Part One: the desolation, the pomp, the nights
Before we delve into the details of the cinematography for Kidnapped by Marco Bellocchio, I’d like to ask you to briefly talk about how you started as a cinematographer. What has it meant for you to have a surname rooted in the history of Italian cinema?
I was greatly facilitated by being the son of Franco Di Giacomo, but the funny thing is that my mother’s father was also a cinematographer, Riccardo Pallottini. Not sure how many other instances of “third-generation” cinematographers are out there. When I started working, this gave me a lot of uncertainty, but today I proudly embrace it. My first two jobs were as a volunteer, Romanzo di un giovane povero by Ettore Scola DPed by my father and La scuola by Daniele Luchetti, DPed by Alessio Gelsini Torresi. Then it came my first job as a camera assistant and video assistant, Nostromo, by Alistair Reed, with Franco [Di Giacomo], and I matured the idea that I needed to create my own independent path as soon as possible. For many years, from 1994 to 2004, I happily worked as a camera assistant and camera operator.
Then you advanced full time to camera operator.
Yes, but before moving to operating, my passion for cinematography was born almost by chance. One day, I got a call from Laura Bispuri asking for help finding some film stock and equipment to shoot her short film, Un uomo indietro, with Ignazio Oliva. At the time, as a camera assistant, I saved all the short ends and had a bunch of film rolls. Another cinematographer was supposed to shoot it, but at a certain point, Laura asked me: «Do you want to shoot my short film?» This first experience as a cinematographer triggered something irreversible in me—the desire to become a cinematographer, which was then realized with the opportunity given to me by Libero De Rienzo in 2004, when I was 29 years old. He asked me to shoot Sangue – La morte non esiste, his first and unfortunately only feature film, which was a unique experience for me. All this while I was still working as an assistant and then as a camera operator. I worked as an operator with Nicola Pecorini, with Alessio Gelsini Torresi, and for many commercials. Gradually, I transitioned to becoming a cinematographer.
Your career has always been a point of reference for me; I look at it with admiration. You’ve worked on independent films, then with acclaimed directors, or on highly successful TV series, and finally with a master like Marco Bellocchio. How have you chosen your projects over time, and what criteria do you use to choose your work today?
I’ve always chosen my projects immediately and instinctively. In this regard, and regarding work ethics, I recognize Nicola Pecorini as my mentor, who has had a career alongside great directors. Nicola always insisted that the projects he chose had to appeal to him, because “if you don’t like what you do, you’ll never truly express yourself.” He approached very important sets with great calm and creativity. I’ve always chosen to work with directors who also transmitted something to me on a human and empathetic level, with whom I felt a mutual understanding, but above all, a mutual “inspiration,” if I can put it that way. It’s crucial for me to maintain a touch of lightness, to create a harmonious atmosphere on set, which helps in managing the great responsibilities we have.
Let’s talk about Rapito, your latest work with the Maestro Bellocchio. How did you prepare for the film? How many weeks of preparation were there? Was it a long or short preparation? And what is the process, let’s say, between you and Bellocchio in this crucial phase?
The preparation wasn’t very long, about four or five weeks, mostly spent on location scouting. It took place during the post-production of the other work we did together, Esterno notte (Exterior Night), conceived as a television series. Esterno notte went to Cannes in May 2022, and we started working on Kidnapped in July. The film had many locations, some logistically very complicated: Mantova, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Roma, castles, churches, noble palaces, rich houses, poor houses, canals, boats, the sea… While other directors work a lot even before the actual preparation, discussing references and the general tone, Marco starts conceiving his ideas once he sees the locations. But he doesn’t decide on the shots immediately, so the locations have to work in their entirety, which can sometimes cause difficulties.
A real challenge for a cinematographer, a challenge both for the number of locations and for the approach…
Exactly. We shot in museums where there were exposed Raffaello’s paintings, incredible tapestries. There were constraints to respect. Sometimes I wondered how I would manage. Some situations made the usual approach impossible.
I imagine this led you to make technical choices regarding the camera, lenses, and objectives…
Absolutely. I was very pleased with the Venice camera while shooting “Esterno notte”, because of its ease of reaching 2500 ASA… To be honest, I did comparison tests between Alexa and Venice, and 1600 ASA on the Alexa is not far from 2500 on the Venice, but I felt very comfortable with the Venice, especially in hindsight during the color correction phase. The grain and noise the Venice produces are more contained than what the Alexa produces in some lighting situations. I knew I would be in very contrasty, dark scenarios, with monochromatic rendering, as many scenes of the film were illuminated with oil lamps, more oil lamps than candles. Marco wanted to depict the mid-19th century, drawing inspiration from and referencing 19th-century painting, which in terms of light is less interesting than that of the 16th or 17th centuries because it has softer contrasts. According to Marco, this was the key to telling the story of the beginning of modernity: oil lamps were a new tool, the advent of a more modern society. The colour separation of the Venice is very interesting because gives you a lot of nuances starting from a
fairly homogeneous coloration. In reality, I was able to modulate and have a very interesting chromatic contrast.
Were they real lamps with flames, or did you modify them with bulbs?
We shot some scenes with real flames, with actual oil lamps, but to be honest, I had some difficulties. Often, I hid micro-bulbs behind the oil lamps, like those used in fridges, under dimmers, wrapping them with black wrap or various diffusions. In some cases they worked out well, but when these lamps had to perform actions, moving around, it became a bit more complicated. A few months earlier, I had shot the TV series “Django” with oil lamps prepared by a specialised French company, with LEDs controlled by an app, which allowed me to do many things, like working on color temperature and flicker and having a certain intensity. For “Rapito”, I also resorted to these lamps at times. It was a mixed technique.
Very interesting. I noticed a bit of flickering, where I imagine you added dedicated lights, especially for close-ups. The close-ups are always very soft, and the lights seem filtered through the fabric. What I liked is that the skin tone, theoretically lit by flame, is always quite light, never too red. My question, to conclude with bulbs and candles, is: how did you achieve this neutrality? Was there special attention to the skin tone and the actors’ faces?
Of course. I find strong colors on faces distracting. It can be fun, speaking generally, to make films where the colors can be more vibrant, in a film set in a recent or contemporary era it can be fun to have a scene lit in green, for example. But Rapito was a film that had a certain type of light as its constant. The color temperature of a candle or an oil lamp can’t change from house to house, so you have to stick to the light, make a choice, and carry it through. Once a key light was established, I always had small projectors, often LEDs, often handheld, that helped me manage the skin tones. We agreed that the cinematography had to be prominent but not distracting.
On this note, can you say more about your relationship on set with Marco Bellocchio?
When Marco describes how he imagines a scene, his description has a lot to do with the atmosphere, and thus with the light. He is a great communicator and has very effective tools, often using pictorial references. He uses many sketches, his little drawings… He fills pages and pages with sketches that are not remotely comparable to a storyboard, but they are incredibly exhaustive regarding the visual impact of a scene. They are almost caricatures, absolutely unrealistic in terms of distance/close relationships. It’s a method I like and that has always helped me a lot because establishes a paradigm within which you can propose things and never risk saying something out of place. Marco always puts you at ease because he can communicate his thoughts and vision very effectively. Marco helps you a lot. He always knows what to do, and works tirelessly every morning. I think there has rarely been a scene in which he didn’t show me his wonderful script. I hope he makes books out of his scripts because they are stunning.
If you had to use keywords, single words, to describe the cinematography and meaning of Rapito, what words would you use? You already said “low contrast” (it’s okay even if it’s two words)…
First of all, “desolation.” It’s a story about the desolation experienced by a family and, primarily, a child. It had to be told with some atmospheres. Even if some images are strong, the film tells a story of great desolation, a great sadness. It’s its leitmotif. Then, “splendour,” “magnificence.” In contrast to the desolation, the splendour of the ecclesiastical world. We worked in their places, in real locations. These environments are both desolate and splendid at the same time. It was necessary to bring out contrasting tones that had to find a meeting point with the rest because humanly everything is desolate, the violence done to the family and the Pope’s insane attitude. When desolation and splendour meet, a short circuit is created. This child remained a Catholic priest all his life, driven mad. The film tells the story of an individual that had enormous repercussions on modern history.
Desolation and sumptuousness, you did an amazing job of bringing these two worlds together. True, you can feel one and the other, but you also managed to blend them. Coming back here to something a little more technical: was the choice of neutral lenses due to the need to bring these two aspects together? You hit the nail on the head, neutral lenses.
The choice of the Supremes was because I find it a fairly neutral lens and that was exactly what I needed, a lens that didn’t carry a bulky look in its bosom. It had to be very simple. And it had to be very performant, and a construction of today gives you a stability in holding flairs, in handling these little luminous bodies. Vintage lenses run the risk of creating aberrations, and wasting your time when these are not taken advantage of.
A very elegant and not obvious choice. I also think of it as a more difficult choice, because I don’t feel like you used a lot of smoke.
No, it wasn’t there at all. I rarely used it in this film. I only used it once, at night, because we needed a somewhat magical atmosphere, also to mask elements of modernity in the canals of Mantua that otherwise would have sent us to the madhouse. I try to be very rational in putting technical complications (also production and time) and visual benefits on the scales.
I was struck by how you treated the night and the color of moonlight in Kidnapped. I noticed many scenes where there are neither candles nor lamps, entirely shot with a bluish, cyan, almost cobalt light, very beautiful. What’s the recipe for this look? Where does this idea come from?
Marco Bellocchio really likes this kind of night setting. He has always said that. I struggle a little bit, because for me, instinctively, a night can only be lit by a diegetic lamp. You see, you don’t see — but you realize it’s a setting lit with light bulbs, candles, oil lamps. I have to say that I try to avoid the light coming from the windows when I work with lights on inside a house, because I have a hard time believing it. Moonlight cannot compete with a light on in an interior. Obviously, if there is no light on somewhere, the room must be lit. So we came up with this convention, now accepted for many years, of the moon becoming a key light. I like to play with this idea, and we have had fun using a moon that is also quite strong to illuminate some environments. When it is the only light, it has to be there, without fear. American cinema teaches us that sometimes something blatantly fake works. If you have noticed, in the children’s dormitory there is this light, there is almost only that. But I challenge anyone who has seen in real life an interior lit by moons like the ones we all use.
So you need realism, even though there is an almost fantastic component in the film. As I said, I was very impressed with the color you used for the night light. It was blue, but not a normal blue. A cyan, cobalt — is that a result of a LUT or an addition? Did you use colours on the SkyPanels?
No, the key lights in the film, especially in the larger rooms, were not SkyPanels. In the children’s dormitory, yes.
There I often put a smidgen of green there, which I like to accompany blue. As for the discharges, a lime green. Mostly I use Fresnel HMIs, 12 to 18 KW. Tell us about a lighting scheme for a very, very large night exterior. For the Castel Sant’Angelo scene I had a 50-meter crane in almost full backlight, perpendicular to the car, where I put an 18,000W that did, let’s say, the main scene, however, around it I put 2x 4,000W diffuse opening, accompanying it in width. This being a scene with a lot of VFX, I could afford to leave the cranes in the field most of the time.
I kept the streetlights that were on location and gelled them: fortunately, they were not sodium or mercury vapor but LED, so they had a fairly stable coloration. Finally, there was a group of projectors behind car on another crane that gave me some fill. A very, very soft light, and there they were a 12,000W always with two 4,000W, but through cloths, to have as natural softness as possible.
It’s an approach that I keep seeing more and more, you know, even with the lights behind the heads. It’s something that’s starting to be done more and more, it’s very interesting.
On the channels I did more or less the same thing, however, it was very complicated because we had both directions and they were small channels, so you couldn’t block the roads. So there I used both 18000s and Aircraft very far out.
The wonderful thing about Aircraft is that they have a much longer range. They reach much deeper than a discharge.
I had lights 200 meters from the camera because those were the only places I could put them. In general, I always start with ambient lighting. Then now we have incredibly convenient tools. The Lite-mats, Skypanel, Astera, Astera Bulb allow you to make these little corridors of light where the actor will pass. Another cornerstone of the way I work is that if something is beautiful and harmonious it works even if, going to analyze it numerically, it is not correct.
This is an important lesson for me, I certainly did not discover it, but I have always treasured it. I was fortunate to work for several years with Fred Schuler, of ASC, who was the cinematographer for Cassavetes’ Gloria, Scorsese’s King of Comedy, and the camera operator for Taxi Driver. He taught me so much. There weren’t a lot of filter diffusers back then and he would do some wacky things, take grease from his nose, squish it on a clear filter to soften lamps, take jellies, crumple them all up, and stick them in front of the lens hood cash to make a kind of weird degrade. He was another one who worked with a constant joy in inventing new things all the time.
This is to say that we have to know the technique perfectly but the rigor of the technique does not seem to me to be an absolute value. Professional rigor does. The real value of the cinematographer in my opinion is being able to mix technical rigor with intuition. It’s good to find solutions that are maybe a little wacky, but right for what you’re doing.
