introduces a feeling of strangeness and disorientation, just as happens constantly throughout the story.
I also think darkness has a dual function within the film. At first, it’s tied to the protagonist’s daily life, to his existential condition. I’m thinking of the flat he shares with his flatmate, his late-night returns home, the constant sound of a city that never sleeps but comes across as run-down, oppressive. In those sequences, black is there to convey a sense of being crushed. The spaces are lit by just a few sources: a lamp on the table, a light over the kitchen counter. We wanted to create a constant feeling of “now you see it, now you don’t”. The bedroom, too, is almost always plunged in darkness. Often the only light source is the computer screen, accompanied by a very faint backlight from outside, suggesting the presence of the city beyond the curtains. Even in the love scene, the light comes mainly from outside, through shafts that evoke signs and reflections from the street below. These are images with a theatrical quality, but they still remain plausible: if you turn off all the lights in a third-floor flat, that’s often genuinely the light that’s left. In this first part of the film, darkness mainly speaks to the impossibility of escaping his own situation.
The darkness of the audition scene, on the other hand, belongs to a different dimension. It’s a more constructed, more cinematic darkness, tied to the character’s transformation. It’s the same darkness that comes back during the tap-dance night under the flyover at Scalo San Lorenzo, or in the scene where he leaves Cecilia’s parents’ house and walks off alongside the pool. These are places that no longer belong to everyday life, but to an almost ritualistic dimension, where the protagonist is becoming something else. For me, cinema is exactly this process of transformation. That’s why the cinema sequence is probably the high point of this visual journey: it’s there that darkness reaches its most complete form, and where the way we used it throughout the film finds its deepest meaning.
Could you elaborate on how the San Lorenzo night scene fits into this?
That scene comes at the point where the protagonist finally grasps the true meaning of the monologue he’s preparing. Up to then, he’d tried to play it mainly through an erotic dimension, whereas in reality the heart of the text is deeply emotional. Through his encounter with Cecilia — and in anything but a romantic way — he finally manages to grasp what his character is going through. In a sense, he becomes that character, and in that moment something like an explosion takes place.
The tap-dance one.
Yes. It’s a scene I find particularly effective for the sound work too, because it’s built almost entirely around the sound of the tap dancing. There’s nothing else driving it. It’s as if everything that had been held in until that point was finally released. It’s an emotional release, but one that happens in an entirely ordinary, urban setting — like San Lorenzo, a place people pass through at any hour of the day or night.
From a lighting point of view, we tried to lift it slightly out of reality. There’s a kind of fake streetlamp that hits the character and isolates him, almost like something out of an old American musical. Everything around him, by contrast, stays plunged in darkness. A darkness that belongs to his past, to the places of his everyday life — he actually lives right in that area. This creates a contrast between the character, who’s going through a transformation, and surroundings that continue to represent who he was before.
It’s a scene of liberation, of transformation. After that moment, he’ll get the part, precisely because he’s finally come to understand the character on a deep level. In some way, he’s become that character himself.
I’d like to ask you something about close-ups. I’m thinking especially of the final scenes at St Peter’s, where there are some beautiful close-ups of Pierluigi Gigante. And more generally, I’m interested in your almost “physical” relationship with the actor: you mentioned that this film taught you a great deal, and I imagine that such a long, close engagement with such a central protagonist must also have been important for the way you work.
With the close-ups, we tried to maintain consistency throughout the film, while gradually adjusting the contrast ratio in line with the character’s development. The lighting setup stayed almost the same throughout: a key light, a rim, negative fill on the opposite side, and constant attention to the eyes. There was almost always a catchlight in the eyes, except, as I mentioned, in Ada’s scene, where its absence was a deliberate choice. That reflection wasn’t just an aesthetic device — it also represented a trace of vitality.
In the final part, at St Peter’s, we were more radical with the quality of light. Even when we were shooting on location outdoors, we often stepped in with artificial lighting. In the scene where he’s lying down and picks up the banknote, for instance, the light is artificial, because we wanted to sculpt the face very precisely. Antonello Resch’s make-up work also played a part here: the grime, the pores made more visible — all those elements which, together with the black and white and harder light, conveyed a very strong sense of degradation and emotional exposure.
From a technical standpoint, the overall setup stayed fairly consistent throughout the film, but the quality of light and the contrast ratio kept changing. This is what allowed us to maintain a stylistic unity, while also tracking the character’s transformation at the same time.
As for Pierluigi Gigante, I think he played the role extraordinarily well. It’s a character tailor-made for him. Pierluigi has a rare quality: he didn’t have
need many takes. Things moved very quickly. In general, I don’t like giving actors too many instructions about blocking. If a scene suggests something, I’d rather listen to it. But Pierluigi also had the precision needed whenever things had to be exact. If he needed to hit a mark precisely, or repeat a movement consistently for continuity, he could always do it. This helped us enormously, both technically and photographically.
We’d developed a kind of game between us. I’d always try to create the catchlight in his eye, and he seemed to sense it straight away — so much so that he could instinctively position himself to catch it perfectly. He was very aware of the relationship between his own face and the light, and that made the work enormously easier.
But the most important thing is that he gave himself completely to the film and to our department. In the final weeks of shooting, by which point I’d learned to listen more to what was happening on set rather than relying solely on prep work done in advance, his performance became the main point of reference for the photographic choices. Along with Fabrizio, he was the one driving the feel of the scene. Many of the cues he gave us through his acting ended up directly shaping how we decided to light and visually tell that moment.
So that’s why there was a shift from the prep work… he arrived, and somehow everything reshaped itself around his energy and the nuances he brought… Let’s wrap up with a few thoughts on the kind of production this was, the context you worked in.
It was a very small production, and we had a crew pared right down to the essentials. For many of us, it was our first feature, and a large part of my team was made up of classmates from the Centro Sperimentale. Lorenzo Mancini, who worked as camera operator and Steadicam operator, was on his first film. As well as being extremely good, he’s someone I’ve worked with ever since our school days. There was a natural rapport between us, and also a particular emotional side to it: when we were studying together, we always used to say that our first film would be made together, and in the end, it really happened.
Xavier Tozzi Fontana too, who’s now a DP himself, was working as gaffer. For him, it was his first time on a feature in that role. The same was true for a lot of the rest of the team. Giacomo Piccolo, for instance, our 1st AC, is a close friend of mine, the same age as me and very experienced, while Marco Mineychev is a very young gaffer with huge talent — on this film he was working as an electrician. Sara Porzio was at the start of her career, as were DIT Andery Ceccarelli and grip Lorenzo Landi — other young colleagues of ours. We were practically all the same age. In the electrical and grip departments, there were only three people: a gaffer, an electrician and a grip. A truly tiny team.
There were very few of us to take on a film like this, but everyone worked with enormous dedication, and in the end we managed to get it over the line. We’d often have several locations in a single day, and we had to find ways to keep up the pace without overrunning. It wasn’t easy. I owe a lot to the team and to the work everyone put in. It’s something I’m particularly glad to remember, because, hearing the reactions of people who’ve seen the film, I get the impression that many of them see it as a much bigger production than it actually was. And that’s partly down to the people who worked on it.
There’s another aspect, too, that really captures the spirit in which the film was made. While we shot the bulk of it on the ALEXA Mini with the full team, some scenes were shot pretty much just by Fabrizio and me, on our own, with a Red Komodo. Some connecting shots — especially in the opening section, set around St Peter’s — and a few other small sequences around the lake in EUR were shot this way, at weekends, roaming around Rome in a kind of guerrilla mode. It was a very free way of working: handheld camera, a zoom lens, and off we’d go. It was also enormous fun. And, in a way, it was consistent with the film itself.
That experience also helped me shake off some of my more academic preconceptions. When you come out of film school, you often have this idea that everything has to be perfectly controlled and polished. I still think precision is fundamental, but I’ve come to understand that not every moment in a film necessarily has to have the same visual intensity. If anything, sometimes it’s important to have variation, a rhythm. If everything is constantly at the highest level of visual construction and spectacle, you lose the sense of which moments are meant to stand out. Whereas when a film builds a sense of progression, the viewer feels much more clearly the emotional and narrative weight of the scenes that really matter. From this point of view too, I’ve learned to follow the film’s flow more, and to let go of some of that rigidity.
You told me that you started making little films very early on, and that in some cases you directed them yourself. How do you experience the difference between the director’s role — building a film from their own vision — and that of the cinematographer, who instead puts themselves at the service of someone else’s vision?
I think the difference lies mainly in where each person’s eye naturally falls. They’re two crafts that, in certain respects, can also be very close to each other. What fascinates me most about the cinematographer’s job is building the visual language: the way you choose to tell a story through light, the camera, the internal rhythm of the images. In my view, our role should never be limited purely to lighting, but should be part of building the film’s overall visual language, together with the director. Of course, if you’re working with a director who has very precise ideas and knows exactly what they want, that’s absolutely fine. In fact, it’s a stroke of luck. But what I enjoy most is precisely that exchange — the chance to build something together, bringing different sensibilities, references and visual worlds into relation with each other.
When I was making my own work as a director, I noticed that my eye would naturally tend to focus precisely on these aspects of visual language. Whereas the director necessarily has to deal with the story as a whole — from the actors to the costumes, from staging to the overall narrative structure — I found myself naturally drawn to how that story could be translated into images. I think this is what led me towards cinematography. At a certain point I realised that’s where I was able to give my best.
Working with different directors over the years, I’ve noticed that many of them are particularly focused on directing the actors and on shaping scenes from a performance standpoint. In those cases, I’d often end up taking on a more active role in shaping the visual language. It’s a dynamic I find really rewarding. At the same time, though, the best results come when there’s a genuine, ongoing dialogue, when directing and cinematography spark each other off. It’s important to remember that the films aren’t ours. Our job is to interpret them, and to help the director tell them in the best way possible.
There’s another element that I think is fundamental. A cinematographer doesn’t just work with images — they also work with the history of cinema. You need a deep understanding of how cinematic language works, of the subtexts, the cultural references and the traditions that each genre carries with it. If you’re making a noir, or any other kind of film, you can’t pretend that everything that’s come before simply doesn’t exist. The moment you choose a genre, you enter into dialogue with a historical and cultural tradition that inevitably comes along with it. And that’s one of the things I find most fascinating: the chance to engage with that heritage, to use it, reinterpret it, and to communicate on several levels at once.
That’s perhaps why I have a slightly odd relationship with the idea of the “beautiful image”. Maybe I’m still young, maybe I lack experience, but the truth is that a beautiful image in itself only interests me up to a point. What interests me is for an image to be part of a larger conversation, to be part of a deliberate narrative, cultural and stylistic construction. If it also happens to be beautiful, all the better. But that’s not really the point. The point is what that image means, and how it helps to tell the story of the film.
This is actually a way of thinking that many cinematographers share. And it’s a sign of maturity.
Thank you, Sebastian, and well done.
TECHNICAL CREDITS
Camera rental: BL Rental
Camera Operator: Lorenzo Mancini
1st Assistant Camera: Giacomo Piccolo
2nd Assistant Camera / Video Assist: Sara Porzio
DIT: Andrey Ceccarelli
Gaffer: Xavier Tozzi Fontana
Electrician: Marco Mineyichev
Key Grip: Lorenzo Landi
Camera: ARRI ALEXA Mini, Red Komodo, Sony FDR-AX53, Leica Q3
Format: 2:1
Lenses: Cooke S4 Mini, Angénieux Optimo DP, Zeiss Super Speed Mk III, DZO Catta Zoom, 28mm Leica Summilux f/1.7 ASPH
Colourist: Sergio Di Marco
Lab: Media Phoenix
