Interview by Silvia Tarquini
The interview is part of the Casa Chiaroscuro Venezia 82 project. A project that brings a team to the Venice Film Festival to create content for 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, to discover new works and emerging talents, to reconnect with and meet in person the great masters of cinematography, and to follow and support the successes of its members. 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 are deeply grateful. Special thanks also go to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia for providing images of the works created by Simone Sadocco during the three-year Cinematography course.
Our warmest congratulations to you, Simone, and to director Nicolò Folin, for the short film Kushta Mayn, la mia Costantinopoli., produced by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and competing in the Orizzonti Shorts section at the Venice Film Festival. The short film is set in Venice, which also connects us to your roots. Which part of Veneto are you from?
I am originally from Solesino, a small town in the Euganean Hills, not far from Venice.
Could you tell us what, in the environment where you grew up, influenced your path towards cinema and, in particular, towards cinematography?
Since childhood, I have always been fascinated by the magic of light, by that feeling you get when a bulb lights up. It’s something I feel is innate. My father wasn’t a photographer, but he always took a lot of photos of me, and I believe that’s where it all began. I have a vivid memory of the flash, that powerful light that always enchanted me. As a child I used to say I wanted to be a magician; once my father gave me a watch, I was 4 years old, and told me that with it I could control the light. He took me into a room and I, holding the watch, made a gesture and the light magically turned on or dimmed (behind me, he was holding the dimmer remote). From that little family trick grew a curiosity that never left me: every luminous atmosphere fascinated me. I remember visiting my grandfather, in an old house where my great-grandmother, already a centenarian, also lived. I would enter on autumn afternoons in Veneto: outside the fog, the sun already set, the environment bluish, and inside only the wood stove burning with an intense red glow. My grandfather smoked and my mother, as throughout my childhood, read me fairy tales, poems and nursery rhymes. I was immersed in an enchanted world. Later my father gave me coloured bulbs, and even a curtain, because my dream was to do theatre. I would spend hours in the garage with that little curtain, switching lights on and off and moving them around… I did everything myself: I wrote, prepared the scene, set it up and then performed. My parents were the audience. I remember the frustration of not being able to achieve what I saw in films. My father told me: “Do you know how many people work to make a film?” That sentence sparked the question in me of what a film really was. From then on I started watching the behind-the-scenes even before the films themselves. I would observe how things were done and began to imagine. Later I studied something completely different. I attended a classical high school, but even there my final thesis connected all the subjects to light, through a small photo album I had created.
The curtain, the theatre, the lights with their power to transform atmosphere and imagination, and your sensitivity towards your grandparents are all elements – clearly deeply autobiographical – that you brought to the screen in your collaboration with Sony, the short film Dear Grandma. for which you handled both direction and cinematography. The slightly vintage aesthetic of the FX2 camera seems to have helped you give the film a tone that is both fairy-tale-like and natural…
I wanted to capture the sense of cinematic craftsmanship and of performance in general, which for me, as you’ve understood, is also something deeply personal.
But let’s move on to your training. What were your first concrete steps?
My first approach was with the camera. My father had a digital camera that he guarded jealously and didn’t want me to use. So, secretly, with my mother’s complicity, I would take it at night to shoot. I had no subjects, I couldn’t go out, and one of the first photos I took was a self-portrait. From there grew a strong passion for self-portraits, which allowed me to look at myself from the outside, to reflect on who I was, on what my passions and identity were. Over time I began to study photography and framing on my own, and then I gathered the courage to ask my father to lend me the camera. From that moment on, together with him, I nurtured that passion.
Did you attend a photography school?
At first no, no technical school. I was 13 or 14 when I first picked up a camera. At the beginning I photographed anyone: friends, girlfriends. Living in a small town in the Euganean Hills, I had to look for subjects, often natural ones, or move around nearby. I was surrounded by medieval settings, with castles and picturesque villages: all it took was going out on my bike with a backpack to find atmospheres to explore. An elderly photographer from my town saw some photos I had taken to be printed and, moved, taught me the basic principles. Later, at university, I enrolled in Arts and Entertainment Techniques at Ca’ Foscari in Venice.
Is that a programme within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities?
No, of Cultural Heritage. There I had the chance to study the history of cinema, dance and photography, thus broadening my references and my outlook on the world of images. As a teenager I had already seen a great many films. At university I carried on. I owe a lot to my film history lecturer, Roberta Novielli, who was also my thesis supervisor. An expert in Japanese cinema, she encouraged me to widen my horizons. She made me see cinema from a theoretical perspective, right there in Venice, while I was dreaming of the Film Festival, which at the time felt out of reach.
And from university, how did you make your way to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia?
I used to photograph my friends, I loved art history and experimented with composition. When it came time to choose the subject of my degree thesis, I was undecided: I loved photography but I was also very interested in cinema. Roberta Novielli suggested that I combine the two fields, and that’s how my thesis was born: The relationship between cinema and photography: the director of photography. I traced the historical evolution of photography, from its roots in art and Aristotle’s early writings to the emergence of the figure of the cinematographer and the great contemporary masters. I focused in particular on Giuseppe Lanci AIC, now head of the Cinematography course at the Centro Sperimentale, whom I later had the honour and pleasure of having as my teacher. After graduating (with honours!), I told my supervisor that I wanted to become a cinematographer, and she replied that the deadline to apply to the Centro Sperimentale had just been extended at that very moment. I checked immediately: it was true. It felt like a sign. I applied and was admitted.
You graduated this year with Kushta Mayn, la mia Costantinopoli. What has the Centro Sperimentale given you? What are the most important things you have learned and will carry with you?
I remember very clearly the first day of interviews: I wasn’t scared, but rather excited and honoured to be in that place, because you immediately sense something magical and prestigious. My years at the Centro Sperimentale were both a duty and an honour: I devoted myself to giving my best and making the most of every opportunity I was offered. It is a place that provides endless chances to get hands-on with what truly interests and drives us. Entering the Centro and being able to experiment with projectors, to observe and understand light, was a gift from the very first to the very last day. And I hope to return there, as I recently did with a Summer School, where I found myself teaching. On the first day of the “introductory course” I asked an electrician to put a gel on the projector and he replied: “you go!” I went to place it and in that gesture I rediscovered the child in me who used to place fabrics over light bulbs to see the colour of light change. Twenty years had passed, and nothing had changed. The Centro Sperimentale was a home, thanks to my encounters with maestro Giuseppe Lanci, to whom I cannot express enough gratitude, and with Daria D’Antonio; she too has been, and still is, a guide: a beacon of light, both the light she brings to films and the light she radiates as a person. She supported me throughout my journey and accompanied me in my growth. And then the Centro gave me my classmates, all of whom had got there through a tough and lengthy selection process designed to uncover beauty. At the Centro, I also had the chance to meet the cinematographer I had dreamt of since childhood. As a child I loved Hocus Pocus, the Disney film set in 1693, with three witches brought back to life in Salem. It was the leitmotif of my childhood, I watched it over and over, it became my cult film. One day Giuseppe Lanci asked me: “Simone, would you like to interview Hiro Narita?” I was speechless: “Maestro, but he’s the cinematographer of Hocus Pocus!” It was incredible, it seemed unreal to meet in person someone who had signed the images of a film I had devoured as a child. I remember the emotion, my heart beating fast, and the gratitude. I was no longer just a student, but someone who could converse with a figure who had shaped his imagination. It was the seal of what the Centro Sperimentale represents: not just a school where you learn technique and experiment with light, but a place capable of opening unimaginable doors, where childhood dreams meet reality.
Did your relationship with Nicolò Folin begin at the Centro Sperimentale? Folin attended the same three-year course as you.
Yes. I immediately felt close to him, like someone from the family. Because when you arrive in Rome, a big city where so many things are happening and you’re surrounded by people you don’t know, you feel the distance from a small town in Veneto, where everyone knows who you are. With him I immediately sensed a bond. I’m used to observing, watching, picking up on feelings, and when I saw the short film he had submitted to enter the Centro Sperimentale, Andom a la guera, I realised there was something connecting us. Perhaps it was my passion for history and period drama, but not only that… That short was set in the Euganean Hills. Nicolò has Venetian roots: his grandparents are from Venice, he knows the dialect well, probably better than I do, and he spends a lot of time in Veneto. For that reason too, I developed a special interest in seeing what he would bring to light from that territory, because I admired, and still admire, his dedication to storytelling, to study, to the search for detail, and to his determination to be philologically accurate.
Had you already worked with Folin before Kushta Mayn?
Yes. Our first work together was an exercise, a short dialogue between two brothers. Destiny had it that our journey at the Centro ended with Kushta Mayn, la mia Costantinopoli, the story of two “brothers”, two friends. And before Kushta Mayn we made a documentary together, E fu mattina, also shot in Venice.
Venice again… Could you tell us something about this documentary?
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E fu mattina, documentary by Nicolò Folin, cinematographer Simone Sadocco. Stills
It was my first somewhat more structured exercise. It was important because it allowed me to sense the night-time atmosphere of Venice, so different from that of any other city and from what I had always seen during the day, since in the evenings I would return to my small town. The water, the reflections, the dark and solitary calli, lit only by a guiding lamp post and then immediately by darkness. E fu mattina tells the story of those who work when the city seems asleep, and this exploration opened me up to new atmospheres. It was as if our eyes were a library storing sensations and images: the fire of the furnaces, the coloured glass sparkling, the boundary between silence and the crowded city… For me it was an experiment, and at the same time a way of getting to know Nicolò better. During filming we stayed at his grandmother’s house in Venice, and that experience cemented a bond: for me, by now, Venice is inseparably tied to him. Every time I return I call him: “Shall we meet? Go for a walk?” That documentary was also a revelation in another sense: until then cinema had seemed distant, in Rome, in Hollywood; instead, it was also there, in Venice, so close… The project of Kushta Mayn was born from an idea by Nicolò. There had been some other proposals, but when he told me about this one I immediately said that the nocturnal world fascinated me enormously. I welcomed it as a gift to be seized. Perhaps it was precisely in that moment that I felt something binding me to Nicolò, not just professionally but in terms of sensibility: those affinities you don’t need to explain, because they reveal themselves. With Nicolò I began the Centro Sperimentale and with him I finished it, and who knows how many other adventures await us. I hope so, because working with him is a pleasure: he has a very critical eye, he is demanding, but he deeply understands photographic needs, a quality not common among directors, and, above all, he knows how to win people’s affection. It was incredible to meet a director whose dreams intertwined with my own.
After these profound premises, let’s come to Kushta Mayn, la mia Costantinopoli.
Nicolò first told me about it while we were shooting the documentary. He said: “You know, I have a story in mind set here, based on a real trial I discovered, about two friends who come to the city seeking help and hospitality.” I remember perfectly how fascinated I was by that story. I immediately replied that we had to shoot it and that it would be spectacular: I like to express my desires, because I believe that if you say them out loud, they can come true. I have a boundless love for history, and I was immediately eager to learn every detail of that trial. Nicolò set me a condition: “Simone, to tell this story I won’t need frills, lots of lights, or spectacular effects.” It was a challenge, because I love sparkle and spectacle. But a cinematographer, as I said at my CSC interview, must be polytropon, like Ulysses: multiform, able to take on the guise of a “cinematographer of the 1500s.” That meant giving up projectors and artifices, embracing radical simplicity. I asked him what kind of atmosphere he imagined: “I’d like the story to feel as if spied through the peephole of a door. That is, without seeing clearly: some parts will be dark, others will reveal only silhouettes, figures in motion. But whatever we manage to see, we will believe in completely.” From that suggestion I began my research, leafing through book after book of art history to find images that could correspond to that ideal peephole. Nicolò cared deeply that everything be lit by candles: almost entirely by candles, to give the actors the real sensation of being immersed in that atmosphere, with pupils dilated in the faint, flickering light, close to the experience of the 16th century. I used many candles, but of course also a few tricks of the trade: like a magician, I won’t reveal the secrets, but a few magical devices came into play. I worked side by side with the electrician, my colleague Giorgio Chiucchiù, who handled the candles: moving furniture, extinguishing, lighting, repositioning…
What were the pictorial references you were alluding to?
Venetian and Veneto painters. The starting point was Georges de La Tour, for the luminous derivation from a single source. But I also studied Ambrogio Benzone, especially for the proportions and dimensions of the subjects: by analysing 16th-century images I drew the macro-references on which to base myself. For example, one of the starting points was the life-sized image: the male figure as a reference for proportion. Another central theme was the gaze. We always sought to achieve close-ups with intense looks, because in the 16th century it was believed that sight conveyed energy and feelings – love and every other emotion. Together with the set designer Sofia Salomoni and Nicolò, we decided to include an authentic 16th-century mirror, round and convex – quoting Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait – which at the time was considered more of a malevolent than a benevolent symbol, as it was thought to create a connection with the afterlife, a gaze from beyond. The mirror appears in the final scene, at a moment of tension, to load the scene with symbolism. We worked a lot in this direction: luminous objects, images, hidden signs. Nicolò and I both love symbolism, subtexts, and whenever we could include them it was a triumph. Even the film’s opening, with one character carrying another in his arms, subtly recalls the Pietà. We often sought to convey symbolic meanings, through light, through images…
Can you share some details about the making of the film? The result is extraordinary. Did you have many resources?
Not at all, and there were many problems, as in every project. Solvable, but real: we didn’t have a genuine 16th-century monastery and had to combine locations and studio sets, real exteriors, fragments of corridors. It’s funny to recall that in the scene where Nicolò’s father – Venturo, who plays the monastery’s guardian – enters the catechumens’ room, the illuminated background that looks like a monastery was actually… the bathroom of the Centro Sperimentale, properly dressed. The small catechumens’ room was right in there. Even the entrance seen at the beginning and end was shot at the Centro Sperimentale, in the infirmary of the soundstage, while other corridors came from real locations. The final result was a collage: a patchwork of elements blending real places and disguised school spaces. A character could look out and step into a real location, continue on a studio set, and the reverse shot could show a reconstructed corridor. Spaces stitched together, often difficult for sound – Tommaso Libero Di Lorenzo worked a kind of magic for the direct sound – while managing dates, timing and budget. The challenge was to make it believable that everything took place in the same location. Thanks also to the support of the Latina Film Commission, we shot the exteriors in a monastery in Latina, with a courtyard carefully designed by the set designer. We faced many practical constraints: moving around, working hours, many actors to coordinate, historical costumes that required great care to be worn and adjusted precisely. But we were well organised, thanks to our production colleagues Aurelia Sofia Consarino, Andrea Greco, and Stefano Mastronardi.
The film stands out, beyond Folin’s direction and your beautiful lighting, for the extraordinary performances of Leo Folin, the director’s brother, and Hlib Tovstoluh. How did you work with them?
Innanzitutto ho dovuto spiegare come utilizzare le candele, come dovevano tenerle: una candela sollevata in un certo modo o tenuta troppo distante cambia completamente la luce su un volto. Bisognava che gli attori tenessero le candele vicino al volto per ottenere l’effetto giusto. Con Nicolò avevamo programmato la messa in scena nei minimi dettagli: abbiamo costruito una mappa in cui segnavamo chi si sarebbe mosso e verso dove. Io avevo elaborato una sorta di pre-light mentale: sapevo da quale punto sarebbe entrata la luce e come si sarebbe spostata con gli attori, dato che non potevamo permetterci una luce generica valida per tutto. È stato un lavoro di direzione della fotografia ma anche di collaborazione diretta con gli attori. C’è stato molto ascolto, soprattutto con Leo, il fratello di Nicolò. Sono andato più volte a trovarlo a Venezia, abbiamo fatto lunghe chiacchierate e passeggiate, l’ho osservato e studiato a fondo, quasi come un’intelligenza artificiale che mappa i dati. Mi piace vedere i volti degli attori prima delle riprese e capire come la luce si muove su di loro, perché questo influenza moltissimo la sensazione da comunicare: ogni profilo cambia in base a come viene illuminato, e sta anche a me scoprirlo in anticipo. Poi voglio dire che è stato un onore illuminare Roberto Citran. Un nome importante, e averlo sul set è stato fantastico. Anche lui è veneto, di Padova.
Congratulations then on the selection at Orizzonti, Venice 82, Simone. After this important milestone I imagine opportunities will open up. Do you already have projects in mind? Or other cherished wishes?
I wish our short film the very best, that it may find its own path and perhaps grow into a longer story, maybe two hours. A tale that will require many more candles, and I would be proud and honoured to light them. Showing what has been and what may come, whether from reality or imagination, as my mother says, they overlap in the red thread of life. I will always remain connected to the Centro Sperimentale, and I will be ready to offer my service in any form, because it has given me so much and shaped me. As for new projects, there are things moving and moving me. I am curious to see what the future holds; I would love to tell small local or urban stories as well as to travel far, physically and through imagination. To discover new worlds… While preserving that sense of wonder and amazement I feel every time a project is proposed to me, a feeling that never changes.
Grazie Simone.
