Interview by Marcello Dapporto CCS
I’d like to start from the end — that is, from the selection of Oh Boys at Cannes. In a year when Italian cinema was absent from the festival, your short was selected and you were one of only two Italian DoPs present. Can you tell us something about that experience?
Yes, we went. It was me, the director, the screenwriter and Gabriele Santi, my gaffer, who I always work with. The best part was the feeling of being a team, of sharing the journey and the satisfaction of the result. The screening was a very intense experience, because the audience was extraordinarily engaged. You could hear the laughter, you could feel a constant feedback. It was moving. The selection of films was also very strong, there were parties, the chance to meet a great many people. I got to know several interesting filmmakers and directors of photography. That said, I don’t build grand mythologies around festivals. I was honoured to take part because I believe deeply in this film, but there were probably many other films that deserved to be selected and weren’t.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the project. How did your collaboration with Antonio Donato start? How did you work in preparation to build the aesthetic of the project?
I met Antonio through moving in the same circles, going to the same events. We worked together on another project, a short film by Hleb Papou called Fellini — me as director of photography and him as editor. Later he sent me a short film of his own, Sparare alle angurie, from 2023, which I liked very much. In that case he had worked with a London-based director of photography who was, in practice, more of a camera operator. As a result, many of the cinematographic choices had been made directly by Antonio. I used to tease him about it: “It’s a beautiful film — shame about the cinematography.” While working on Fellini, we often found ourselves talking about films, ideas and references. At a certain point he said to me: “I have this project, we’ve won a grant, we’re writing it and I’d love to do something together.” I told him to send me the screenplay. From that moment — so right from the early stages — I became part of the creative process. I found myself giving feedback already during the writing phase. It’s something I always do, when possible, with the directors I work with. I watched the story evolve step by step, in a continuous dialogue.
And what do you think your contribution was?
Sparare alle angurie had a very precise visual language. It had a strong, extremely graphic visual imagination: parallel lines, very controlled compositions, a very evident construction of the image. I was interested in that approach, even if at times it risked becoming a purely aesthetic element. I therefore suggested to Antonio that we take a further step: keeping that quality, but always seeking to ground it in narrative meaning. From there we began working on the screenplay in relation to the spaces, during the first scouting. The film is set in a small location between countryside and sea, and when Antonio had identified some possible locations, we went to visit them together. There were several occasions on which something didn’t convince me, either in terms of the meaning of the scene or its relationship to the chosen space. In those cases I would propose alternatives. I would ask: “Why shoot it here? Isn’t there a more suitable space?” Our method was precisely this: to start from the locations and let ourselves be guided by what the places suggested. I knew the material very well and could propose alternatives.
Can you give us some examples?
The scene set in the music school… Originally it was supposed to take place at the harbour, during a kind of rehearsal-performance. That solution didn’t convince me. We discussed it at length with Antonio and with the co-screenwriter. In the meantime I had heard about a music school. We went to visit it, we saw some of the rooms and I started taking photographs. At that point I said: “What if we set it here? What if he watches them from outside while they’re playing?” A large part of the work came about in exactly this way: we reworked many scenes on the basis of what we actually had available. For me this is fundamental, because real spaces often offer more interesting narrative possibilities than those imagined on paper. Sometimes the locations you have at your disposal are not simply the container of the scene but an integral part of what the film wants to tell. The strength of the collaboration with Antonio was this: he never put up walls. On the contrary, he was always open to dialogue. If a sensible observation emerged, he would take it on board, we would talk it through, bring in the screenwriter and try to understand what were truly the driving forces of the scene, what we wanted to tell and what was the best way to do it.
The scene with the two English characters having lunch was also not originally set on the beach but on a terrace. I pointed out that the terrace, however attractive, could have been anywhere — in the mountains, in the countryside, in any other setting. You could barely see the sea. There was no sense of two well-off tourists experiencing something quintessentially Italian, a meal by the sea. So I suggested finding a bar and setting up some tables directly on the beach. The idea was well received and in the end we found an intermediate solution: a venue overlooking the beach. The entire creative process was shaped by this constant exchange. In Antonio’s previous short, the camera was almost always at eye level. Here we introduced some variations, occasionally using slightly higher or lower viewpoints. We worked on the empty space around the characters — which naturally remains an important element of his visual poetics — while trying to build different perspectives.
Here too, everything grew from the locations. We always tried to make the most of what we had available, because I believe that a large part of the cinematographic work consists precisely in this. If you work on a built set, the primary dialogue is with the production design. If instead you work in real spaces, you necessarily have to intervene at the level of the writing as well. When a location doesn’t work, you have to find a more suitable one; or you have to work out whether a scene can be moved from an interior to an exterior, or modified so as to engage more effectively with the space in which it will be shot. This, in the end, is the work we did.
The stylistic imprint of Oh Boys is very strong; how did you work on the formal choices — from aspect ratio to frame composition, to the choice of focal lengths?
In his previous short Antonio had used 4:3. Here we wanted to do something different. The idea was: let’s break up the graphic quality a little, that very rigorous line, and reframe it within a new boundary. Antonio had a tendency to keep the characters separate within the frame, to leave a great deal of air above their heads. At a certain point I said to him: “If you want to increase this sense of space above the characters, let’s try closing in the sides of the image. That way we’ll have less lateral space but an even stronger perception of the air above them.” From there came the choice of format. When I read the screenplay for the first time, I was struck by the constant presence of the village, of nature, of a certain idea of Italianness. The film is about the male need to measure up to a performance and come out of it a winner, set in the context of southern Italy. On a visual level this gave me a very particular feeling: an extremely sunny surface, beneath which a darker component also moves. We had splendid locations at our disposal, a very present nature, small towns rich in colour. My first reaction was to think how beautiful it would have been to shoot on film, using very little lighting and letting the format and the texture of the image emerge in an almost natural way. Obviously the budget didn’t allow for it. From that point on, the work consisted in trying nonetheless to convey that same feeling through the tools we had available.
Another element that is very striking is the economy — this capacity for synthesis which is, in my view, one of the film’s great strengths, including in the construction of the frames. I’m thinking, for instance, of the micro-story of the boy bouncing the ball, which develops by returning several times to the same shot and which, in spite of this, tells a great deal. Did you set yourselves limits? How did you resist the temptation to resort to tighter close-ups to underline the performances? And finally, how did you arrive at the decision not to move the camera?
On this we were in agreement from the outset. I also work in advertising and fashion, where you shoot a great deal: shot-reverse-shot, handheld, long moves. You accumulate an enormous amount of material knowing that it will be selected, cut and reorganised in the edit. When I work on a story, on the other hand, I love to shoot the smallest possible number of setups. It is a personal choice, something I always try to propose to the directors I work with. Antonio was already very close to this idea. In fact, reading the screenplay — which had a tight rhythm, almost a ping-pong quality, very sharp and propulsive — my initial temptation was to introduce some more energetic movement, a sudden pan here and there, something closer to a certain Scorsesian language. But he stopped me immediately. He said: “No, that’s not something I’m ready to call my own yet. That kind of dynamic I prefer to build in the edit.” From there our first rule was established: static camera. Once that principle was in place, the variables we could play with became heights, distances and therefore lenses. We also needed to convey a sense of place — a village that is in fact one of the film’s true protagonists: a container that encompasses and shapes all the characters. The boy’s story was perhaps the most symbolic, and precisely for that reason it could be told in a single shot. There was no need to fragment it — and it would in any case have worked against the film’s overall rhythm. That shot functions almost as a close-up of the village rather than of the characters. We see three specific situations interweaving with one another, and then the situation of the boy, which ends up taking on a broader, almost representative value for the entire community.
The idea of shooting it in a single frame was already there in the screenplay. I pushed hard to use that courtyard. It was an extremely interesting space: modern architecture set within older elements, with colonnades, stacked terraces, façades in the background. A layered space, rich in possibility. Initially something much more graphic was envisaged, built almost around a single wall. I tried to push towards greater depth. I kept saying: “Let’s try to build levels, layers, in which many things can happen simultaneously.” From there Antonio enjoyed writing all those small situations that interweave within the same frame. Here too the process was always the same: start from the location and make the most of it.
Staying with the theme of influences and inspirations — did you have specific references? Were there films or filmmakers you were looking to in particular, or did you prefer to avoid that kind of approach?
In practice I use references mainly to define the level of brightness and the type of colour we want to achieve. Left to my own devices, I would always tend to close the image down, make it darker and more contrasty. Antonio, on the other hand, had references more closely linked to colour. We looked at images shot on film, above all on 35mm, often in bright exteriors. I searched for material that recalled that kind of rendering to see whether it might appeal to him. From his previous short I had understood that he liked very bright, very colourful images, so I wanted to grasp how far we could push things, especially in the night scenes. We exchanged some references, but mainly to define a palette — a level of brightness, contrast and saturation.
Staying with the look of the film — you mentioned the initial desire to shoot on film. Having instead to work digitally, how did you try to recover that organic quality? Starting, for instance, with the choice of lenses.
When I feel that a project calls for that kind of sensibility, my natural inclination is to go towards ARRI cameras. And in this case we used Ultraprime lenses. I was interested in starting from something that made the most of the ARRI’s qualities: the behaviour in the highlights, the colour rendering, and that sense of full, vivid, luminous nature that it manages to convey almost without any particular intervention. Before the shoot I had spoken with Daniel Pallucca, the colourist. I had explained that I wanted to achieve an atmosphere close to that of film and asked him how he would prefer me to expose the material: slightly over, half a stop or a full stop. He told me to start from a LUT he regularly used and to keep the exposure a little higher than normal — even a stop or a stop and a half in some situations — so as to give himself more room to build that rendering in post-production. For the finale, on the other hand, I had in mind something far more distorted and unsettling. We had requested Petzval lenses which, however, never arrived. We had been assured they would be available, and so on the first day I improvised using diopters on the exteriors. The problem is that working that way, especially with wide-angle lenses, is extremely complicated: the vignetting becomes noticeable and the intervention of the filter is too apparent. At that point we were forced to recalibrate the whole approach. The original idea was to shoot the entire finale with the distortion and softness typical of Petzval lenses. When we realised the lenses weren’t coming, we decided to concentrate that effect exclusively on the boy with the saxophone. It had been the first thing we had shot and it seemed the most coherent way to salvage at least part of the original intention. I showed Antonio some tests made with Glimmerglass filters and he was immediately intrigued. I too was interested in experimenting and pushing things a little further. So we decided that the boy with the saxophone would become the centre of this visual transformation. Around him the image takes on a magical quality, while the rest of the finale maintains a more ethereal atmosphere through the use of filters.
Personally I still consider it a compromise. If I could have, I would have shot the entire finale with the Petzvals. But what mattered was that that part of the film had a different tone from the rest. In the end we managed to achieve this difference through the lighting and through a few targeted visual choices. At that point I told myself there was no point using the close diopters on all the other frames, because I would have ended up altering the film’s visual language. That distortion had to belong to the boy alone. For him we used a 50mm — and it is probably the only 50mm in the entire film.
Everything else was wider?
Yes, we stayed almost exclusively within the 25mm. This too was a kind of rule: we wanted to keep the space around the characters constantly visible.
The film depicts on one hand the male tendency towards competition and on the other the fragility that lies concealed behind it — with the exception of the boy with the saxophone, who observes this world from the outside. Can you tell us about the lighting choices you made to express these aspects? Let’s also talk about the long sunset that accompanies the entire finale of the film, running across the different narrative threads.
There was a desire to arrive at the finale with a kind of glow — a sunset light that was slightly forced. We didn’t want a completely natural sunset. Besides, we didn’t have the means to achieve a truly realistic one on that scale. As so often happens, it was a matter of finding the best way to work with what we had available. I could never have actually lit a square as if it were bathed in natural sunset light. So I asked Antonio whether a more theatrical light might interest him — almost magical, deliberately artificial and heightened. His response was immediately positive. We ran some tests in the first days of shooting and then maintained that approach throughout. The result is a very warm shaft of light that strikes the characters above all, and the surrounding environment far less — almost like a theatrical spotlight. For the rest of the film, on the other hand, I wanted to maintain a certain naturalness. I wasn’t interested in constructing an artificially realistic image, but neither did I want to load it with dramatic meaning through the lighting. I was looking for something natural and at the same time playful, with a certain chromatic liveliness and moderate contrast. The screenplay has a bright tone — almost slapstick at moments — while also containing serious and melancholic elements. I didn’t want to overemphasise either dimension. The aim was to build a pleasant, luminous image that also conveyed the playful character of the story. Not by chance, the film’s original title was Playtime.
A reference to Jacques Tati.
The idea was therefore to maintain vivid colours and a general sense of vitality. We wanted to depict the village positively from a visual standpoint, letting the contrast between the image and what happens to the characters produce part of the narrative tension, without turning the light into a directly dramatic instrument. A large part of the work on the boy with the saxophone was based simply on controlling the natural light. The same applies to the scene of the two English tourists eating outdoors: the sun, the heat, the holiday atmosphere were all elements we wanted to preserve. The most constructed sequence was the one in the square with the ping-pong table. The reason was straightforward: the village was lit by a handful of uninteresting street lamps, replaced over the years with LED sources of different colours. At that point we decided to switch everything off and rebuild the lighting entirely. There the dialogue with the production design was fundamental. This is also an area I very much enjoy. The bar visible in the film didn’t actually exist — it was a closed premises. We decided to transform it visually into a bar, adding tables, chairs, light sources and completely redefining the space. Here too I was looking for an image that retained an Italian flavour — popular, playful. Only in the finale did I try to use the light in a more openly narrative and symbolic way. I’m not sure how much of all this the viewer actually perceives, and it would in fact be interesting to find out.
After the preparation — including the work on the screenplay and the locations — how much room did you leave for improvisation on set? I’m referring both to the work with the actors — blocking and performance — and to the visual choices. Did it ever happen that you changed your minds at the last moment?
With Antonio, once everything had been defined, we prepared each scene in extraordinarily precise detail. We would shoot rehearsals on an iPhone, he would cut them together, we would note down the focal lengths. The level of preparation was impressive. I had never worked that way before and, at first, it unsettled me a little, because normally I like to improvise in the moment. I work well under pressure. In reality that method proved extremely useful. Precisely because we had prepared everything so thoroughly, the system worked. Antonio is very good. We also had extraordinary actors. The two English performers, Meg Bellamy and Tom Byrne, came from productions such as The Crown and were of remarkable quality. On set a wonderful energy developed, both within the crew and between us and the actors. Often I would stand at the monitor alongside the screenwriter, and Antonio would come over to hear our observations on the performances as well. There was a constant exchange. I remember one specific moment. There is a scene in which one of the English actors moves at the table and a shift in focus and a variation in the perception of the focal length are clearly visible. Technically it was a problem. At a certain point we stopped and asked ourselves: “Could this imperfection have a meaning?” Antonio looked at it and said: “Let’s keep it. It increases the sense of the character’s inadequacy.” There were several similar episodes. That said, we had prepared the film so thoroughly that we remained very faithful to the plan. In practice we shot almost everything exactly as it had been worked out during the filmed rehearsals on the phone. The changes were few and always driven by very specific needs. This was also possible because Antonio leaves a great deal of room for dialogue. He is very sure of himself and knows precisely what he wants to tell. If you make a well-reasoned observation, he never stiffens. He grasps the issue immediately and responds clearly: yes, no, or perhaps. This openness to dialogue was one of the things I appreciated most about working with him.
How many days did you shoot?
We shot in just four days, with an extremely tight schedule.
Four days? Including the night shoots?
Yes. It was genuinely demanding. In reality one of the hardest things was precisely building the shooting schedule and making everything fit together. While we were shooting one scene, half the crew was already elsewhere setting up, closing roads, switching off lighting rigs or preparing the next location. It was exhausting, but also enormous fun. The team was extraordinary. Even now, when I work in Rome, I try to call those same people back. A genuinely special atmosphere developed — a situation in which everyone helped each other out. I remember a camera assistant who, during a break, had nothing urgent to do and started helping my gaffer move the stands. It was that kind of atmosphere in which everyone pitched in without anyone having to ask. If I climbed somewhere to help someone, someone else would immediately come and give me a hand in turn. That synergy is one of the things I love most about working on set.
A more personal question. Is there an image or a scene you feel particularly attached to? Something you would want to stay with the viewer when they leave the cinema. Or a sequence in which you feel you expressed your work as a director of photography at its best?
I am very self-critical and rarely feel truly satisfied. I don’t say that out of false modesty — in fact I often do the opposite: I tend to focus on what doesn’t work rather than what does. But I am very fond of the ping-pong scene. Everything that went into the making of the film comes together there. It is a sequence in which we literally built a place from nothing. We invented a space that didn’t exist. We created a situation, a geography, a dynamic. Imagining a place and then watching it take shape before your eyes is something I find deeply rewarding. Seeing that it works, seeing that what didn’t exist before becomes credible on screen — that is an enormous satisfaction. In that case we didn’t simply light a location: we built a world. That is why that scene has stayed with me in a particular way.
Your work spans advertising, fashion, music videos and narrative filmmaking. And then there is directing, which you continue to practise from time to time. In what way does being a director yourself influence your relationship with the directors you work with as a director of photography?
At first, when I began shifting increasingly towards cinematography after having worked primarily as a director, I lived with this with a certain unease. I had the impression that some directors perceived it almost as a threat. With time, however, I noticed that in more established working relationships it had become an advantage. I believe the collaboration with Antonio was born precisely on the basis of these premises. When I am on a narrative set I pay close attention to the actors. Sometimes I stay more in the background, at other times I become very involved in the process. I write, I read screenplays, I think about the construction of scenes. This allows me to understand the director’s work more deeply and to engage with him not only on a visual level but on a narrative one as well. I try to get inside his head, to understand his point of view. It is as if I were handling, at least in part, his own language.
With different tools, though.
Yes. And that is precisely the point. Antonio was very open to dialogue. He would often ask my opinion on the actors. Sometimes he would respond: “No, I don’t see it that way.” Other times he would say: “You’re right, let’s try it.” We are now developing a feature film together. A few days ago I read the screenplay and called him to give him some feedback that amounted almost to directorial suggestions rather than cinematographic observations. He replied: “Interesting — let’s work on it.” It is a dialogue that continues to exist outside the set as well. This way of working probably also makes me a director of photography who is less obsessed with the technical side. The technique interests me, naturally, but only up to a point. For this reason I am happy to rely on very well-prepared and passionate assistants — people who are extremely competent and far more of a “nerd” about it than I am. I am a nerd about other things. What interests me more is the project as a whole. That is why I often find myself working with directors who are looking for someone who is not simply an executor. One of the things I hear most often is: “I’ve worked with people who were excellent at their craft but never proposed ideas, never offered a point of view.” I, on the other hand, always make clear from the outset that I like to be deeply involved in the project. I like to be inside the creative process — to contribute, to discuss, to put proposals on the table. I naturally try not to be invasive or overbearing. When a job is offered to me, one of the first things I ask is precisely whether there is room for that kind of collaboration. Because it is the way I work best. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way.
Thank you for everything you have told us, Antonio.
TECHNICAL CREDITS
Focus puller / 1st AC: Marco De Chiara
2nd AC, DIT and video assist: Claudio Fagnano
Gaffer: Gabriele Santi
Key grip: Sergio Frasca
Best boy: Lorenzo Iuliano
Camera: ARRI Alexa Mini
Aspect ratio: 1.33 open gate
Shooting format: ProRes 4:3 2.8K: 2880 × 2160, 24fps
Lenses: ARRI Zeiss Ultraprime
Rental — camera, grip and lighting: —
Colourist: Daniel Pallucca
