Michele, how did you create the very first shot in the film, that we're about to see?
It was created with a special lens called Innovision that allows you to film objects close up.
Considering the film is called 'Dellamorte Dellamore'...
It seemed relevant to start from inside death...
And then reveal our character.
This first scene was taken from a scene in the book...
Only it wasn't right at the start of the book...
And it immediately gave you this sense of routine.
The fact that we see someone on the phone, someone knocks, and then he shoots him...
It gives you a little energy... Not surreal...
It's almost like a parallel universe.
Yes, exactly, we immediately enter this character's universe...
And he's precisely that; he's a character.
And we're also showing you his daily life...
This guy who lives in a cemetery. He lives there because he's the caretaker.
It was Tilde Corsi's idea to make a film based on Tiziano Sclavi's 'Dellamorte Dellamore'.
Her son Andrea was also responsible in some way...
He brought the book to school, to read in the library...
Tilde was called in to see the headmistress...
Because some parents of children who had borrowed the book...
Had complained, saying the book wasn't suitable.
- It was shocking. - It was shocking...
Tilde read the book and thought it would make a great film.
She wasn't a producer at that time, and she tried pitching it to a list of producers...
To get the film made, but no one was interested.
So she turned to me...
I was already an established screenwriter...
And also to you, because she knew you...
And she knew we had worked together on 'The Sect'.
We met up, and we decided that one option...
Perhaps the only option to make this film...
- ...was to produce it ourselves. - Self-produced.
So, we set up a production company...
We started to discuss the film on an artistic level...
At the same time, we started trying to raise the money to make it.
We asked Conchita Airoldi and Dino Di Dionisio to work with us...
Who were experienced producers...
And they came on board to help us in our first experience as producers.
That was how the film came to be.
Then we tried contacting Rupert Everett...
Because he was the legitimate owner of his image...
Because Dellamorte Dellamore was Dylan Dog's father.
You could call it issue zero, it was the start of the series.
And, precisely... Legitimately...
He was surprisingly enthusiastic about the project...
Perhaps because it was a period when he wasn't so much in demand...
He came from the production of "Tikhiy Don"...
A television series shot in Russia. It was Sergei Bondarchuk's last film...
But it never got released because of legal problems...
We're not quite sure what.
But the interesting thing is that Rupert became very enthusiastic about the film...
Reading the script, talking to you...
- He was extremely committed to it. - Yes, he even waited until we were ready...
And he turned down other work.
But he didn't know the image of 'Dylan Dog' was based on him.
He had absolutely no idea.
He found out after we started shooting the film...
And he probably would have asked us for more money if he had known earlier.
No, I'm joking.
I must say he really got involved with the production...
And also for a very low fee.
I'm going to talk about my role as the scriptwriter for a moment...
It was a very laborious process...
Because, after having spoken at length with Michele...
I remember I locked myself away for the entire month of August...
And I attempted to write this film which had a fundamental problem...
That is, it didn't have a plot.
- It didn't have a recognisable story. - It was episodic.
Yes, it was lots of episodes put together...
In a book where each chapter was a contained story...
So I found it very hard to create a narrative arc...
That was logical and consistent...
In fact, I don't think I succeeded!
It doesn't have a logical and consistent narrative...
But I must say that the month I spent locked away with Sclavi's book...
I realised I had to imbue everything with Sclavi's style.
70% of the jokes in the film are straight out of the book...
But I came up with the other 30%
Imitating Sclavi's style, form, poetry...
And bitter-sweet view of life.
That key we just saw...
I was very moved when I visited a prison...
And I saw the keys they use to lock up the prisoners...
And I had an exact reproduction made, because I think anyone who recognises it...
Will see it...
And it locks our character in a more cryptic world.
There's only one cemetery in the film...
But it's actually two cemeteries.
We used this cemetery for the day scenes...
- Where was it, Michele? - This one was in Carsoli, in Abruzzo.
I just want to say one thing about what we talked about earlier...
That the film... Even viewing again after some time...
It really is imbued with Tiziano's universe...
Just looking at every shot...
I can really see my passion for his comic, 'Dylan Dog'.
Watching it again, I noticed how respectful we were of the source material...
Also the cartoon style.
I like to think that, in some way...
In some way we were successful.
Also the rhythm of the editing resembles panels in the comics...
- Yes. -...in many scenes.
I wanted to talk about the two cemeteries...
I remember we made very few changes to this cemetery.
- Yes, very few. - Very few...
- Whereas the nocturnal cemetery... - Yes, the one you see in the titles...
And the one you'll see in the night scenes.
That was in Guardea, in Umbria...
In a real deconsecrated cemetery.
The idea of working in real cemeteries for ten weeks...
We thought it would be quite unsettling at first...
But, in the end, we were in perfect harmony with the locations.
When we found the deconsecrated cemetery in Guardea...
It had to be cleared first, we had to remove all the bones...
Which then had to be put back.
And Antonello Geleng, the production designer, built a set of graves...
Based on your very detailed instructions.
Yes, there as well...
We really wanted the cemetery to look exactly as you see it now...
It's an extremely peaceful place, a green place...
Where there's nature, and where nature even exceeds itself.
And this is the world inside Francesco, it's the world he lives in...
In this almost adolescent role.
He's really just a big kid...
He doesn't want to grow up, he doesn't want to leave his garden...
His enchanted world.
You've just reminded me of the meaning we wanted to convey in the film...
Even though the character of Francesco is evidently thirty year old.
But, in reality...
The entire film is about the dreams and fears of an adolescent who doesn't want to grow up.
- Absolutely. - The sense of death, of eroticism...
His fascination with this woman.
- The game. - The game...
It's an extremely adolescent game.
I remember when the film was released overseas...
We were accused of making a misogynistic film.
There's the stereotyped image of this evil woman...
But this isn't our vision of women, it's Francesco's vision...
So much so, that all the women in the film are played by the same actress...
So they are clearly this character's projections.
What you are seeing is an office in the outside world...
It's a little surreal...
With all this bureaucracy, even the opening hours, as you can see, from 10 to 12...
In the age of absenteeism...
It has an almost silent atmosphere, pointless... nothing, almost.
He's there to collect his wages...
They pay him to do his job, and so they should.
The adult world outside is extremely ridiculous, right?
It's ridiculous here, the character of the mayor is ridiculous...
The character of the chief of police is ridiculous...
Absolutely.
Whereas the internal world, without adults...
Dellamorte's world... It's a delirious world...
But it's also extremely poetic...
- Romantic. - Yes, extremely romantic.
I'd like to say a few words about the actor who played Gnaghi...
His friend... This kid...
He is actually an excellent musician...
He's the front man in a French band called Les Garcons Bouchers
He had already worked on a few films...
And the quest to find Gnaghi was very long...
I must say, we found him thanks to our co-producer...
Michelle Costagavras, Costagavras' wife...
Who found this actor in France. Because, we had chosen Rupert...
We had chosen Anna Falchi, after a lot of auditions...
Because she bore the closest resemblance to the woman in Sclavi's comic.
Yes, and at that time, Anna Falchi was an emerging star...
- But she wasn't considered... - No, she had made two films...
- She made one... - The famous one by Marco Risi.
And she did that advert by Fellini, the famous one set on a train.
She had the perfect look for the film...
And out of the three characters she plays, she also dubbed the first character.
...in Italian. But the other two were dubbed...
Because we wanted there to be a slight difference between them...
At least in her voice.
You had to re-write the inscription above the door In this cemetery
Yes, you see it at the start...
You can see the inscription in many cemeteries...
Obviously, it means; "We shall return, We shall rise again"
It seemed appropriate for what we wanted to say in the film...
It's the guiding principle...
An underlying sense of what is to come...
We're all waiting for this famous idea of the universal judgement.
This is the first scene in the ossuary. Sergio Stivalleti built the ossuary, right?
We used the real ossuary in Guardea cemetery...
And some of the bones were removed...
And we added some more things to get the shot we wanted.
Also to show death all tangled up with nature...
In fact, our aim was to show these skeletons...
...tangled up in the rocks and in the roots of the trees...
With all these putrid rags, that might have belonged to a leper.
This is the first scene where we see this union of love and death...
Namely, the sensuality of the concept of death...
...that is typical of Sclavi's book.
- It's there in the film title. - Absolutely, yes...
The idea to use water, for example...
Because I liked the idea that before Anna enters this place...
She was very hesistant to enter at first...
But from the moment she sees this place...
She can't wait to get stuck in...
She's very precise, she takes off her shoes...
She enters with a certain nonchalance.
This is a reference to a painting by Magrite.
Exactly, a painting by Magrite called 'The Lovers'.
But this wasn't our idea, it was already in Sclavi's comic...
And it's his reference.
Some critics accused us of making too many references.
But I really think with 'Dylan Dog'...
Its strength lies in this union of humour with a dash of culture...
You can learn a lot from a film.
Sclavi constantly makes these references in his work.
Yes, he's a great assembler.
And there are elements we mentioned earlier that recur in Sclavi's work.
The fact that you're describing a character who lives in this reality...
Who's totally unaware of what's happening around him...
Almost as though it's normal for him...
I think it's a good starting point for a story that's so completely insane and absurd.
This is the start of the scene with the will-o'the-wisps...
That should appear now.
We used little balls made of cotton...
Because we still didn't have much of a budget...
I might have done this scene optically if I were to shoot it now.
This was all done live, without computers.
This shot was done with a...
We shot the background, then we wound the film back...
And then we hired these fishermen...
We had fishing rods with wires and cotton balls...
...that were soaked in a flammable liquid that gave off this blue-green colour.
- And 'The Isle'? - That was another reference...
Let's say it's by Soavi more than anything else...
It's the 'Isle of the Dead' by Böcklin, a painting I really love...
It seemed nice to put into this film...
Actually, the original script I wanted would have cost the earth...
- But we didn't let you! - Reduced to a water feature.
It still works.
Going back to the will-o'the-wisps that will return to interrupt them during their love scene...
I should mention that we decided very early on...
...that all the special effects in the film had to be done live.
It was an artistic decision...
But, in reality, it was also taken...
Because we just didn't have the money to use computers...
We did get a few quotes for some optical effects...
Digital didn't exist then, or 3-D as we know it...
- Or it was something very new. - But I remember, at some point...
We made a stylistic decision...
It was pointless trying to use a bit of both...
We preferred to get everything as we were filming it...
It's almost theatrical.
Although you can see a few wires here... But the background...
We didn't care...
We tried to hide them with the lights.
Yes, we used a special lens.
But this was also a very subtle homage...
To certain Italian horror films from the 1950's and 60's...
- Films by Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda. - Yes, that's how we work in Italy...
We have always made do with our own home-grown techniques.
At the end of the day, they work.
The love scene between the two of them, that's about to get complicated...
We shot it in a studio.
We shot it in a studio so as not to disrespect the dead.
And we rebuilt a part of this cemetery in a theatre.
Yes, we spent a long time discussing the problem of the morality of the film...
We knew the film was going to be extremely violent...
But we spent a lot of time deciding if something was really necessary or not...
We only filmed what was necessary.
But this is something we'll talk about later during the scene of the massacre...
Yes, but our aim was to make a film that was above all cynical and amoral.
Yes, the film is cynical and amoral.
Sclavi's world really is the polar opposite of ours...
So it would have been foolish to do it any other way.
But what really defuses everything is the presence of humour that lightens the mood.
In fact, a number of fans criticised the film...
Saying it wasn't as scary as our previous films.
But why isn't the film scary?
Because it's the complete opposite of a normal horror film...
Because horror films are fundamentally based on a fear of death...
The fear that the character, or characters, are going to die...
The characters are always scared of dying...
But this film takes a more existential approach.
It's a film about the fear of living.
Dellamorte is afraid of living, he's afraid to leave his tiny micro-cosmos...
...of mortuaries and graves. He's afraid of the outside world.
An adolescent who's afraid to grow up, who's afraid to face himself...
So his problem isn't death, his problem is life.
In fact, this is what we would say in interviews...
Thanks also to Sclavi's input, we subverted the genre somewhat...
It isn't the fear of dying, it's the fear of living.
As far as the comedy in the film is concerned...
This is a problem we discussed a lot...
I remember when I was writing it, and when we were shooting...
We always asked ourselves...
How can we maintain a balance between serious drama and comedy?
In fact, we would always say...
Nothing is shot, nothing is performed...
As though it were a comedy.
- Absolutely. - The comedy had to be indirect.
Absolutely.
It's a bit like English humour...
It's the absurdity of it all that makes you laugh.
Here we see Anna, who has been bitten by her ex-husband...
And she's going to be infected...
So Francesco knows he'll have work to do.
This is one of the more romantic moments in the film.
Yes, also the ending is more dramatic...
In the last ten minutes...
When our protagonists realise there is an outside world.
There's a shot of a pistol here.
They were barn owls LIPU had given us to film...
They were fed...
He was worried someone was going to steal the doormat.
This is the foreign Inspector, played by Michael Knox.
The film was shot in English because...
Being the lead actor, Rupert Everett is English...
There was no way we could shoot it in Italian.
It wasn't a decision made for overseas markets...
- We had no choice. - The film had to be different...
And we didn't even respect its Italian nationality...
A lot of horror films are shot in English with English or American actors.
The dialogue is obviously in an absurd vein...
Although they're taking it very seriously.
They're talking about very serious things...
And it's hard to see that we're trying achieve a comic effect.
Everyone here is...
People usually run for cover when it starts raining...
They're all in a hurry...
But Francesco loves the rain because it's all part of the malaise.
This is the ossuary...
And there's this fly that we made out of black thread...
And transparent wire, that's almost invisible...
And some real flies... The assistant director found a dunghill...
But he didn't find very many because it was Winter...
They had survived because of the heat from the cows.
This is the famous joke about reading...
- "I've only read two books in my life..." - Yes...
"One of them was the telephone book, and I never finished the other one."
I remember that this scene in the ossuary...
At least when I was writing it, but when you shot it...
It reminded me of certain Japanese horror films...
Especially a film called 'Kwaidan'...
There's this sense of solemnity in this scene.
It was impossible to shoot this scene as it was written it in the script...
Because, when he shoots her...
The bullet was meant to hit the fly in close up...
- That had caused a lot of problems. - Yes, yes...
But we never shot it. You used a lens by Mario Bava here.
That was a lens Lamberto lent me...
And it was a water glass lens made by his father, Mario.
The influence of Italian horror films from the 1950's and 60's is very evident.
As you said, this is a solemn scene...
Because he knew she would come back sooner or later.
So he knows very well he has to kill her...
Because, obviously, she would become a zombie.
Sergio Stivalleti created a wound on Anna's head...
And that was achieved by pulling a wire.
If I'm not mistaken, this is the only slow motion shot in the film.
Yes, this was shot 120 - 150 frames a second...
To give you an idea of this burial being final.
We were running very over schedule.
Yes, it was an extremely complicated shoot.
Complicated, because...
When we tried to raise financing for the film...
In the end we got a sum, but it wasn't the sum we were looking for.
We didn't have enough money, so we had to decide...
If we were going to make the film, or not?
And, bravely, we decided to do it.
What's more we also shot the film in a season where...
I think it was October or November...
- We shot the film in winter. - It was the middle of winter...
And most of the film is set at night.
It was raining continuously, we were working in the mud...
It was a difficult shoot.
This was the hardest scene to shoot in the entire film because...
I don't know how to say it...
In order to get the outside world looking so unpleasant...
We used a terrible hand-held camera to make the audience feel uneasy...
It's fragmented... All this uncertainty...
In a sense, it's the only really bad scene in the film.
Yes, it was a conscious decision...
But it seems to have gained value over time...
Watching it now, it's right that it's so jerky, uncertain, and strange.
This is the start of Gnaghi's love story with the mayor's daughter...
This was one of the things I enjoyed most.
This pretty girl was...
We needed a fourteen year old, we held auditions in schools...
Fabiana Formica.
The poor girl really suffered in the scene where she was locked in the coffin.
Her mother was crying.
That was her real mother!
She had such a fright when she saw her in the coffin.
Gnaghi's reaction here, when he vomits on the girl...
Perhaps not so directly, but it was already in Sclavi's book...
It became... Let's call it a gag...
I've seen it copied a lot in many things...
Very recently in 'South Park'...
There's a character who vomits on girls when he falls in love.
- We were ahead of our time. - This is the piazza in Guardea...
That was close to our cemetery...
I remember this was the very first thing we shot...
On the first day of work.
And Rupert really was our starting point.
Rupert was very important for this film, because, I remember...
When we were still at the script writing stage...
After the first draft, which is quite close to the film...
The only thing we changed was the ending...
We'll talk about that later.
But this was the script, even if we did change a few things.
And at a certain point we started to panic, me, you, Tilde...
Because we realised we were making a film without a strong plot....
A film that had another kind of appeal...
And we became almost frighteningly productive...
I remember we prepared a second version of the film, that was more of a giallo...
- Where you had to guess who the killer was. - Yes.
And when Rupert read it, he said: "I wouldn't dream of it..."
"We can make that other film, that is a bit more surreal..."
"Which I find fascinating..."
"But I won't make this giallo."
- When he told us that... - He opened up our eyes...
Because he really was the guiding force.
Listen, Rupert's little house...
Dellamorte's house, was in Guardea cemetery...
Whereas Gnaghi's house, the area below...
We built it in a studio, but it's meant to be under his house...
In this little cemetery.
We wanted to give the impression that Gnaghi was a bit like his dog...
Francesco won't lower himself to living with the servants...
So he doesn't share the house. Gnaghi is downstairs in his cave...
In the cellar...
And Francesco hates television, while Gnaghi is a couch potato.
Yet there's a profound love between them.
Yes, precisely, but it's that love between...
How can I put it? It's undeclared, obviously...
So it's a love of tantrums, of conflicts...
The crash; You shot the crash after we had finished filming.
- With a reduced crew. - Yes, with a reduced crew...
But still in the same place where shot all these scenes, in Guardea.
I think that, these kids...
We're expecting something to happen to them...
In fact, I think the audience can't wait for something to happen.
I remember the crash was quite impressive.
This is the boy scout's funeral...
And I remember that up to now, the audience...
Especially when there were a lot of people...
They weren't sure which direction the film was going...
They didn't know if they were meant to be scared...
Or if it should be involving them on a deeper level...
Or if they were meant to laugh? But I remember...
By this scene, people started laughing...
When they saw all the coffins... Also, the song we chose...
It was a song from the boy scouts repertoire...
This is one of those scenes...
We didn't cut any scenes out of the film...
We just shortened some of them.
This scene was shortened a little...
I remember the argument between the girl and the mother of the dead motorcyclist...
We cut it a little, because you filmed them arguing with a hand-held camera...
And it seemed great when you were shooting it...
But it didn't work at all.
Yes, perhaps it was also a little repetitive.
Even now, watching the film again, I cannot remember at all...
Which jokes were from Sclavi's book, and which ones I invented, imitating Sclavi.
It's all mixed up.
Stivalleti had to redo her make-up a number of times...
I remember the first time he showed us...
She looked like she came straight out of an autopsy.
Yes, she had to be sewn up after the accident...
But I still wanted you to see her pretty young face...
So he had to make some subtle corrections.
Then there's this great character, this girl who...
She was hopelessly in love with the boy on the motorbike...
These love stories are all intertwined...
On one side you're seeing Gnaghi's love story with the dead girl...
And, at the same time, there's this love story here...
There's the shower, that is his point of cleanliness...
Where he would try to scrub off all this death on him.
Here we see Gnaghi, who is obsessed with these war news reels
We had a few problems here...
Because Dellamorte was supposed to shoot some children...
I remember.
- Yes, but we didn't shoot it. - No, we didn't...
But also the fact that the kids were meant to be zombies...
It was very amusing because they walked chattering their teeth...
Like castanets.
And then, when their heads exploded, they were obviously fake.
- We relied on the illusion. - Almost like they were made of earthenware.
In fact, here as well, it isn't frightening.
No, I remember the audience laughed a lot during this scene.
He remembers that he has to light the fire.
Whereas Gnaghi had headphones.
This was one of the more complicated scenes...
Because you wanted a lot of cuts.
Yes, it was complicated, it was a very small place...
And there were constant problems with the lighting...
So I couldn't shoot the film in little pieces...
I wanted to shoot the scene in sequence so I would have more control over it.
But, obviously, this required more time.
It's very dark here...
I was hoping you could see this huge heart he uses to kill the nun...
Unfortunately it's hard to make out, but it was an enormous bronze heart.
Yes, as he picks it up, it seems a little too light.
Yes, you catch a glimpse of it.
When I wrote Gnaghi's character...
His dialogue in the script was obviously just a grunt...
But I remember...
Next to each grunt, in brackets...
There was always the meaning of what he wanted to say.
So it was like he had a real script.
This is a shot from inside the television set...
Gnaghi's character is firmly established as a comic character here.
- We wanted them to live with a pig... - Yes.
And they would treat this pig like a dog...
To hunt out the returning zombies.
And we also ordered this pig, that was grown for us...
But due to time constraints we had to abandon it...
It should have been them two, with this pig on a lead...
...trying to sniff out the undead.
I remember that we spoke at length about the lighting in the night scenes...
Because, especially in horror films from the 1970's...
There was a tendency to shoot night scenes with a blue filter...
And this was done to accommodate the television airing of the film...
And blue held up better than black...
But we had decided that we wanted black nights.
- Black and white. - Black and white, yes...
But the darkness of the night had to be black.
In fact, all the night scenes are almost black and white...
- And red. - Yes, a dash of colour here and there.
This also created some notable complications with lighting.
We had to use an excavator to create this scene...
We built a huge tunnel...
And it was reinforced with poles...
And we used light wooden beams, covered in a grassy material.
Unfortunately, it had rained a lot...
So the bottom of this hole was full of mud...
And the motorcyclist had to, in some way...
Really break the wooden beams...
We built a special ramp for him to take off from...
It was almost comical...
Because, after three attempts this motorbike couldn't break the beams...
And it got stuck underneath.
It took us three days to get this shot of the motorcyclist rising out of the ground.
The moon you see as the motorcyclist is in flight is obviously fake.
Like all the moons in the film, they were made out of plexiglass...
Painted by Antonello...
Originally, there was a small sickle in the opening credits...
That was created artificially.
Nowadays that would be done on a computer...
But we shot everything live.
I remember it was very difficult here, in the cemetery...
It was cold and windy, and we couldn't control the fog...
We had these machines that ran on oil, creating this white smoke.
Because...
- The wind kept blowing it away. - Yes, either there wasn't enough...
It was hard to get the exact amount to create this smokey atmosphere.
We didn't have any problems finding mud because we had tons of it!
It rained continuously.
There was even a pilgrimage, after the film opened...
Of packed buses from Milan to Buffalora in the Lombardy region...
They were fans who went around looking for these places...
They had seen this cemetery in the film...
And a group of them made it to the cemetery in Buffalora...
But the caretaker told them it wasn't the one in the film...
And they were very disappointed. This even appeared in the newspapers.
To get this shot of the wing on the pistol...
We made a barrel that was five times larger than normal...
To make it stand out more.
To really get a nice angle...
- This one here. - Yes, this one is fake.
- Is it a replica of Dylan Dog's pistol? - It's an exact replica...
We gave it to Tiziano as a gift. It was a Bodeo...
The hero's famous pistol...
That he keeps forgetting.
I wanted to include a reference to Sergio Leone...
When he's preparing the bullets...
This cross he engraves on the casing...
So the bullet expands, it gets bigger...
And it makes a hole as big as an orange.
This is the first time in the film when Dellamorte realises he's killed a living being.
Yes, but he made a mistake...
- Yes, it was a mistake. - She was in his trajectory...
But she would have been infected because he was eating her.
This is a moment of reflection, when he realises he screwed up.
But also when he...
It's coming up now, where looks at the wound...
And he realises he shouldn't have killed her the first time round.
And this is the resolution of...
The violin was on loan from a show by Tadeusz Kantor's theatre company...
About the construction of musical instruments.
Here we have a real head, and a fake head...
Stivalleti made this beautiful head...
It was controlled with wires, it had a lot of cables...
And it was very manoeuvrable.
You used a lot of low angle shots for this scene.
Yes.
Yes, it's a classic technique.
There was this sense of the ground seen from below, and not from above...
Revealing the sky.
Yes, it's also the point of view of the dead.
You cut to the real head for the dialogue.
Did you bury her?
We created a special collar that was covered in grass...
With a prosthetic around her neck so it looked like her head was missing.
The things we did to keep her happy...
We cuddled her because she was hot, then she was cold...
She was uncomfortable...
We dug a hole around her, obviously...
And there were flies, too. They put a glucose solution on her hair...
- To attract the flies. - Yes, to attract the flies.
This was an idea that came to us while were shooting...
Seeing as Gnaghi is a musician.
This shot comes from a longer scene that wasn't used in the end...
Where Dellamorte is driving around at night, at the start of the film...
We filmed all night...
But due to a technical fault we lost all the footage.
We didn't lose it, we used the wrong film stock...
So we watched it, and there was nothing there.
This is almost the main point of the film; This moment of them living together..
And immediately after, she's going to return.
Dellamorte's real desperation will start.
This is a moment of them living together, where they're cooking a meal...
I never really liked this scene. I don't know why?
Perhaps because it occurs at moment in the film...
When you're still unsure of what direction it's heading in...
It's the only really slow moment in the film...
Because now it's the start of a new...
- ...a new chapter. - Yes.
The choice of his house...
The interior, these blue walls...
And a red curtain...
To add a tiny element of theatricality to his daily routine...
As though it were almost like a theatre set.
You already had some music in mind when you were shooting it...
It was very well done by Manuel De Sica...
But you initially wanted Tangerine Dream.
Yes, I wanted Tangerine Dream because...
Aside from the fact that I admire them a great deal...
And that they had scored a lot of films in the eighties...
They did a great score for Kathryn Bigelow's first film...
- ...'Near Dark'. - 'Near Dark'....
It was the atmosphere these musicians could bring to the film...
We also had some contact with them.
They wanted to do the film. They read the script, they knew you...
But they didn't have the time.
They were having problems with something else.
Philip Glass was another musician who inspired you.
I've used Philip Glass on a lot of films...
And also here, there are pieces that are clearly inspired by his work.
You worked hard to create the right atmosphere with Manuel.
We did it ourselves.
Our fake moons again.
Yes, it's a kind of globe, that looks like earth for a moment...
It's actually a fountain decoration.
This is her arrival, and I remember she was on a trolley.
Yes, we put her on a trolley, with the camera...
And there was a fan...
A fan to move the clothes on her back.
I remember it was very cold that night...
I must say Anna was very patient...
And cooperative.
I think it was very hard for her to do this, and also a big sacrifice.
There are all these elements of nature in her make-up...
We didn't talk about this very much at the start...
But all the zombies you see in the film...
They all have these kind of branches...
That derives from the myth of the mandrake.
Yes, from the research we'd done...
The various cemeteries, etcetera...
Mandrake is a magical element, that grows in cemeteries...
It has a very interesting history...
They say it grows in cemeteries, or where someone was hanged...
The mandrake is born from the sperm.
But we couldn't explore this too much...
Because we would have had to explain too many things...
But this idea that the plants are alive is still in the script...
That they're with the dead, in some way.
The other thing we wanted to do at the start...
But it was something else we had to abandon...
Was a railway line next to the cemetery...
At a fixed time, there would be a kind of earthquake...
Which was the train passing by.
There was this justification that the dead couldn't sleep peacefully...
...because these trains kept waking them up.
It annoyed them.
We had to abandon it because of logistical problems...
Also, the running time, and too many explanations.
The character's desperation here reminds me a little of Rupert's desperation...
He came to shoot a film for eight weeks and it ended up being eleven.
Especially the cold.
He had a house there, in Guardea...
But I remember he was very tired at the end.
Part of the problem is that was he in almost every scene...
Apart from maybe two or three...
Yes, he was exhausted...
He had enough of us.
It became very tiring for him.
But he was always extremely cooperative...
And he never upset anyone.
He's also a very likeable person...
And I think he's great in this film.
I think he really understood the character...
...of this adolescent adult.
He always found the balance between the humour and the drama.
Miss Chiaromondo is an actress called Claudia Lawrence, English...
She liked the idea that she would get worse each time we saw her...
First it was a walking stick, then she was on crutches, and now she has a walker...
Who knows where we'll see her next?
This was also quite an amusing scene...
Because the telephone directory is Francesco's...
- It's his bible. - His bible...
At the end of the day, it's the people, all these names written down...
Crammed onto these incredibly thin pages...
There are thousands of names.
An index of the living, that slowly becomes an index of the dead.
This idea of the telephone directory makes you think, it's great.
Here was see death... The death...
This was shot very traditionally, almost like in the seventies.
It was essentially a big puppet.
They were actually black sheets of paper...
Filmed in reverse, at 150 frames per second.
But the final look of Dellamorte is all down to Sergio Stivalleti...
Who was my assistant on Baron Munchhausen...
Which I worked on, as second unit director...
So it was a kind of homage.
This is more of his routine.
I was saying earlier...
- A homage to Sergio Leone. - A homage to Sergio Leone...
The cross on the bullets...
This scene was the most... How can I put it?
Most representative of what this story is about.
I'm not saying it's nice, but think about when you're on the phone...
Someone knocks on the door, you open it, and you shoot!
Again and again! Your friend's there with a wheelbarrow.
But by this scene you're certain this horror film isn't scary...
And you also realise this film doesn't have a plot...
- It's all about the routine. - Yes, yes.
The plot of the film is the routine, the boredom of life...
The impossibility of recovery, and the impossibility to escape this pain.
- Is this a dolly shot? - No, it's a steadicam...
Built by Nicola Pecorini.
It was a steadicam that you could rest on a dolly...
That carried it up.
This is the scene of the massacre in the town...
That caused a lot problems, because it was meant to be realistic...
He goes into town, he stops by the square, and he shoots at the kids...
But we had a lot discussions about this scene...
Let's just say it was the French co-producer...
Gavras, Costas' wife...
Who asked us to find a remedy for this very violent scene, that's almost gratuitous...
So we made a decision to mix it up a little...
So you're not really sure if it's a dream, or if it's happening for real.
Now we return to these thousands of names written down...
So there's this vague tone...
That was a decision we made while were shooting it...
Originally, it was meant to be extremely cynical and more realistic...
But we also realised that the film was aimed at an adolescent audience.
He makes that sound with his mouth, like a kid playing...
You see all these names, but they're no one...
And he's no one, because he's alone.
His name also appears at the end, so he's a victim of himself.
There was a phrase that closed this scene...
"Work gets me through the day."
That was already in Sclavi's book.
There's a continuity error here because he doesn't have the wound on his shoulder.
- We did discuss it. - We did, but we couldn't shoot it again.
Alfonsina Lettieri, the costume designer, played a joke on me here...
Along with Maurizio Millenotti...
I found out that for every week of filming...
They added a tiny cross to the one he already had around his neck...
So, one day, while I was filming something...
I noticed he had four crosses, and I had seen three the day before...
But I accepted this thing...
I thought it would be nice for the audience...
Sitting there, thinking; How many crosses has this guy got around his neck?
I think he has eight or nine crosses in one of the final scenes.
Why did they play this joke on you?
I think they were testing me, to see if I'd notice.
I also thought it was quite cryptic...
It's strange for the audience, first he has one or two, then five...
If you're really watching the film closely you can see it.
This is where the giallo part of the film begins...
The investigation into who was behind the massacre...
And you realise the massacre actually happened...
But I want to say that it was still handled very unconventionally.
Absolutely! It's a bit like a detective story in a comic.
There's this great shot of her head inside the television.
That globe of mirrors created a sort of disco effect.
Her father arrives now...
And I remember when the film came out...
Some people criticised the choice of Masciarelli as the mayor...
Because it seemed...
As he was a television comic, at that time...
It seemed like a choice that was in conflict with the rest of the film...
But it was actually a very precise choice...
Because the mayor had to symbolise political power in Italy...
Christian Democrat politics, let's be honest.
We wanted an actor who the least typically Italian...
So we had to use an actor who was known for comedy...
Because, at that time, the only films getting made were comedies...
And it wasn't even an Italian comedy anymore...
So the fact that he was famous on television...
...was an added bonus, looking at it critically...
Because the film also had a very subtle...
A subtle pretence of political allegory.
Yes, especially overseas...
They got the metaphor...
That a lot of strange things happen in Italy.
It seemed appropriate that the law be represented by a television comedian...
In fact, it's a choice I would make again, absolutely.
He's also the star of one of my favourite scenes in the film...
The meeting between him and the daughter.
I really like this scene because it's both the the height of horror...
- But also the height of comedy. - Sure, sure.
How did you get the shot of the head flying?
To get the shot of the head flying...
It was one of the fake heads built by Sergio Stivalleti...
There was a special telescopic stick behind it...
With a little man hiding behind it...
And the moment the head had to go flying towards him...
He just had to push this stick...
It was helped along by the wind, with this sail that moved...
And the rest of it, like the bite marks, they were obviously done with prosthetics.
We built an enormous mouth to get this shot from inside it...
The camera was inside this construction that simulated the mouth and teeth.
Here, the actor was actually holding the head...
And he operated it like a puppet.
Looking at it now, the effects are quite outrageous.
Yes, but it's all so fake...
That...
It's a grand guignol that...
Yes, but also to distance you from the realism.
Also at the time, we said...
That the film was inspired not only by Italian horror films from the 1960's...
But also by the theatre tradition of the grand guignol.
- Exactly. - These scenes of blood spraying...
- And the effects were... - A certain theatrical exaggeration...
In fact, those enormous holes in their heads are quite surreal.
You put them on top of the world here.
Yes, because there was this moment of tension between them...
Did you use a crane?
No, I had become a little fixated on showing these cypresses...
In fact, that's also why we chose these cemeteries...
You see those subtle, pointed, cypresses...
I wanted them in the shot...
So I made them go up a tower, ten metres high...
And contrary to what I was expecting...
Gnaghi climbed up very nimbly, while Rupert...
I didn't know he suffered from vertigo...
And he cursed me for the rest of my days...
Because I made him go up the tower.
But the idea was to get them in the shot.
We also made a shooting star but...
It came out very badly so we didn't use it.
And here we see her second character.
Yes, this closes a chapter in the story.
In fact, from this moment on, the film gets more realistic...
Let's say the zombies disappear at this point.
Yes, you could say that, exactly...
It's like a new regime has arrived.
There was a strange sense of normality before...
Even the things that happened in the cemetery...
But now the new mayor has arrived, who's regarded as more of an official type...
- He's almost a manager. - He's almost a manager...
Someone who comes from Milan, with his bodyguards...
He comes riding into town.
In fact, you can also hear helicopters on the soundtrack.
Yes, it's almost like the cemetery has been put under a magnifying glass.
And now his love story starts again...
- With... - He sees her again...
Now she appears as a secretary...
And we don't know if she's noticed him yet.
It's almost like a sophisticated comedy...
Between the two of them, with this story about impotence.
This theme was already in Sclavi's book...
Where he spreads a rumour in the village that he's impotent...
Something that isn't true.
And this is another extremely adolescent theme...
He's like an adolescent who is approaching manhood...
It's the start of his manhood...
And he chooses to say he's impotent...
Because being different means so much to him...
He wants to be different, no matter what.
This is another barrier between him and the outside world...
That he refuses to communicate with.
And the twist here is that she falls in love with him because he's impotent.
Sure!
I noticed that a lot of people... Not a lot...
Following the film's journey abroad...
A lot of people tend to divide the film in two parts...
There are those who love the first part more, that's more horror...
More fantastical...
And they don't really like the second part, that's more realistic...
Whereas some people really like this second part because it's realistic...
While the other part had more references, it was more classical.
But the real die-hard horror fans...
The first part, right up to this point...
It's their favourite part, and also, perhaps, the ending.
Because here, perhaps, we've betrayed...
Some of the spirit of a real horror film...
Because there aren't many effects at this point in the story...
It's their story.
The surreal part is when he goes to the doctor to get castrated...
But apart from that...
You used the same lens here as well...
The same technique you used to get the shot of the skull at the start of the film.
- Yes, this lens... - To get into the hole in the ground.
It's a probe, it's a lens like a breadstick...
- So it's as big as your little finger. - There was another little cut here...
Something else was meant to happen when he hits his head but we cut it...
- I can't remember... - Yes, there was a...
There was something...
Yes, there was a shot of them in darkness, illuminated by a cone of light...
He's wondering if he'll see her again... It was something do with fate...
But I remember it slowed down the action.
It's more like a knock on the head...
And he suddenly decides to get castrated.
This is an English actor, his name is Clive Riche...
We bleached his hair red to him look more...
We're really in comedy territory here.
Yes, we kind of break with tradition here...
But the scene straight after has all the elements of...
- ...of horror. - The storm...
Where did you shoot this?
We shot this in a real surgery...
Near... Still in Carsoli, in Abruzzo...
It was during the first week of filming...
He's on a gynaecologists bed.
This is the end of the second love story...
Because she's going to turn up now...
And he'll realise his sacrifice was for nothing...
Because she doesn't love impotent men anymore.
I remember the next scene, her arrival...
It was all done in one take...
With the camera spinning around them.
It was a last minute choice...
Because we were running way ahead of schedule...
And you only had one morning to shoot this scene...
Then it became an afternoon... You didn't have much time.
Yes, we rehearsed it in the hotel we were staying in...
To try and nail it.
This scene seems a bit forced, watching it now.
But I think it still reveals just how tormented he is.
She's even more of an adolescent now...
Almost like she's been rejuvenated...
- Having discovered love and sex. - Exactly.
- Was this all done with a steadicam? - It was done with a steadicam.
Did you have to shoot this a lot of times?
Not really, I think we did it five or six times.
Also because you had found these actors in the hotel.
We found them quite a while before...
I don't remember who was operating the steadicam in this scene.
I remember we were staying in a hotel, a kind of residence...
The entire crew was staying there. A hotel that didn't open in winter.
Yes, it was a residence for athletes...
It was only open for us.
And we all stayed there, except for Rupert, who had his little house...
Isolated, just as Dellamorte had to be isolated from the rest of the crew...
From the world of the living.
I remember when we arrived in this cemetery...
We had already built most of the graves ourselves...
So they were made out of light materials, like polystyrene.
The lights you see should have been fireflies, right?
The lights you see should have been fireflies but...
But they didn't come out well.
He's looking for prostitutes...
This sequence was very long and complicated in Sclavi's book.
Yes, it was much darker, more sombre...
Where the melancholy starts to get to him...
It was much more sombre, and he becomes this ferocious killer...
But we tried to lighten it up a bit...
But here as well, it's very much Sclavi's style...
The man alone with the bottle.
Everything was a lot more mixed up in the book...
And we tried to simplify it.
She's your actress of choice.
That's Barbara Cupisti, we made two films together...
One was 'Stagefright', the other one was 'The Church'.
So this is the third film you made together.
I was talking about these gravestones made of polystyrene...
It was very windy, so these crosses were flapping around...
And we had to use metal supports to keep them from moving.
We had to resolve this scene, especially the fire at the end...
Because we couldn't burn the house.
We were lucky to have this car, a Volkswagen...
That had a flat windscreen...
And that allowed us to get a reflection, that we'll see shortly.
It helped us resolve the scene.
This lighting of the cigarette, I remember...
It was a reference to certain romantic American films of the 30's and 40's...
- Lauren Bacall... - And Cary Grant.
No, Humphrey Bogart.
They were always lighting cigarettes.
You can't do that now, no one lights a cigarette...
It's a terrible thing!
- Heroes don't smoke anymore. - No, only the bad guys smoke.
And this is the end of all of Dellamorte's love stories...
Because he's going to kill this one as well.
At the end of this part we start moving towards the ending of the film.
Dellamorte's madness is nothing compared to the madness of the outside world...
They don't understand his crimes.
- The policeman who doesn't understand. - The slowness of the law.
Yes, this was shot in a real apartment...
We shot this scene twice because there was something we didn't like in the first...
In the first version.
No, it was actually filmed in a garage that we decorated...
To make it look like an apartment.
His disappointment here is absolute, it's pure desperation...
And that's why he decides to burn all of them.
But every gesture Dellamorte makes is ambiguous...
Because he's just teasing her.
It's as though each gesture is both innocent and malicious.
She's hot now...
See how evil he is!
- These are the flames on the windscreen. - The reflection we mentioned earlier.
If I'm not mistaken that's an idea you came up with on the set?
Yes, otherwise we couldn't have shown the fire...
There was no other way, because we had run out of money.
We filmed this scene before we started the main shoot...
Because I had found this nest...
And I thought it would be good to include it.
- Almost all the shots of animals... - And the moon, the real moon...
You filmed them in your garden, before we started shooting.
I just wanted to shoot something...
It's how I work, I always try to film something before the main shoot.
At least some of the smaller details...
Now we get to the hospital, that was shot in...
...the studio...
- Cinepolis... - Delaurentiis...
If I'm not mistaken it was the last film shot at Cinepolis...
It was practically closed at that point.
I wanted you to see the mud in the hospital ward...
Mixed in with the blood you see earlier...
So the earth from his cemetery, the earth of the dead...
...is starting to contaminate these places as well.
This is where everything is resolved in the narrative.
This is one of the more violent scenes in the film...
And also one of the more realistic.
Yes, there's a nastiness here...
How can I put it? It isn't hate...
It's his moment of catharsis...
His contact with the outside world has created this short circuit...
I remember audiences laughed a lot when he killed the nun.
Yes, I think audiences really enjoyed this scene...
Because they finally see their hero...
He's not taking it out on the poor living dead anymore...
He's taking it out on the outside world.
And then it's all done in the style of the grand guignol...
So we tried to remove some of that realism...
Yes, okay, It's an old polemic...
But, sometimes, it's more of a liberating experience if a film is very explicit...
While some films show very little, and they're even more unsettling...
More frightening.
I remember this was shot in a studio at Cinepolis...
That was practically unfurnished, and it was all done with lights.
Yes, with lights and these classic hospital screens.
I remember when I was writing this scene, I'm not sure why...
But I was thinking about Polanski's 'The Tenant'...
In fact, when he opens his mouth at the end, and you go inside.
I just thought of something else...
It's another reference to Sergio Leone...
The confrontation... The final confrontation...
- The showdown. - Yes, it's all come down to this...
He's burning all his bridges...
I remember it created this great expectation in the audience...
They're starting to wonder what will happen to him?
But the final farce comes...
When he meets the Inspector on the steps...
Who tells him there's a maniac on the loose.
This is a zoom.
Yes, and something that's starting to emerge now...
And we'll also see at the end...
Is this theme of friendship.
Franco really was his only link with the other world.
And this shot?
This staircase had a very strange aspect...
People are going up and down, but they never meet...
It's a kind of game of mirrors...
It looks artificial but we actually found a staircase like that...
And it inspired us.
Nobody believes him here, he tells them he did it but no one...
He doesn't communicate with the outside world...
But the outside world doesn't communicate with him, either.
That's Sclavi's absolute pessimism, so it's also in the film.
This is him reduced to a rag, he sees death everywhere he goes.
He even wants to destroy his cemetery.
As we're near the end, I want to say a few words about the film's release...
The film opened in March, which is usually a quiet period...
And it was very successful.
I just want to mention the symbolism of the wings behind him...
That purify him, in some way...
And there's the final confrontation with death.
That's really a confrontation with himself.
I must say that this scene...
I think this is possibly one of the better scenes...
He really performed it...
He gave it this sense of desperation, of confusion, of drunkenness...
It really is the end for him.
That was a sculpture made by an artist from Viareggio, who gave it to our producer...
Because we had seen it in a photograph...
It was very representative.
First it was an angel, but when it loses its wings...
It transforms into death.
- Sorry to interrupt. - No, no...
I was just saying that when the film came out...
It was at a time when the Dylan Dog comic was extremely popular.
In the sense that it's always been popular...
But at that time it was getting a lot of press attention...
Even in the cultural papers...
So, even though we didn't announce it as a Dylan Dog movie...
Everyone still knew.
So it was a big success with audiences, but also, I must say, with the critics.
The film also did quite well overseas...
We sold it to a lot of countries.
We took it to the Gérardmer Film Festival...
It's the most important horror festival in Europe...
And we won the special jury award, and the audience award.
The good thing about it is that Carpenter was on the jury...
Tobe Hooper, Chuck Russell...
There were a lot of our fathers or uncles!
In some way.
These two characters leave their cemetery...
And they go out to explore the rest of the world...
We had lots of problems shooting the ending...
Let's be honest, we shot the ending after we had finished shooting the film.
Because we initially thought they would leave the cemetery and then return.
- Yes, that was one version... - We created lots of versions!
But in the end we all agreed that the film...
Here as well... The audience identifies...
Perhaps, really, with the two protagonists...
And they want to see where their journey ends.
One presumes it has a sad ending...
Because you're left wondering where on earth can they can go?
Like someone in a village who says they've never seen the other side of the mountain...
- And they go to find out... - ...what's behind the mountain...
- And, obviously, there's nothing there. - This is the moment of catharsis.
Where they discover, perhaps, that the only true feeling...
That doesn't die, which is their friendship...
It might be the only thing they can save.
It reaches a crescendo...
We tried to give it a sense of sadness...
Is this a piece of motorway you rebuilt?
This man with the world in front of him, and death flanking him...
This idea of Gnaghi using a coffin for a suitcase...
We used a very small model for that shot.
- Where were you? - We went to a place in Abruzzo...
Called Scanno, there's a lake there...
We searched all over Italy...
Because we also wanted to show something that could represent love...
This lake has a vague heart like shape.
It's a kind of apex, with this broken piece of motorway...
That ends by a lake, in the shape of a heart.
It stimulates the romanticism, in some way...
And we shot this last scene...
...outside of the original shooting schedule.
- It was a month or two after. - Yes, after it had been edited together...
This is perhaps one of the strongest moments in the film...
Because the audience isn't laughing anymore...
You're watching to see if he's capable of killing his friend...
You could call it a moment of serious reflection...
- In the face of death. - And it's one of Sclavi's poems...
That's in the book... But not at this point in the story...
We got it from Sclavi and we decided to use it during the dubbing stage...
It wasn't in the original screenplay.
Some of the snow was already there, and some of it was artificial.
And then both of them end up in the...
- The glass ball... - The glass ball you showed at the start...
- That wasn't in the script either. - Yes...
It's a reference to films we liked, by Orson Welles...
But also to close this story inside a glass ball...
It's as though their destiny has already been written.
They're living a story that's already been told.
Gnaghi becomes someone who knows how to talk.
- As though they are... - This leads into Dylan Dog...
Because Groucho will take Gnaghi's place...
And he'll change...
I've seen it before, in numerous films...
Where these two friends are two different sides of the same person...
And, as they grow, Gnaghi will become Dylan Dog...
He'll become Dellamorte, and Dellamorte will become Gnaghi...
They exchange dialogue...
There's this sense of consolidated friendship.
It was great watching it again.