Interview by Lorenzo Lamberti
Editor Silvia Tarquini
The interview is part of the Casa Chiaroscuro Venezia 82 project, curated by Alessandro Chiodo CCS. This initiative brings a team to the Venice Film Festival to produce content for the Collettivo’s social channels and website. With Casa Chiaroscuro, the collective aims to engage with Italian and international cinematography at Italy’s most important festival, discover new works and emerging talents, reconnect and meet in person the great masters of cinematography, follow and support the successes of its members, and spread the culture of the image as widely as possible. The project would not have been possible without the support and trust of our sponsors and friends Canon, Frame by Frame, and Fotodiego, to whom we extend our heartfelt thanks.
Tommaso, you were the cinematographer for the feature film 6:06 Directed by Tekla Taidelli and presented at Venice 82 for Le Giornate degli Autori – Notti Veneziane. What are the defining features of this film?
6:06 is not a comfortable film. It was shot entirely handheld. It tells a story of detoxification, but also of redemption and rebirth. It is a hymn to life. The two characters, JoJò (George Li) and Leo (Davide Valle), come from very complex backgrounds, with harsh past experiences and obvious difficulties. When Leo meets JoJò, he begins a detox programme, while she is processing a bereavement. They meet at a powerful moment. The film is a road movie: after their meeting, they embark on a journey during which they grow up, mature, and discover love. The film has two souls, one rooted in the past and one in the present.
Tekla Taidelli is a director with an eye on independent, street-level cinema. What was your working relationship with her like?
With Tekla Taidelli, more than a collaboration it was a kind of “collision”. We both come from tough, very particular paths: I from working with Franco Maresco, a grotesque, hyper-real, anarchic cinema; Tekla from her first major film, Fuori Vena, which won at Locarno, and from there she continued along her “street cinema” path, creating schools and working with young people. She has always made small films with non-professional actors. This “collision” allowed us to move the actors within a raw backdrop. These two disarmingly beautiful young people constantly had to measure themselves against harsh backgrounds. At times it was almost like working on an instant film. The film was scripted, but there was always the instinct of the moment, the will to make everything alive and real.
I’m interested in what you said about the backdrop. These characters move against a harsh background, which the film fully reveals. We see the outskirts, we see the people who inhabit those places. What was it like to shoot in those areas far from the city centre? And what was it like to approach, with the camera, both the people who live in those spaces and the spaces themselves?
As I mentioned earlier, the film has two souls. The first part is Leo’s past. We decided to shoot the past in black and white, using different formats, from 16:9 to 4:3 to 1:1. In this section, Leo relives the same day several times – three, to be precise – and for each day we changed the format, as if the frame itself were a cage, an attempt to trap the character’s life within the shot, progressively tightening the framing. On the first day the shots are wide, then gradually they close in, narrowing the space, even putting the actor under strain. In this first day the context is very present – it is the context of the suburbs. In the second part, the film shifts to colour, a somewhat heightened technicolor. The idea was to create a stark contrast with the first part, because our protagonist begins to rise again. Black and white remains only as flashbacks of painful memories that refuse to fade, or bad habits that try to reclaim the character, while colour seeks to provide momentum and freedom for the actors, who always have a backdrop in which to move.
How do working methods, the set, and the crew change in relation to the locations? How did you experience this need to be in dialogue with the places? And how did you approach the lighting?
We are observers. This film by Tekla Taidelli is one of those works that remind you why you chose to make cinema, why you chose to be behind the camera, why you decided to listen, to observe. Our work as cinematographers is, to a large extent, about listening, staying close, seeking out the image of the stories we want to tell. With Tekla, from the outset, we decided to use fixed Cooke Panchro S3 lenses for the black and white sequences, while the road movie – essentially the rest of the film – was shot handheld with lightweight Angénieux EZ zooms, which allowed the actors to move as they wished. The chosen method was, at least in part, the long take. This way the actors were free, able to carry on with the scenes without interruption. When Tekla told me about the idea of the road movie, I said: “Tekla, I absolutely have to use the zoom, without stopping.” Because these were takes lasting 5, even 7 minutes – something you rarely get to do in fiction.
And from the specific point of view of lighting? How did you approach this need for freedom? What were your key reference points for maintaining control over the work?
The black-and-white section drew heavily on expressionist cinema, with sharply defined, sculpted lighting, very little diffusion – and the actors would either catch the light or not. It was partly up to them to seek it out… We didn’t want to condition their acting or movement, but if shafts of light were created, they knew that by passing through them they could play with the light. That was the need in the interiors. In the colour section, there was a greater focus on light and continuity. Since much of it was shot outdoors, we chose both the season – October – and Portugal, where the weather was fairly constant and overcast. At first, there was the idea of shooting in another season, but I advised against it because it was too sunny. Shooting in October gave us a diffuse sky, which is fundamental when you’re filming inside a car. For the road movie, especially in the night sequences, I used a kind of cinematography I like to call – perhaps exaggerating a little – “situationist”, because some scenes were improvised: they were scripted, but as we shot, we changed them a lot. That’s why I call it “situationist light”: I would place lighting points with a clear idea but in extremely limited time. I shot the second part of the film with just one electrician. There was no one else…
Did you operate the camera yourself?
Yes, I did, together with my camera operator Mirko Fracassi, with whom I’ve been working for five years.
Let’s talk about the “triangle” between the actors, the director, and yourself. Since you were operating the camera, what kind of direction did Tekla Taidelli give you? How did you take it on board? What was that triangle like?
Our collaboration worked because we both wanted to be free, to shoot a film with a wide breath that could capture a truth – the truth. Tekla, of course, had done extensive preparation with the actors beforehand, running two intensive rehearsal periods, working on the acting and the movements. So once on set, I found a very strong and effective directorial framework for the actors’ performance. With the camera, it was enough just to be there and follow the action. There was an understanding built on trust. With Mirko Fracassi, a glance is all it takes for us to understand each other. With two zooms – one wide and one tight – we shot the entire film. That was the set-up on set.
I’d like you to tell us something – an episode that captures the atmosphere you’ve described, something from the set.
There are so many moments worth telling. Since the film is about rebirth, one important episode is when the two protagonists go to a party, a rave. We partly shot it at a real party, and I was only able to add a few lights. It wasn’t about setting up lighting, but about capturing the moment when Leo falls back into the temptation of drugs and JoJò manages to pull him away. They find themselves in the van, at night, on the road, looking for a place to talk. The characters were searching for a place, just as we were searching for the right spot to shoot the scene – somewhere intimate, secluded. Eventually, we came across some abandoned public toilets under the trees, with only the yellow glow of a streetlamp. I love situations like that, because they present a challenge: creating beautiful scenes with very little, and with hardly any preparation. In that case, I simply placed a neon on a wall, and that was it. And I must say, thanks also to the new technologies we have today, it was enough to capture a very powerful scene, with the two protagonists circling around that light. Sometimes simplicity brings with it great richness. For me it’s always “less is more”. Even in big productions, you only need a little if you want to capture the truth of a story, or to deal with emotions. If you start piling things on, it becomes fiction – something else entirely. Cinema, in my view, needs to return to simplicity, and with today’s cameras, it can.
You were also involved in the production of the film… In Italy, there aren’t many cases of cinematographers who are also producers.
For the director, the film was partly autobiographical; as I said earlier, when you reach this kind of closeness to life it’s truly wonderful. We cinematographers too must sometimes choose projects we really believe in, ones that make us feel alive. Our role today must also be, in some way, to defend cinema. And today we carry a different weight. That’s why I also worked on the production. At first, 6:06 was entrusted to another production company, which eventually collapsed – because these things happen too. I’ve been part of a production company for a few years, Argo Film, with which I’ve mainly made Sky Art TV productions and documentaries. Tekla asked me for help and, together with my two partners, we decided to support this film with our work and professionalism. Here in Italy, I looked around and thought: “maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s not my job to be a producer.” But when Tekla Taidelli and I went to the Berlinale to seek help and find other production companies to step in, I realised I wasn’t the only DoP-producer – there were actually quite a few of them there. This probably means that in Italy we should wake up a little more. These “cries” of desire for cinema, let’s call them that, these free films, deserve to have production paths different from the usual, and it’s high time that independent cinema was born in Italy as well. We need to believe in it more. 6:06 was a small miracle, but a necessary one, because the director needed to make this film. It had to be made – for us, for her, since she saved herself from drugs, and I hope many people will see it.
Is there any other aspect of this adventure you would like to talk about?
Yes, the opportunity to work with so many young people, because Tekla runs a film school, Street Cinema. My entire crew was made up of young people. Tekla and I were the “elders” of the team. This kind of energy is needed more and more in film crews today.
Thanks Tommaso.
