Interview by 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.
Luca, congratulations to Leonardo Di Costanzo and to all of you who worked on Elisa, presented in competition at Venice 82 and now in cinemas. It is a beautiful film and, in my view, it bravely addresses a necessary subject. At the end of the story, the criminologist – whom the protagonist had asked why he devoted himself to people like her – sends her a letter saying that he is now in another country, one torn apart by fratricidal war, where he also meets “victims” and “executioners”, though he still does not know why he does it. The ending, in short, shifts the focus from the individual case to the broader theme of conflicts between ethnic groups and nations, which is frighteningly relevant today. I believe that Di Costanzo manages to carry out an operation that is deeply engaged and political, while at the same time shifting the point of observation, probing into the origins of violence within the human being, and turning his gaze towards the so-called “culprit” – the one from whom we usually want to distance ourselves moralistically, feeling “superior”, on the right side. I feel the film indirectly suggests a different approach to today’s issues.
This observation of yours is extremely interesting, and I am not sure how many people will pick up on it. Elisa’s case is, first of all, a real case, not a literary invention – a paradigmatic example of a situation that concerns both individuals and the community. Here I briefly connect it to the film The Voice of Hind Rajab, which, as we know, tells the tragedy of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a car with several dead relatives, surrounded by Israeli tanks, who, after hours of waiting for someone to rescue her, is killed. This too is an individual case, yet it speaks of a general tragedy that all of us are living through in an unbearable and unacceptable way. The drama of a woman who tried to exterminate her family is also an issue that concerns us all, because conflicts, to varying degrees, are present in every human being. Leonardo Di Costanzo is a great intellectual, deeply engaged – a rare thing at a time when it seems that what matters most is only money and success.
Today people take sides On one side or the other, too easily. Much more difficult, as Di Costanzo does in this film, is to try to restore a sense of unity among human beings and to attempt to understand those who have come to commit crimes.
Because it is much easier to condemn than to understand. These analyses are extremely painful, extremely hard to convey, and incredibly difficult to interpret. In my view, Barbara Ronchi was extraordinary. I didn’t know her, I had never worked with her before, and she struck me deeply. While we were shooting, just watching her moved me, and that is something that happens very rarely to me. It was a great merit of hers. Moreover, to play the role she learned French from scratch in just a few months, and now she speaks it perfectly. She is a perfect example of an actress who deeply understands the meaning of her work.
What do you mean by “the meaning of an actor’s work”?
Acting is one of the most precarious and most dangerous professions. It is often misunderstood as something to do with glamour, physical beauty or appearance. But none of that has anything to do with inhabiting a character in such a true, real way. The actor deals with the depths of the human being. While we were shooting, Barbara was truly, at the same time, both unconscious and guilty – and she knew it. Like the real protagonist of the story, she seemed gradually to become aware of what had happened to her. Through an individual crime, the film speaks of a social and parental problem, one that all of us have experienced, and still experience.
What were your first feelings when you read the script? How did you imagine your work?
When I read the script I was terrified, because I thought it would be an extremely difficult film – not for me, in terms of cinematography, but for the actors, and risky for Leonardo, since it was a film with very long dialogues: the conversations between the criminologist and our protagonist lasted 5 to 7 minutes each, across five meetings… I thought Leonardo was putting himself, his career and the production at risk, because it was a film extremely delicate in terms of marketability. Instead, as always, once the film was finished I realised I had been wrong, and I like that very much – in the sense that the films I fear most at the start are often the ones that turn out best, because they are the most courageous.
How did you approach these long dialogues from a cinematographic point of view?
Each of those dialogue scenes was going to take at least a full day to shoot. When we went on location scouts, Leonardo and the great production designer Luca Servino chose the riskiest room in which to set those conversations – a room with 180 degrees of windows, exposed to the most frightening variability of light. Had we faced sunny days, the film would probably have been “uneditable”: the movement of the light during the hours of shooting would have been extremely risky. I had given myself some vague protection, but really very little, because it seemed necessary to me that the outside should also be visible from inside. So that protection would in any case have been rather ineffective, both aesthetically and cinematographically.
Did you protect yourself with lights from outside?
Yes, with lights from outside and with cloths that would have prevented the sun from hitting the table where the actors were speaking, though not for the whole day. Luckily, I didn’t need any of that, because during those five or six days of shooting the dialogues the sky remained permanently overcast. And here comes back my point about the outrageous luck that follows me. Luck is an integral part of our work, and I believe I have had it from the very first day – both in the people I have met and in the weather.
Let’s stay with the room where Elisa and the criminologist’s conversations take place…
I am convinced – and I hope I say this without presumption – that anyone else doing my job would have said that room was not compatible with 5–6 minute scenes to be shot over an entire day. I accepted the risk because that room was very beautiful, precisely for its windows and for what could be seen outside, for its spaciousness. I am convinced that the quality of a film does not depend only on the light but also on the credibility of the environments in which we shoot.
Can you therefore describe your work with that light?
As you know, I hardly use artificial lights anymore – around 80% of the lighting comes from natural light, from controlling natural light. That doesn’t mean doing nothing about the light, but rather working with the production designer on practical lights, on curtains, on blinds, as in the case of this room. In that room I don’t think I added any lights, but I spent much of my time shifting and adjusting the blinds, because that too is part of the work of cinematography. Just as I spend time moving and adjusting curtains in the rooms where I shoot, and changing the bulbs in the bedside lamps I use for lighting. I know I’m saying things that go against what is usually considered the work of a director of photography, but I now reduce myself to this essentiality, which is inseparable from the work of operating the camera – a job I still do despite the trade-union turbulence in our country. Because it is the framing that determines the quality of the light, not just the light in itself.
In fact, the room (the light) is wonderful, as is what takes place between the criminologist and Elisa. There is so much light outside, and the blinds break it up and create a filter. It seems like a perfect metaphor for the state of the woman’s psyche, having repressed her crime and placed a barrier between her conscience and the past. The same seems to happen at other moments: the prison bar, where Elisa works, is entirely in semi-darkness – an atmosphere that seems to reflect both the condition of the prison and the psychological state of the protagonist. Did you look for symbolic elements? Did Leonardo in any way explain the choice of the room?
No, it was simply the most beautiful room in the whole place. Faced with the photographic difficulty, the only thing I felt I had to ask the production – and they agreed – was that those scenes be shot with three cameras instead of two, because this allowed us to capture wide shots and close-ups at the same time. Since there was no lighting, the space was a full 360 degrees. The flexibility of the digital process today makes such solutions possible. We should start adopting them more, understanding them better. Bringing in large rigs to control the light, in fact, conditions the framing and the actors’ movements – and this is no longer acceptable now that we have freed ourselves from film, a medium both insensitive and expensive. In the past, you couldn’t ask for three cameras; now you can. It’s funny – today we are in a moment of great liberation from technical constraints, yet it’s still difficult to free ourselves from old habits, from certain mindsets. There is an old mentality that persists, handed down through textbooks, books on photographic lighting written in the 1980s, still studied today. Instead, what is needed is to invent a completely new and different form that frees us from the chains of the past.
How did you use these three cameras?
For the most part, we aimed to do the entire scene in a single take, and this was possible thanks to the skill of our lead actress and our lead actor, Roschdy Zem. Both of them knew their lines perfectly by heart and performed them without interruption for 6–7 minutes. It was practically like a stage play. This allowed us to shoot the scene several times with different framings, essentially repeating the same take but from different points of view – wide, tight, lateral, frontal, in profile.
There are also some extremely close close-ups of Barbara Ronchi, especially towards the end…
Yes, and there, as I said, while we were shooting I was moved by the intensity of our lead actress. I actually cried. While I was crying I couldn’t see anything anymore – which was rather irritating!
Would you like to add something about your relationship on set with the actors? Or with Di Costanzo?
The wonderful thing when I meet actresses like Barbara is that there is practically no need to speak. Non-verbal communication is the basis of our work, especially with actors but also with the crew. And it is extremely moving when everything works perfectly purely on the basis of understanding. I could sense when Barbara was about to stand up, when she was about to move… Empathy is the main tool of communication between camera operator and actor. Roschdy Zem was also wonderfully good. But in all of Leonardo’s films the actors are frighteningly effective. Di Costanzo has an extraordinary ability to focus on the actors’ work; in every one of his films, actors are at the centre of the storytelling. Leonardo always tells “difficult” stories, and he does so in a very fair way, with respect both for reality and for performance. And that, in my view, is exactly what a director should do. Leonardo is not interested in whether we are using one lens or another – of course he notices it, but he is not a technical director. He concentrates above all on the storytelling, on the rhythms of the acting. If I had to choose between a director who focuses on that and one who tells me whether I should use a 21mm or a 25mm lens, I would have no doubts. Not for myself, but because I think technical issues are completely irrelevant to the success of a film. I don’t even concern myself with the lenses – let alone the director. I don’t because I believe the essential stage of my cinematography work will come later, in post-production. Everything I cannot do on set, or choose not to do because I prefer to work quickly, I do later in colour correction, thanks to my 25-year collaboration with my reference colourist, Andrea Orsini.
There is one last aspect I would like to talk about: the particular setting of this prison. The inmates sleep in small houses in the woods and move freely within the enclosure…
That place is an abandoned hotel. Brilliantly, production designer Luca Servino and Leonardo Di Costanzo decided to prioritise the beauty of the location and consequently to portray a sort of model prison, because the prison is defined by a fence but, in the end, the possibility of escape could be relatively easy. I feared it would not seem credible, but once again I was wrong… Even though the inmates walk freely in the woods, they are still inmates. Just the very first shot, when Elisa arrives in front of a fence with surveillance cameras, is enough to establish definitively the prison setting.
The fact that it is in Switzerland, and that it is connected with the university and with academic research, creates a particular world that we accept – indeed, that we believe actually exists… I believed in it myself.
That is the power of cinema. Another interesting thing is that the place itself – that sort of abandoned hotel – was actually surrounded by houses and small villas that were erased in VFX. We were keen to show, in various aerial drone shots, that the place was isolated. In reality it was full of little houses that were digitally removed… Perhaps I am too attached to concreteness, and I am always afraid of doing something that is not realistic, yet I see that it often works. Realism lies in things, in people. Art may not be plausible, but it must be credible.
What you say makes me think of a broader issue. Realism, as an ontological dimension of cinema, certainly distinguishes Leonardo Di Costanzo’s work, as well as your own approach to your profession… Do you find that at this moment, with the advent of ever more advanced technologies such as the LED wall, the demand for realism is somewhat diminishing? From a certain point of view, it is paradoxical that the more perfect the machines become, the more attention to realism seems to be lost…
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but over the past year every time I’ve been interviewed I’ve been asked what I think about artificial intelligence. I don’t think anything of it; I don’t consider it a useful tool for cinema because reality cannot be represented in the abstract. Reality is reality. I therefore don’t believe artificial intelligence will have a significant future in cinema, except perhaps for special effects. For many things, of course, it will relieve us of certain costs, but I think that staging – in terms of faces and situations – is irreplaceable. Perhaps I’m wrong, but the vital signals I thankfully see around us are not – once again – on the technological front, but in the power of storytelling. For me, cinema is a social art, both in its making and in its viewing. I cannot imagine watching films in any other way than in a cinema, together with an audience of strangers, because only in the theatre and with others will I truly understand what I am watching. I have enough faith in that. I think saying that cinema no longer represents reality is just a smokescreen, an excuse not to go to the cinema. It’s like saying, cinema doesn’t interest me anymore, so I don’t watch it.
At this point, would you like to leave us with a suggestion of something to go and see? One of these signs of vitality you’ve noticed?
A wonderful example, both for its effectiveness and economy, is Ciao bambino by Edgardo Pistone – a great young director who shows that Italian cinema is alive despite all the difficulties we know so well.
Thank you Luca.
Thanks to Flat Parioli Post Production VFX for the stills.
