Interview by Fabrizio La Palombara CCS
Tell us how the project for this film came about.
I met Davide Angiuli during a period of study at the Centro Sperimentale, when I took part in the Campus Terre di Cinema in Sicily, directed by Vincenzo Condorelli AIC. It was a campus aimed primarily at cinematographers: six scripts by different directors were selected, and each was assigned at random to a cinematographer. Our job was to read the scripts, meet the directors, and work out whether there was a real connection between us and the material. The campus supplied cameras and film stock — the whole experience revolved around shooting on film — and everything had to be captured in a single day, a genuine twelve-hour marathon, to produce the short film the director had conceived. I read Davide’s script and put myself forward. There was an immediate understanding between us, and as we dug deeper into the project we realised we shared a great many visual references. The atmosphere was very spontaneous, almost makeshift — a summer campus among young people. We promised each other it would only be the beginning and that we would keep in touch. And so it proved. Then, in 2024, six years later, Davide called me and said: “I’m finally in a position to make my first film — I’d love you to shoot it.” I was surprised; I hadn’t known he had been trying to get his debut off the ground. The script carried a strong sense of survival, an urgent need to portray a nocturnal, extreme Bari rooted deep in Davide’s own background and experience. It feels significant to me that, for his first feature, Davide chose to reckon with something he knows in such a visceral way.
Once you had read the script, what was the next step? How did you approach the cinematography?
After reading the script, we began meeting almost every day. It was winter, and we immersed ourselves in watching films. To begin with, Davide envisaged a very composed, rigorous approach — static camera, tripod-mounted, minimal movement, perhaps the occasional zoom — but gradually he began introducing more and more handheld work. On the page, the story unfolded in a single breath, without pauses, without any real respite for the character. There was a constant sense of anguish, of tension, almost of agony, and there was violence. Davide described colours and atmospheres with great precision, drawing directly from his teenage memories. All of this drove us to find a language that could cleave to that material — something physical, immersive. What struck me was that, when he described the night, he always imagined it as intensely colourful, whereas the daytime was characterised by a milky, melancholic light. This contrast was already extraordinarily powerful in the script. Our exploration through visual references drew us towards hybrid, almost documentary-like solutions. Among those references were more contemporary filmmakers such as Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman — we were keen to engage with the present as well. We also looked at more canonical work, such as that of Roberto Minervini, but everything we considered had a strongly physical component. The Safdie brothers‘ Uncut Gems and Good Time were particularly clear touchstones: visceral cinema, with nothing posed about it. From the moment we started talking about handheld camera, it felt as though we had entered a shared current. For two or three weeks we were in constant dialogue, exchanging references: I would send him images that he immediately felt were right, and vice versa. At a certain point there was no longer any need to discuss things in purely photographic terms, because our visual imagination had fully converged. This meant that even the construction of the shots was already very clear well before shooting began. I travelled to Bari to scout locations and immediately grasped what Davide had in mind, what the spaces were — some things changed later, of course, but the overall approach was solid from the outset: a nocturnal, extreme, violent Bari, saturated with colour, built on strong contrasts and deep saturation. Everything had to emerge from the black, with a clean separation between darkness and light. Davide wanted faces to rise out of the darkness.
Watching the film, one has the impression that the handheld camera supported not only the visual language but also the work with the actors, giving them greater freedom. It is also striking how close the approach comes to the long take: the camera seems not to cut, but rather to move in search of the characters, even accepting the possibility of ‘losing’ something, which is then recovered through sound. How did this choice come about?
It was a very deliberate choice, and your reading is accurate: these were almost always micro or medium-length long takes. This approach took shape once the right actors had been cast and Davide had begun an in-depth process with them. Nearly a year passed between reading the script and the start of shooting, owing to funding issues, but that time allowed us to refine our method. The decision to work with long takes stemmed from the need to preserve the emotional continuity of the scenes and to give the actors genuine freedom of movement. The camera was not meant to impose a rigid structure, but to adapt to what was happening in the space — to follow the characters, to search for them. You do not always see everything, nor do you always catch every line head-on. But that is precisely where sound comes in, completing the image and allowing the viewer to retain all the information while maintaining a strong sense of reality. It was a way of building an immersive experience, in keeping with the continuous tension of the narrative. At a certain point I began watching footage from the rehearsals, then attended in person, and it was already clear from that material that the camera was never still and that the actors had an energy that was difficult to contain. It was impossible to impose predetermined movements, to mark precise positions, or to ask them to move from one point to another in any rigid way. Not because direction was lacking — there were clear guidelines — but because the acting was deeply tied to the moment; it called for an almost documentary-like quality. It was not exactly improvisation, though there was some of that, but rather a very immediate, vivid presence. Seeing Davide arrive at very interesting solutions in terms of performance, I decided to take a step back. We realised that this energy was powerful and that our job was to support it.
At that point, we chose to build each scene through four or five long takes — sometimes very short ones — and then work out, during shooting and in the edit, how these pieces might connect and whether they were sufficient to cover everything. For me it was also enormously enjoyable, because I would enter the actors’ flow, trying to adhere to their way of inhabiting the scene, to anticipate their movements, to sense what was about to happen. I remember that by the second or third day of shooting, a very strong sense of harmony had already formed: we were completely in sync. They no longer needed to know where I was or what I was doing; they moved freely and I followed them, already knowing how they would react. I tried to foreground certain elements in order to convey something raw, while always respecting the locations, which we had chosen precisely for their visual strength. The production conditions played their part too: I did not have a particularly large crew, so it was necessary to work in an essential way — to rely on what was there, to intervene as little as possible in the environment, and to build everything through the movement of the camera.
This comes across very clearly. It is as though a certain ‘poverty’ of means had been transformed into richness: the cinematography is perfectly at the service of the narrative. With a static camera, an overly constructed frame, or a more intrusive approach to the lighting, the film would probably have lost its essential nature. And above all, as you said, the actors were never interrupted — and they are both extraordinary.
I was struck by them too. One of the two, August, who plays the Albanian character, is an experienced actor, fairly well known for a Rai series as well. But Davide had written the film long before that series was shot, shaping the character precisely around his personality, almost modelling it on him. Malich, on the other hand, is much younger, yet he has a remarkable naturalness and spontaneity. I noticed it immediately during rehearsals. He was very receptive, he listened, and a direct, immediate, intensely alive language developed between us. Sometimes a sound, a small cue, was enough for him to grasp what was needed: we fed off each other. This dynamic was so organic that it could sometimes even be heard in the sync sound: in post-production, certain directions had to be removed from the film’s audio. Unexpected events ended up enriching the scenes too — small accidents, objects jamming, dynamics that surfaced in the moment. In some cases we kept them, because they worked. A scene involving a car accident, which had been conceived differently in the script, was ultimately built from what actually happened during rehearsals. In this sense, the script functioned almost like a canovaccio: a solid yet open structure, capable of accommodating what emerged during shooting. And all of this, of course, was reflected in the camera work.
There was also an important choice regarding the lenses, right?
Yes. At first we had considered shooting anamorphic, because we were looking for a way to ‘break’ the image — to make it more selective, to compress the background and isolate the characters within this dark, highly coloured world, with a distortion that could also be aesthetically compelling. When I carried out the first tests, however, I realised it was not the right direction. I found myself working with very large, heavy lenses — not particularly manageable — with a minimum focusing distance that limited me considerably. I felt almost constrained, boxed in, and that ran counter to the sense of freedom we were trying to achieve. From there came the idea of working with a single lens, a single focal length: the 50mm. Davide and I discussed it and immediately saw the advantages. Above all, a great operational lightness: no lens changes, greater ergonomics, but more than anything a single, consistent vision aligned with the writing. In the script, there was no real sense of wide shots, nor of constructed details or close-ups: it was a continuous flow, without interruptions, without shifts in perspective. Narratively too, there were no pauses, no full stops: everything moved forward without break. The choice of a single focal length was the most faithful translation of that quality. Davide immediately embraced this intuition, as did the production, which trusted us despite what might have seemed a risky decision — shooting an entire film on a single lens, without traditional coverage for the edit.
Which camera and lens did you use?
We shot on an ARRI Alexa 35 with a Schneider 50mm lens, used at T1. The choice of camera was driven primarily by the way the image behaved at higher sensitivities. Compared to other models I had tested, working around 1600–2000 ISO, the Alexa 35 delivered a much softer quality in the micro-contrast and edges — something that felt less digital. With the addition of texture, this quality became even more pronounced: the transition between black and colour was extremely gradual, without hard edges. That was exactly what I was looking for — I wanted faces to emerge from the black, but without abrupt separation, with a very soft transition. In some cases it almost seems as though focus is missing, but in fact it is there: it is the image itself that blends, making the relationship between darkness and colour continuous. The lens also played a crucial role. This Schneider 50mm, while maintaining the same perspective, changed its rendering significantly depending on the aperture — between T1, T1.4, T2 and T2.8. They almost felt like different lenses, owing to variations in refraction and the imperfections of the glass. We therefore decided to use the aperture as an expressive tool. Day scenes were shot mostly at T2.8, to preserve a more natural feel, with a slightly more stable depth of field, though still soft at the edges. Night scenes, on the other hand, were shot mainly at T2, narrowing the focus and rendering everything else more diffuse, almost suspended. This technical choice helped shape a world in which context is never explicitly described, but instead emerges through sensation, colour and subtle perceptual distortion.
This freedom to work with the aperture, to constantly open and close it, is something we cinematographers also owe to handheld work and, above all, to the focus pullers. It is an extremely demanding role, often taken for granted. Your focus puller did a very good job.
Absolutely. I always say, jokingly, that when focus is perfect no one says anything, but when it is not, everyone shouts ‘out of focus!’. It is an extremely demanding job, especially in a context like Cattiva strada. My focus puller, Franco Baratti, was truly excellent — I pushed him hard, but he rose to the challenge and carried it through with great precision. In these situations, the risk is always shared; it never belongs to just one person.
It was the right choice for this film, because reading the script I never perceived any shift in perspective. I remember one evening sending some test footage to the director and telling him I would write again the next day — then spending the whole night thinking about it, realising I had never once ‘seen’ a wide shot, nor a close-up in the traditional sense. Usually, when reading a script, certain images emerge very clearly, but here that did not happen. It was a continuous flow. Davide himself had not noticed it, probably because he was too immersed in the writing; it took an outside eye to bring that into focus.
And it was not an immediate decision: up to a month before shooting we were still leaning towards anamorphic, partly because we had taken as a reference a certain kind of cinema shot on Panavision lenses. But when I carried out the tests, I felt it was not the right path. This was a film to be shot entirely handheld, without support, and anamorphic would have made everything too rigid. At that point, Massimo Proietti from D-Vision Movie People proposed an alternative: a lens that was still at prototype stage. He let me test it, and the moment I mounted it on the camera I knew we had found the right direction.
How many weeks did you shoot for?
Four full weeks. We also shot on Saturdays, so it was a very tight four-week schedule, all in Bari, at the beginning of the summer.
Which was the most complex scene? And which one gave you the greatest satisfaction?
In fact, there was no single scene that was more complex than the others: as I said, the entire film sustained a very similar level of intensity throughout. From a camera perspective, working with these long takes and already inside a very precise flow, I never really felt a sense of difficulty. If I had to identify the most challenging moment in terms of lighting, I would point to the quarry sequence. It was an environment that had to be built entirely from scratch, with very limited means and a vast space to manage. That was where I truly felt the lack of resources — because even though I was working largely with darkness, I still needed to give some depth to the background, to make the space perceptible, especially for the rave section and the finale. With very few lights available, I had to cover a huge area and significant volumes. The 50mm helped, because it allowed me to be selective, but there were still hundreds of metres of space within the frame, so the problem remained. It was probably the most demanding situation to handle. The same was true organisationally: we were working with a very small crew, though in certain moments — the quarry among them — we had additional support. The difficulty was that I had to manage both camera and lighting simultaneously: I was operating handheld, following the action, while giving lighting directions over intercom at the same time. I never had a moment to step back and properly assess the light with any distance — everything was happening at once. In other situations — interiors, car scenes — I had settled into a more stable approach. There I worked extensively with what the locations already offered, choosing environments that provided an interesting visual base and then intervening to unify and enhance what was already there.
Well, the result is truly remarkable. And what about post-production? Who did you work with on the colour grade? At what stage did you step in, in relation to the footage?
Post-production was somewhat problematic, because we began the film without having a colourist on board. I had made a few proposals, but no agreement was reached, and a week before shooting started I still had no one to work with in order to define a workflow, a LUT, or more generally the direction of the look. At that point, I handled everything myself. It’s an area I’m familiar with, so it wasn’t an issue in itself, but I did miss having someone to exchange ideas with. I developed the look working on a calibrated LG monitor that I use for checking, without the possibility of verifying the result on a more structured system. Even the tests were managed with two different DITs who only followed me partially, so many decisions – from the camera to the lenses, through to the choice of working around 2000 ISO – were the result of a very solitary process. The same applied to the overall image approach: the decision to work with deep blacks, allowing them to ‘fall’ without information, could also have been shaped in post-production. But without the certainty of being able to control that stage later on, I preferred to build it directly in-camera. I chose to treat digital almost as if it were film: I was looking for an image that was already ‘stressed’, dirty, unstable, not reassuring. Everything was constructed during shooting, with a very lean workflow and a custom-developed LUT, organised through a very precise node structure. This made the post-production process more complex, because we had to pick up an already very defined image. The dailies were already quite close to the final result. Only about a month after shooting wrapped was I able to bring in a colourist I trust, Paolo Buonpane. We made very minimal interventions: small adjustments to saturation, a few tweaks to contrast and exposure, really very little. The main work focused on the texture of the image, particularly on reducing definition in the low and high frequencies, in order to soften micro-contrast and make the image more organic. The Alexa 35 has a very soft rendering, but at the same time, because of its high resolution, it retains micro-contrasts that are not always easy to ‘break’. We worked on that, but a large part of the result was already determined by the high ISO and the lens. I would say that about 80% of the look was built during shooting, with the remaining 20% refined in post.
You made a choice that requires a certain degree of courage and forces you to make clear, decisive decisions.
Yes, I think it was a positive aspect. Sometimes, when working digitally, there is a tendency to rely too much on the available light, constantly lowering, correcting, adjusting, until you lose a clear idea of the image. When you work with fewer means – or with a more ‘analogue’ approach – you are forced to decide what you really want to show. In that sense, you reclaim your work, your visual responsibility. It is no longer about ‘lower this, raise that’: it is a shift in mindset. On the next film, for instance, I had far greater resources and a full crew, with an average of 14–15 lights on set. On Cattiva strada, by contrast, we worked with the bare minimum: at most 4 or 5 Astera units on the car, a projector, a LED panel – and that was it. Nothing else. And it was not just a question of budget, but also of method: I simply did not have, nor did I want, the possibility of managing a complex lighting setup. Everything was based on observation: this is the natural light, I choose the right time of day, I enhance it slightly, I add only what is necessary. That’s all. In this sense, it was very similar to the experience Davide and I had years earlier, shooting on film at the Campus Terre di Cinema, where we had just two lights available. There too I worked in the same way: lighting only what was necessary, building an image that was already ‘stressed’, intervening more by subtraction than addition. I’m thinking, for instance, of a car scene in Cattiva strada: you see the faces and the jewellery, and little else. A minimal sense of movement in the background, just enough to provide context, but everything reduced to the essentials.
And it is precisely this that then worked in the edit: a few precise images are enough to construct a scene. Many sequences were resolved in this way, with the bare minimum that was nevertheless essential, allowing perception to complete the rest. In this respect, the work of the editor, Massimo Ruggiero, was fundamental – truly very effective. The film has a structure I would almost describe as ‘brutalist’: there are sharp cuts, sudden interruptions that do not necessarily follow classical conventions. And it is a choice that works, because it is consistent with the nature of the narrative. It is a raw film, and the editing is raw as well. Credit must go to Davide Angiuli for having the courage to pursue this direction: it is not so common today to see a film edited in such an energetic way, even against now-established rules. But this is precisely what gives the film a strong sense of truth, of realism, keeping the viewer inside the story and alongside the characters. Personally, I was very struck by Malich’s character: he carries a constant, unpredictable tension that comes across very clearly. It is also something recognisable, as it recalls figures many of us have encountered, especially during adolescence. And I think this feeling emerges precisely from the whole: from the staging, the work with the actors, and the way the film was shot and edited.
How is it being distributed? Has it had a festival run?
It is being distributed by Notorious Pictures from 26 March, and it was screened at the Bif&st in Bari. It was important for the film to be part of that festival, given its strong connection to the city. The actors won the award for Best Actor, a thoroughly deserved recognition. A theatrical run is now planned, at least until 5 April, after which the aim is to continue with further festival circulation that does not require an international premiere. It is a somewhat atypical path, but one that is also consistent with the nature of the film: it is a very radical work that can speak to a broader audience, not just a festival crowd. Cattiva strada is something to be experienced. It is not so common to find films in cinemas today that are this direct, this sincere, portraying reality with such immediacy and without filters. We are now used to seeing certain social contexts mainly in series, often with a more fictionalised dimension; here, instead, there is a raw and authentic portrayal. And beyond the setting, there is a story of friendship which, for me, is one of the film’s strongest elements. Two characters who, despite coming from apparently opposite worlds, find a bond, a form of brotherhood. It is not a constructed message, but something that emerges naturally: the need to support one another, to understand each other, even within a difficult environment. I think Davide has conveyed this dimension with great sincerity, drawing from a world he knows well. It is a type of relationship that, especially in Southern Italy, is not uncommon: very heterogeneous groups of friends, coming from different backgrounds, yet sharing the same space, the same process of growing up.
Thank you Emilio.
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Rental: D-Vision Movie People
Digital colour: DCP
Camera: ARRI Alexa 35
Lenses: 50mm Schneider Xenon T1, Cooke T2.3 18–90mm Techno
Aspect ratio: 2.21:1
DIT: Gianluca Sansevrino
Gaffer: Nico Saponaro
Key grip: Lorenzo Colucci
1st AC: Franco Baratti
Colourist: Paolo Buonpane, Inlusion Creative Hub
