Riccardo Scamarcio pops up on my Zoom screen at a roadside cafe with a curtain of blue behind him. Darkly handsome in a crisp white shirt, he puffs on a cigarette – very old school – while answering in the most cleanly perfect English. He is crossing the mountains to Tuscany. The spirit of classic Italian cinema could hardly be better honoured if he were rendered in black and white.
I mention this as his appearance reminds me of how Johnny Depp came to cast him as Amedeo Modigliani in the American actor’s second feature as director. Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness follows the painter and sculptor as he cavorts through an earthily rendered version of early 20th-century Paris. There is a great deal of arguing in bars and necking in graveyards.
Depp had arranged to talk to Scamarcio early in the evening, but he was forced to knock the meeting back by three hours. At that point the Italian was driving with his daughter and the nanny. He called into a petrol station. Happily, the staff recognised the star and allowed him to use a side building for the Zoom.
“We were talking, and after a while Johnny says, ‘Hey, man. Can I say something? Where are you?’ There was stuff around for cars, oil, strange tools around me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I’m in the gas station. I was driving, and this is the only place I could stage the Zoom call.’ He says, ‘In a gas station!’ I didn’t know this at the time, but the producer was there off-screen. And Johnny said, ‘He is in a gas station. This is my man!’”
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This is how the business now works. You do press interviews in hillside cafes and take auditions in petrol stations.
“Yeah, it was rock’n’roll,” he says. “Johnny is a very special person. He is very sweet and very gentle and very kind to every single one. He is a person who likes paradox.”
Scamarcio, now in his mid-40s, has been exhaustingly busy in Italian cinema and TV for more than 20 years. Back in 2005 he was rough-hewn in the epic gangster flick Romanzo Criminale. He has worked with Abel Ferrara and Costa-Gavras. You can see him in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, about Silvio Berlusconi, and Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors. He doesn’t need to stretch into English-language productions, but he, nonetheless, has been happy to show off his polyglottal talents in films such as John Wick: Chapter 2 and Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice.
“It’s very important to work in other countries,” Scamarcio says. “In English you have more opportunities. The market is bigger. I speak very fluent French too. So I’ve been shooting films in France. I’m very known in my country. When you work outside your country it’s fantastic, because people don’t know you, so nobody cares. They have no expectation from you, right? There is another level, which is the language. Acting in another language is like having a mask.”
How familiar was Scamarcio with Modigliani before coming to the film? The elongated faces and mournful eyes that characterise his work are – though, as the film explains, underappreciated in his life – now an immovable part of the culture. That must be even more so in the artist’s native Italy.
“Yes, of course. My mother is a painter,” Scamarcio says. “I was obsessed with this big book that had pictures of his paintings and sculptures. My mother was always saying, ‘Why is this boy so obsessed with this book?’ Maybe it was a sign. I knew, of course, he had a very, very tough life.”
It hardly needs to be said that Depp is currently a controversial character. The Kentucky actor – somehow now 62 – has been a ubiquitous presence since the late 1980s. He was Jack Sparrow. He was Sweeney Todd. He was in a rock “supergroup” called Hollywood Vampires. (Three Days on the Wing of Madness is dedicated to late guitarist Jeff Beck.)
Over the past decade, however, he has drawn more attention for an acrimonious split with Amber Heard that led, in 2022, to Depp suing his then former wife, who had accused him of physical abuse, in the United States, for defamation. Heard was found liable. Two years earlier he had lost in the British courts after suing News Group over allegations of abuse against Heard published in the Sun newspaper. The dispute has, to say the least, caused some division on social media.
When the mess went away (for then, anyway) Depp returned to a project he had first discussed with Al Pacino decades earlier: a study of Modigliani adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre. Indeed, Pacino, who has an amusing role in Three Days on the Wing of Madness as a flamboyant art dealer, had been toying with the idea way back in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola were all involved in conversations about it.
“Pacino was supposed to direct this project, and then he didn’t,” Scamarcio says. “It was his passion project since when he was young. Then he met Johnny in Donnie Brasco and they become friends. Pacino says, ‘I have this project. Maybe you could be perfect to play Modigliani.’ So Pacino was supposed to direct the film and Johnny to play Modigliani. It didn’t happen.”
Scamarcio is politely euphemistic about his director’s recent complications.
“Johnny had his problems that we all know,” he says. “When he won the case and he was back, Al says, ‘I think the moment is now correct for you to direct the film. I’m too old. I don’t want to do it. You should do it.’ And, as Johnny says all the time, if Pacino comes to you and says do something it’s better you do it.”
The resulting film is an amusing, anarchic romp through a highly romanticised version of Paris in 1916. As you might expect from Depp, there are a few rock’n’roll touches. At one stage The Black Angel’s Death Song, by The Velvet Underground, and Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues vie for our attention. None of this gets in the way of a hugely charismatic turn from Scamarcio. He does good work as a misunderstood master who can barely scrabble together a few sous for artworks that would later sell for millions.
It is more than 28 years since The Brave, Depp’s indifferently received directorial debut. Did Scamarcio feel he had what it takes behind the camera?
“Basically it is about trust,” he says. “I felt that my director, Johnny Depp, trusted me very much. That is what it is all about. This is what an actor needs from his director. He needs to be loved and trusted. We did this journey together – experimenting things, changing, just trying to get some special life there.
“He was talking about Marlon Brando, when they were friends. We were talking about all the processes of being a cinema actor. For me, it confirmed all the things I believed when I think about my job. My job is to create an atmosphere.”
For all the flash and bang of Three Days on the Wing of Madness, it is at its best in the conversational duel between Pacino and Scamarcio. The older actor is a marvel. After a few decades of chewing the scenery, he seems to have recovered an inner calm.
“He’s still there, fighting as an actor and an artist,” Scamarcio says. “But with the simplicity and the fairness and the honesty of a 20-year-old actor.”
I wonder if Scamarcio could sense Pacino’s Italian roots. The American is, after all, only one generation distant from Sicilian origins.
“Oh, yeah. Because, well, you can take away an Italian man from Italy, but you can never take Italy away from an Italian. You know what I’m saying?”
Scamarcio does not seem to sleep. Early previews of the current film will feature a conversation, filmed at Tate Modern in London, between Scamarcio, Depp, the art critic Waldemar Januszczak and British artist Polly Morgan. He has another three Italian productions on the go. Will we hear him in English again soon?
“There is the international language – which is acting,” he says with a charming smile. “Being alive on scene – and being obscene. Being obscene, which means ‘out of scene’. It comes from the Greek.”
I’ll take his word for it. Educated man.
Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th, with previews on Thursday, July 10th
