Drug dealers came over to tell Matteo Garrone when he was getting it right - or wrong - while he was shooting his unforgiving but complex portrait of life in a notorious Camorra- dominated part of Naples
IT'S LUCKY FOR director Matteo Garrone he's not easily intimidated. Gomorrah, his film about the notorious Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra, was shot in the crowded streets and housing projects of Naples. That meant its subjects were free to keep an eye on what he was doing.
"There were always about 40 or 50 people behind the monitor, looking at what I was doing and reacting. For me, that was very important. They were the first audience of the movie," Garrone says laconically.
"Often, we'd be shooting in front of a building and behind the building, there were drug dealers working. They'd come and say, 'Yeah, this is correct, this is not', but I have to be honest, they didn't interfere too much. I think, because they love cinema and because they realised I wanted to show their story without judging. And also," he laughs, "because they didn't expect the movie would be so successful."
When Gomorrahtook the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it had already opened on 400 screens across Italy, taking an unprecedented €1 million in its opening weekend. On first showing at Cannes, it immediately sold to 12 more countries.
"It was kind of a blockbuster in Italy which we really didn't expect because the movie is quite rigorous. There are no happy endings, no heroes, and also, it was sub-titled, even in Italy, because nobody understood the Camorra slang. I did everything I could to make a box-office failure," Garrone says with a smile.
Sub-titles or not, audiences have always had a healthy appetite for organised crime on screen. Blend the 1959 television series The Untouchableswith the 1990 film Goodfellasand you have the inspiration for David Chase's television series The Sopranos. Brian de Palma's 1983 cult hit Scarface was a loose re-make of a 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name. The Godfathertrilogy, Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco: mafia movies have almost single-handedly kept Al Pacino in business while feeding our love of vendettas, guns and pasta.
Garrone, whose previous five films were more concerned with the convolutions of love than death, was ushered towards the subject by Italian journalist, Roberto Saviano's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. The pair subsequently worked together on the script for Gomorrah, pulling five storylines from Saviano's encyclopaedic tome to create a fictional mainframe.
"Saviano wrote the book from inside the Camorra. It changed my point of view, and also my stereotypes. I wondered if it was possible to try and do this also for the cinema; to re-write the imagery. We wanted to make a movie from the inside, without glamorising it, without going into good and bad: a movie not against the Camorra but about it."
If that smacks of a kind of fuzzy amorality, it's worth noting that Garrone is no apologist for the Camorra, and Gomorrahis far from being a recruitment video. Using a documentary style, and concentrating on the system's foot soldiers rather than its generals, Garrone's portrait of life in the notorious Camorra-dominated housing project, Scampia, is bleak, unforgiving and above all, complex.
"I wrote the screenplay in Rome and arrived in Naples, thinking that all was black and white. Camorra: bad. People who try and work honestly: good. But then I discovered there's a very, very big grey zone where all is confused: legal and illegal, good and bad. That's one of the most important things I wanted to show in the movie, this confusion."
While the Sicilian mafia tends to grab the column inches, arguably the Camorra families of Naples are even more brutal and powerful, with business interests ranging from high-end international fashion to waste disposal, as well as drugs. Some have estimated their annual profits to be in the region of $23 billion (€17 billion).
What they share with the mafia is a belief in omertà (code of silence).
AFTER ROBERTO SAVIANO publicly attacked a prominent Camorra boss while publicising his book, several threats were made on his life and he now lives under police protection.
So was Garrone, who signed up to the project before the death threats to Saviano, not fearful of similar repercussions for himself? "Of course I became more worried about it but no, not really. I wanted to make this movie. I never had doubts about it." No threats were made on Garrone's life, but making a movie about the Camorra did throw up some fairly unusual production problems. Garrone was determined to use the local Neapolitan pop music on his soundtrack, but to get the rights, he needed the signature of a songwriter who had been on the run for two years. They were secured, by chance, through one of the actors, an ex-con who had been in school with him.
"We knew there were many risks in this project. One, for sure, was that of using violence without just using it just to give pleasure to an audience. We tried to use violence only when it's important to tell something about the character. The other big risk was to fall into a folkloric stereotypical idea of Naples - men singing, big weddings, pizza." Ironically, the problem here is that camorristi are themselves keen fans of Hollywood Mafia movies, much given to imitating fictional gang bosses which sets up an interesting hall of mirrors for a film-maker.
"It's not cinema that takes inspiration from reality, it's reality which takes inspiration from film. They look at cinema and imitate the characters. We filmed one scene in the real villa of a very famous boss, who's now in jail. When he built it, he gave his architect the tape of Scarfaceby Brian de Palma and said, I want my villa exactly like Tony Montana's." In truth, what sets Gomorrahapart from its more operatic Hollywood counterparts, and lends it considerable power, is its dispassionate camerawork and unselfconscious performances from local actors, some of who learned their trade in prison drama groups.
Yet despite many viewers in Italy believing Gomorrahto be a documentary, Garrone is a vociferous believer in film as art, not public information tool.
"THE FIRST THING I said to Saviano is that I didn't want to make a television documentary, I wanted it to be more universal, less about names than themes . . . When we wrote it, we thought of it like a silent movie, concentrating on the visual rather than giving information. I think it is a political film, but the politics is in its language."
For Garrone, making Gomorrahhas resulted not only in international success but also, in a transformation of his formerly rigid ideas on the Camorra. "If I was born in Naples, probably, with my attitude, I would have become a camorrista. For sure, I would have made some mistakes when I was young, and if I was lucky, I'd have realised before I got killed.
"People there are not forced to become camorristi, but the line is very subtle, it's very easy to cross."
Gomorrahis running at selected cinemas