Interview by Alessandro Chiodo CCS
Testa o croce by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis is now showing in cinemas. Simone, tell us the story of Buffalo Bill, Santino and Rosa.
It’s hard to summarise the plot because there’s so much in it. Like all of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s work, Testa o croce starts from a true story and merges with legend – in this case, also through historical archive footage dating back almost to the origins of cinema. The film tells the story of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show: Buffalo Bill had the idea of creating a show that became hugely successful in America and then took it on tour in Europe, a sort of travelling circus with about a hundred people – half Native Americans and the rest cowboys. This spectacle toured across Europe, staging the legend of the West, the tales of American mythology. From this comes the episode set in Rome, where Buffalo Bill challenged the Italian butteri to a rodeo, a taming of a wild stallion. According to the story, the Italian butteri won – in particular one of them, Augusto Imperiali from Cisterna di Latina. This curious story, supported by historical accounts, meets Matteo and Alessio’s distinctive way of storytelling, which transforms real events into a legend enriched with voices and popular tales.
Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is a young woman married to a wealthy military bourgeois, trapped in an uncomfortable and unwanted marriage. When she meets Santino (Alessandro Borghi), it’s love at first sight, and she sees in him the chance to free herself from that oppressive life. It’s a love story between two people who meet by “chance” and run away together after committing a crime. Buffalo Bill (John C. Reilly) pursues them, hired by Prefect Rupè (Gianni Garko), who seeks revenge for his son’s death and wants to find Rosa. Everything unfolds against the backdrop of a popular uprising in Italy during the early years of unification. History, legend, fantasy and folk tales intertwine around Rosa, who dreams of realising herself, her love and her independence.
It’s paradoxical that the butteri challenge the Americans and defeat them, while at the same time Rosa’s dream is the “American dream” – the dream of an imaginary America that doesn’t exist…
America at that time represented the possibility of self-realisation through the building of a democratic nation, where everyone could pursue a dream. Rosa says, “My mother always told me: either a whore, a wife, or a nun.” A woman had only those three choices and had to pick one. Rosa becomes a wife to secure a more comfortable life, but soon finds herself oppressed. As she says at the beginning of the film, “I can’t breathe.” Along her journey, through her encounter with Buffalo Bill, she finds the chance to change, to become someone, to break free from that constraint. That’s why she wants to go to the United States.
Testa o croce is your second film with Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, after The Tale of King Crab.. Tell us about how the project came to life. I know there was a long period of preparation here as well – months and months of work.
It’s my second collaboration with Matteo and Alessio – actually the third, because before that we shot a documentary together, Il Solengo, which is when we first met. From that film came not only a working relationship but also a deep friendship. Working with them has been a real education for me; I’ve learned so much, above all a genuine passion for cinema, and my own taste has evolved. Yes, all of Matteo and Alessio’s films have a long gestation; they’re works that go through an extended process of writing and production. I live through it with them, entering their world even as they write, when the film is still far away. I start thinking about it during the writing phase, listening to them talk about the characters. We dedicate a great deal of time to pre-production. This long process is typical of Matteo and Alessio, but it’s also a way of working that suits me very well. I need a long relationship with the director to understand where the film is heading, to build a shared “vision”, a deep understanding. It’s not only about the film itself, but also about their general sensibility, their ideas. For me, it’s a way of studying cinema – and I enjoy it. It’s a process that doesn’t allow me to take on many projects, but it helps me grow. I studied film at the Academy, like you, but I was never really a cinephile. I love cinema, but for a long time I focused on understanding the mechanisms behind the art of constructing or creating an image. My path, like yours, was a technical one. We focused on doing. Thanks to an excellent school, we were lucky. It’s been a long journey, and a bit obsessive on my part: I wanted to understand why I couldn’t create images like the ones I admired, like those of our master Vittorio Storaro. It was a difficult goal to reach (he smiles).
What were the shared references between you, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis?
The western excites us. For me, it’s one of the most fascinating genres and has undergone an extraordinary evolution in the history of cinema. It was used for American propaganda, later became a vehicle for criticism in the revisionist western, and was eventually transformed into something else entirely – such as Jodorowsky’s psychedelic western. It’s the oldest of American film genres, and the most reworked. The film is full of cinematic references. We watched and rewatched a mountain of films – dozens of them: Peckinpah, Ford, Hawks, Hellman, and love stories like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Altman’s Fool for Love, and many others. Matteo and Alessio approach cinema without fear of echoing it, without the presumption of doing something new, and with the sole desire to make “cinema” – to find the right recipe for something moving, with the characteristics of the films they love. Testa o croce isn’t a spaghetti western – nor do I think it tries to be – though inevitably it references the genre. I’ve read reviews that associate it with that tradition, but there’s very little of the Italian western in our references or in the film itself. We drew much more from the American western than from the Italian one. What we really did was connect with Italian history, observing it from an unexpected perspective. The challenge was to make a western set in Italy at the end of the Risorgimento.
It’s a story set in Rome, in the Roman countryside. Nature has a powerful visual impact on your work and on the film itself. Tell us about this aspect, because it’s intriguing: when watching the film, you’re in Italy, yet it doesn’t feel like Italy – it’s an unfamiliar version of the country. And this western isn’t dusty and desolate like the classic westerns of our imagination, but muddy, swampy, green…
Exactly, that makes it clear that this isn’t a spaghetti western. The characters move within Italy during that historical moment. They set off from Rome and travel south, on the run. The marshlands were already in the screenplay. Matteo and Alessio had conceived a journey towards the south in search of a mythical ship bound for America. I suggested the places of my childhood, where I grew up – Sabaudia, Latina, the Agro Pontino. At the beginning of the 20th century, that area was an immense swamp, an inhospitable place plagued by malaria. The few souls who lived there inhabited the Lepini Mountains, while the lower part, near the sea, was overrun by swamps and mud. For months, during the long gestation of the film, I travelled around my area looking for places that still retained that ancient landscape. I found some, photographed them, and showed them to Matteo and Alessio. The proposal gradually took shape, until it became the actual setting of the film. Landscapes are very important to us; we treat them almost as characters. Having something from my childhood in the film, photographing those places, was moving for me, but above all, they had to serve the story. The search was long, because there are no longer many areas that are not urbanised. Fortunately, the Circeo Park in Sabaudia and the Pantanello Park in Ninfa still preserve the Pontine Marshes as they were before reclamation. My family and friends helped me. It was a very meticulous search even before the location manager, Elena Baschieri, officially joined the project. When she came on board, Elena made everything possible and found other wonderful locations, such as the mountainous area near Carrara, the setting for Buffalo Bill. Each place is a narrative element, both in Santino and Rosa’s love story and in Buffalo Bill’s parallel journey. The landscapes of Buffalo Bill evoke American monumentalism, while Rosa and Santino’s journey unfolds through a rural Italian world.
The two worlds eventually meet, but let’s not give too much away…
They meet because Rosa’s desire – her wish to escape, to reach America, to seize her own chance – leads her into this second world. The film builds an imaginative journey in which the landscape carries a narrative weight, not necessarily tied to the sequence of events, but rather to the unfolding of emotional states.
There are many western elements – the conflicts, the horses, the guns, the explosions, thetrain robbery. But more than the genre itself, it’s the spirit of the western that interested us. ‘the train robbery. What struck me most, though, is the swamp scene, where the two characters first connect. They get dirty, step into the swamp – it’s a beautiful scene.
There’s a huge story behind that sequence, both logistical and creative. We wanted to shoot the swamp scene in the Circeo Park, in the Verdesca pools, where at certain times of the year a real swamp forms. Six months earlier, during our location scouting, it was quite dry; three months later, when we went back, there was water. Visually it was fascinating – trees submerged like in a pool filled with trees, an extraordinary place. But by mid-September, as we approached the shoot, the water had disappeared; we had already realised a month earlier that this would happen and were looking for a solution, but finding a swamp is very difficult. Even the Pantanello Park, drained after the August drought, had no water left. We had to reinvent everything. What I find interesting in the process of making a film is adapting to nature. While visiting a place near Ninfa, a beautiful botanical park, we saw a river. It was supposed to be a small scene in the film, a brief moment in their journey. Looking at it – rather desperate, with no other chance of finding a swamp and on the verge of changing all the locations drastically – we said to ourselves: “From the right perspective, this could look like a swamp, even though the water is crystal clear and the nature lush.”
The magic of cinema.
It was a swamp that suited the story perfectly – it conveyed the feeling of a constructed place. That river, in fact, has an almost scenic architecture, and as we moved forward in preparation, we realised it matched the idyllic moment Rosa was experiencing: a foul, dangerous place that appears alluring, reassuring. Love changes the way you see things; in that scene, Rosa initially feels in danger, afraid, but the idyll of love, her connection with him, transforms everything.
I loved that sequence, that scene, because in the mud you see the magic, a new gaze, the life that could begin between them. Something starts from there.
It’s as if Rosa were living her dream. That’s what happens when you fall in love – even the most trivial things seem wonderful when you’re in love. With the person you love, complicated things become simple. It’s a western where the main character is a woman. There are other westerns with female co-protagonists, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman, but here the point of view belongs to Rosa. Telling a western through a woman’s eyes creates something different; the traits of the traditional, always masculine western are lost. The feminine is traditionally linked to the unconscious, to the surreal, to imagination. Rosa creates and shapes her own story, and reality slowly turns into something magical, closer to the substance of dreams.
While on one hand there are surreal moments and a western storyline, on the otherhand the way the film is shot feels, if you’ll allow the term, realistic. I’d perhaps call it a kind of magical realism. The strong sense of reality one perceives may depend on the ‘having been shot on 35mm? We feel close to these characters; they don’t seem ““digital”. How did you approach the project from a technical point of view?
With Matteo and Alessio, we started from something simple: the kind of cinema we love belongs to the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – whether American, Italian, German, French, or otherwise. That world was shot, built and conceived on film, and it represents the foundation of our taste. We chose to make a film the way our reference directors used to. I wanted to do it almost with the same tools – it may sound exaggerated, but it’s quite concrete: certain tools force or allow you to work in a specific way. Shooting on film (ARRICAM LT and ARRI 435 for 35mm, and ARRI SR3 for 16mm) not only gives a certain chromatic quality, but also imposes its own discipline. I wanted a film made without using modern tools – by that I mean anything that would influence the image. But I admit I wasn’t entirely consistent with this “dogma”! (smiles) For logistical and budget reasons, to be honest, we also shot some parts digitally – mainly in scenes that required multiple cameras. I don’t like operating when there are several cameras; I prefer someone else to do it so that I can watch and evaluate the images. You were there too – you shot the opening title sequence as the second unit – along with Riccardo Porfirio and Stefano Lombardo.
But you operated the camera as well. It’s a film of static, still shots – there are no virtuoso movements.
There’s no virtuosity, I agree – and yes, I was behind the camera. Most of the film was shot in S35mm, and the parts not involving Rosa were shot in S16mm, as if the real world were more grainy, tactile, rough, while Rosa’s world, as you said, was tangible yet made of the substance of imagination – that material lightness and those soft tones you find in the paintings of Previati or Morbelli.
Did you match the digital footage to the look later, in post-production?
Yes, they were adjusted to match the look of the story. Digital doesn’t have its own identity. I like to compare it to a box of light: some hold more light, others less, but every digital camera is a container that, as far as I’m concerned, needs to be transformed into something tangible, something that comes closer to your own taste.
Did you shoot with the Venice 1 or the Venice 2?
With both. We had a backup camera, a Venice 2, for scenes we couldn’t shoot on film. Sometimes we used two Venice 1s, but essentially, both were employed.
About the opening titles, I know you wanted a particular treatment – they’re in black and white, evoking other worlds.
The film-out is nothing more than what used to be done to bring films to cinemas before the DCP. Even digital films were printed on film stock. The section of the opening titles we shot contains the Wild West Show summarised in a few images: the battle between Native Americans, Americans, and Union soldiers, and the presentation of Buffalo Bill. We conceived it as if it were archival footage. There are real films of Buffalo Bill, and at first we considered using them. Then, as the idea evolved and with the actor John C. Reilly, we decided to recreate that imagery through fiction while keeping an archival tone, in black and white, as if it were a rediscovered film. It was not meant to be explicitly archival, but to evoke it, within the framework of an invented story. Together with Nazareno Neri, the colourist I have worked with for years, we tried various solutions, but the digital tests were unsatisfactory. So we did a test at Augustus Color with Alessandro Pelliccia, and it proved interesting. I had wanted to try this system for a long time, but we couldn’t do it on black-and-white film stock, so we made a recording of the digital image onto 35mm film, yet that still wasn’t enough to achieve the effect we wanted. I didn’t want to add digital grain — it would have been pointless. To obtain an organic grain, we had to print on a smaller portion. After several tests we found a compromise, around 21–23mm, which had the right kind of grain. Then, together with Nazareno, we transformed it back into black and white.
There’s a theme that emerges in the film: theunpredictability. Was there anything unpredictable in the way you approached the project?
Unpredictability is a theme that runs both through the film and behind the scenes. Testa o croce is certainly the most important production we’ve taken on, in terms of budget, cast, and story, and unpredictability has accompanied the entire process, right up to completion. It stems from the constant need to confront the possibilities available, transforming what’s written on paper into something achievable. Our creative approach is about adapting to circumstances, knowing how to turn the original idea into something different when it’s built in reality, shaped by the elements that come into play. A film has its own life, like a child: you “conceive” it, but then it grows on its own, becoming something that, even though you’ve created it, has a life of its own. That life is made up of events, of what happens to it. The film changes in unexpected ways, and I’ve learned – or rather, I’m learning – to make the most of those changes. More than any other, this project involved a strong element of improvisation. Although carefully prepared, we let ourselves be guided by instinct. Some scenes were shot purely on impulse, almost invented the day before, because the characters kept evolving, becoming more and more real. Matteo and Alessio make the most of whatever opportunities nature, the story, or the preceding scenes offer in the moment.
Did you shoot in sequence?
As much as possible. Benedetta Barroero, the assistant director, made a huge effort to let us shoot in chronological order. We managed it partly, in blocks.
The film premiered at Cannes and Locarno, and now it will continue to live and evolve through its encounter with audiences.
Now it will live its most complex life.
What do you take away from this film?
It brought me growth. Every film represents a part of my life. I associate each film I contribute to with a chapter of my own story. This one helped me grow, understand, and overcome a pain. It’s an important film for me, one I’m deeply attached to. I put so much of myself into what I feel I know how to do best. It’s my way of expressing myself through a language different from writing or words—which aren’t really mine—or, if you like, of freeing myself from the frustration of not knowing how to paint.
The film has just been released. What would you say to people to encourage them to go and see it?
I’d say people should go and see Testa o croce because it contains a whole universe of passion for cinema and the desire to tell a story about Love—with all its great emotions, struggles, and the triumph of desire. But I find it hard to explain why one should see a film; it all depends on personal experience. A film might mean nothing to some and a great deal to others. I’m curious to know what it will stir in people. It’s an attempt to communicate something, and the audience’s response tells you whether you’ve succeeded—whether what you express resonates with others. Beyond all that, it’s a fun film! The films I love are those that make me think, cry, and laugh at the same time. Testa o croce is a small moment of life that I hope will leave something inside.
Thanks Simone.
