Interview with Ernesto Gastaldi (1970)

This is the English translation of an interview with screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi conducted by Luigi Cozzi. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in April 1970. You can find more info about Italian horror movies in the monograph Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). If you are interested in buying the book, feel free to use the launch discount code EVENT30 for 30% off.

Ernesto Gastaldi: I have a real passion for science fiction. My interest in sci-fi began when I read Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings (1949), a novel published almost twenty years ago. Unfortunately, for filmmakers, there aren’t many chances in the sci-fi genre. However, I hope to make a sci-fi film myself very soon. It is an old idea of mine, I have been thinking about it for many years now. I want to make an omnibus film consisting of four episodes. Each episode deals with the theme of the fantastic and features a famous actor. Jean-Louis Trintignant has already accepted [to star in one of the episodes]. Tomorrow I am going to meet Giuliano Gemma to tell him about this project of mine. I wrote Giuliano’s latest western movie, so I hope that he will act in my sci-fi movie for an acceptable [small] fee.

Luigi Cozzi: You will produce and direct this sci-fi film of yours, then. It is not the first time that you are producing and directing a feature, right?

EG: No, it is not the first time, as you very well know. I have already produced and directed two films: a muder-mystery-cum-love-story [giallo-rosa] called Cin cin… cianuro (1968) and a horror called Libido (1965).

LC: You have been dealing with horror cinema for almost ten years now…

EG: I started my career by directing a 16mm film and a producer decided to trust me. After a training period, I wrote L’amante del vampiro / The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960), a terrible film that almost makes me feel ashamed. But L’amante del vampiro was a useful experience and it made good money at the box office.

LC: If I am not mistaken, you have also worked on a small, little-known adaptation of Le Fanu’s 1872 classic Carmilla, the famous short story that inspired both Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, ou l’étrange aventure d’Allan Gray / Vampyr (1932) and Roger Vadim’s … Et mourir de plaisir / Blood and Roses (1960).

EG: Yes, Tonino Valerii and I wrote La cripta e l’incubo / Crypt of the Vampire (1964) for Camillo Mastrocinque. The story of La cripta e l’incubo is based on Le Fanu’s Carmilla, even if the short story is not mentioned in the credits.

LC: I remember La cripta e l’incubo well. Christopher Lee was the protagonist, and the film was quite morbid. I wonder why the Italian censorship didn’t hinder the film… Maybe because La cripta e l’incubo was considered a typical product for the summer season [when nobody goes to the cinema anyway]… It was the same for Antonio Margheriti’s incredible orgy Danza macabra / Castle of Blood (1963) …

EG: Ah, there was a period in which I collaborated with Nini [Antonio Margheriti] a lot. I wrote several films for him… I remember I lunghi capelli della morte / The Long Hair of Death (1964) with Barbara Steele, and a sci-fi film that we started right before the success of the James Bond saga. For Mario Bava I wrote La frusta e il corpo / The Whip and the Body (1963) and I must confess that I was quite disappointed with the finished film. I wrote a Clouzot-style psychological nightmare, but what Bava saw in the story was a baroque, decadent drama, and he exasperated the tones until he reached total implausibility. I am very sorry about it, because Bava is good at his job, he is a great magician. Even more than Margheriti, Bava is excellent at creating tricks and optic effects. Indeed, his father [Eugenio Bava] was one of the most respected special effects creators in Italian cinema. I remember a scene of La frusta e il corpo that was shot on a beach. Bava wanted a castle in the background, so he prepared a glass matte and he put it on the camera to shoot the scene. Bava is crazy about these things, and he is one of the very few who know how to do them.

LC: You have also worked as a screenwriter for Riccardo Freda, the other Italian specialist of the horror-thriller genre [brivido]…

EG: Exactly. Freda is first and foremost an art expert, he has a great figurative taste [gusto figurativo]. I wrote two films for him: Lo spettro / The Ghost (1963) and L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962).

LC: Please, explain L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock to me. I saw the film but I didn’t understand anything. It was a series of unexplained events and it was difficult to understand the narrative thread… You wrote the screenplay, right?

EG: You see, my screenplay was very clear and precise, with all the details logically connected. But Freda decided that a horror film doesn’t need any explanation. According to Freda, the spectators of a horror film are content with witnessing a series of absurd and terrifying events: the audience doesn’t really need to know why all these things are happening. Therefore, Freda ignored all the explanations, all the logical links and all the psychological motivations that I had put in the screenplay. He simply strung together a series of scary scenes.

Interview with Aristide Massaccesi aka Joe D’Amato (1991)

This is the English translation of an interview with filmmaker Aristide Massaccesi conducted by Max Della Mora, Andrea Giorgi and Manlio Gomarasca. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the fanzine DROP OUT, in September-October 1991.

DROP OUT: Why films of yours like Buio Omega / Beyond the Darkness (1979) and Rosso sangue / Absurd (1981) were cut when they were released in Italy?

JOE: Obviously because my films were too violent, or too hardcore, for the Italian market. Generally, we shoot two versions of the movie because certain countries do not want a version that is too violent. Italy, Germany and, in general, European countries do not want too much violence. In countries like the US or Japan, on the other hand, the violent version is very welcome.

D: Your film Antropophagus (1980) is available in three different versions. The violent scenes are the same in the three versions, but the dialogues and the editing [of the other scenes] are different.

JOE: I didn’t know that. I guess that these changes were made by the distributors of the film. The distributors working in this or that country may have changed the dialogues of Antropophagus to make them more understandable to the local audience, or things like that.

D: Rosso sangue is a sequel to Antropophagus. Why didn’t you shoot Antropophagus 3?

JOE: Antropophagus was not commercially successful, and Rosso sangue made even less money than Antropophagus at the box office. So we decided not to make a third movie in the series.

D: Maybe, with a title like Antropophagus 2, Rosso sangue could have been more successful?

JOE: I have never been commercially successful in Italy. My films have always been more commercially successful abroad. So we thought that it was not a good idea to use the title Antropophagus 2 for Rosso sangue.

D: What was the story for Antropophagus 3? We heard that the cannibal was supposed to eat his own brain…

JOE: Yes, that was the idea. The story of Antropophagus 3 is about a cannibal: he seems to be dead, but then he comes back to life and becomes a zombie.

D: What can you tell us about Luigi Montefiori [who plays the cannibal in Antropophagus and Rosso sangue]?

JOE: We are friends. He has also written a lot of screenplays for my films. It has been twenty years now: he writes, I direct. It is a sort of collaboration.

D: Did you shoot some scenes of Killing Birds (1987)?

JOE: Yes, I shot some scenes of Killing Birds because director Claudio Lattanzi, who was very young at that time, didn’t feel like doing it.

D: What about Troll 2 (1990)?

JOE: Troll 2 was shot by Claudio Fragasso in Utah. It was a quite ironic horror, it was quite nice. I don’t think that it will be released in Italy. Maybe in VHS… It was released in Europe, though.

D: What do you think about films like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981), in which there are real scenes of violence, especially involving animals?

JOE: I don’t think that the scenes of violence are real in these films, I think that it is just a publicity stunt. Maybe the scenes involving animals are real… But everything can be faked [done with special effects]. For example, in my upcoming film, there is a scene set in a morgue. In the US, you can just go to a morgue and film what you want… but, when I was a cinematographer, I went to shoot in a morgue and I felt sick… I can’t do it, it is too disturbing for me. In fact, in my upcoming film, we recreated a morgue in another location. This is to say that anything can be faked. It is useless to kill real animals.

D: What about Endgame – Bronx lotta finale (1983) and Anno 2020 – I gladiatori del futuro (1983)?

JOE: These two films were made to exploit the success of Mad Max (1979). In Italy, Endgame – Bronx lotta finale and Anno 2020 – I gladiatori del futuro were never released, but they were quite successful abroad.

D: What about Bruno Mattei?

JOE: He is a serious professional, he has always been involved in filmmaking. He started his career as a film editor.

D: You worked with him for Emanuelle e Françoise (Le sorelline) / Emanuelle and Françoise (1975), which is available in two versions in Italy. One version has more sex, the other has more violence…

JOE: Really? It could be. It is always the same story with the distributors. There was a film of mine, I think they called it Blue Holocaust or something like that… Anyway, this film was released in a hardcore version: they cut some scenes and inserted pornographic footage instead… Sometimes I am unaware of what distributors do to my films… It is such a commercial environment, you know… If I made auteur cinema… If I made one film every two years, maybe I could keep an eye on all my films… But I make six films in one year: if I keep an eye on all my films, I go crazy…

D: A French version of Emanuelle e Françoise (Le sorelline) has hardcore inserts starring Brigitte Lahaie…

JOE: That must be an initiative of the French distributor. He made his own film…

D: What about Michele Soavi?

JOE: Since everybody in Italy keeps saying that nobody is giving young directors a chance, I have tried to work with young people like Michele Soavi. I produced films by Claude Milliken (real name: Claudio Lattanzi), Clyde Anderson (real name: Claudio Fragasso), Martin Newline (real name: Fabrizio Laurenzi) and Michele Soavi. Michele Soavi is the young director who has been doing better.

D: Are you still working with Michele Soavi?

JOE: Yes, we are making a film based on a story of his, a thriller on the road, something similar to Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986).

D: Let’s talk about Laura Gemser.

JOE: She is a dear friend. She is not an actress anymore, she works with me.

D: She is a costume designer.

JOE: Who told you?

D: We saw the credits of La casa 5 / Beyond Darkness (1990) and Troll 2. Is her real name Moira Chen?

JOE: No, her real name is Laura Gemser. We invented the name Moira Chen because her real name, Laura Gemser, had already been used a lot, she made hundreds of movies as an actress. So we changed her name, but it was useless. Everybody recognized her.

D: You appear as an actor in a film by Massimo Dallamano [Cosa avete fatto a Solange? / What Have You Done to Solange? (1972)], in the small role of a policeman.

JOE: I was working as a camera operator when Massimo was working as a cinematographer. Then Massimo became a film director and I became a cinematographer. In Cosa avete fatto a Solange? I played the small role of the policeman because the film was shot between Rome and London and we wanted to save money. It would have been expensive to have an actor move from Rome to London and vice versa, so I played the role. It was also amusing for me.

D: Tell us about Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali / Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977).

JOE: It was a way of revisiting the Emmanuelle series. I made the whole black Emanuelle series [with Laura Gemser] and the films did really well at the box office. When the black Emanuelle character started becoming less popular we tried to revamp her a bit with the cannibals, and in fact Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali was very successful.

D: Was it very gory?

JOE: Some scenes were very strong.

D: What about Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi / Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980)?

JOE: The film was distributed in two versions. I was told that there is a version of Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi with hardcore scenes, which I never shot. […] The film I shot was a softcore film. […]

D: What about Al Cliver?

JOE: He looks like an American guy. His face is amazing, but his real name is Pierluigi Conti. He is a carpenter, he is really good at that. He is not a great actor but he has the right face, the face of a suffering, tormented man. And he is super-nice, he is adorable.

D: How many pseudonyms do you have?

JOE: I have a lot of pseudonyms. Joe D’Amato is the one I use for erotic movies, because it has become a sort of trademark now.

D: Compared to your first softcore movies like L’alcova (1985) and Il piacere (1985), the films you are making now have less sex scenes. For example, your film Dirty Love (1988) is basically a drama.

JOE: This is because we had some problems: in Japan, for example, if you want to sell your film you can’t show “the bush” [il pelo] and therefore you have to shoot a “bushless” version, which is difficult… Then, for the German market and for the American market, you have to shoot something that could be aired on TV… As a result, you inevitably end up making all these bullshit films…

D: Would you go back to shooting hardcore movies?

JOE: No, hardcore movies don’t give me any satisfaction anymore. When the hardcore market was liberalized [in the late 1970s and early 1980s], these films were well distributed, but now the market is saturated. Moreover, I was a guy who tried to make hardcore movies with a plot, which was useless because in red light cinemas they used to cut the story bits to make a non-stop-fucking film. So there was no point in making hardcore films my way anymore.

D: Did you work with Giuliana Gamba as well?

JOE: Yes, I produced her first film because I thought that having a woman direct a pornographic film could create a certain curiosity in the audience.

D: What was the title of this film?

JOE: I don’t remember. It was a hardcore movie. Perhaps it was called Le porno investigatrici, or something like that. Alexander Borsky made other hardcore films, his real name is Claudio Bernabei, he was a collaborator of mine.

D: As for Caligola… la storia mai raccontata / Caligula… The Untold Story (1982), the VHS version is heavily censored, while the Dutch version is hardcore and very gory…

JOE: Caligola… la storia mai raccontata was cut when it came out in the theaters as well. Tinto Brass’s Caligola / Caligula (1979) was very risqué, so we had to shoot two versions of Caligola… la storia mai raccontata, for the usual censorship problems in Italy.

D: You have always had problems with Italian censorship…

JOE: In Italy censorship is a big problem because we have seven commissions and you never know which commission will end up rating your film. A commission doesn’t mind violence (for example, Antropophagus had no problems at all), while another commission strongly disapproves of violence but doesn’t mind sex… […]

D: Do you have other horror projects in the making?

JOE: I am starting a new project called Ritorno dalla morte. It is the story of a woman who has paranormal powers. She is in a coma because of a violent aggression that she suffered, and she uses her paranormal powers to control a dead man and take revenge [on her assailants]. The zombie and the woman are connected by a computer. The boyfriend of the woman understands the situation and disconnects the computer, thereby killing the woman and the zombie.

D: Will it be a gory film?

JOE: Yes, but in Italy the film won’t have big chances. We recently made La casa 3 / Ghosthouse (1988), La casa 4 / Witchery (1988) and La casa 5, and only La casa 4 was successful – very successful actually – because it starred Linda Blair. The other two films didn’t go well, like all horror movies in Italy, except for big productions.

D: What are the reasons behind the decadence of the horror genre?

JOE: There was no renewal among directors. Mario Bava died [in 1980] and, apart from Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and completely forgotten directors like Enzo Castellari and Alberto De Martino, there were no new guys. Then there was the huge crisis of cinema and the film comedies with Renato Pozzetto and Paolo Villaggio were making all the money, so nobody was interested in making other kinds of films anymore. Italian horror cinema could be good, quality-wise: our horror films can be compared to the American ones. There is just one difference: the American films are very ironic (e.g., Sam Raimi), while we keep on making horror films seriously, as if they were terror films, and perhaps the audience has had enough of that.

D: La casa 5 was supposed to star Linda Blair, like La casa 4.

JOE: We tried to contact Linda Blair for La casa 5, but she had just made Repossessed (1990) and she was convinced that Repossessed was a masterpiece, so she refused our proposal for fear of ruining her career [sputtanarsi]. She was super-famous at the age of fourteen, when she made The Exorcist (1973), then she grew up and nobody cared about her anymore… So now she is very careful and prejudiced in choosing her acting roles.

D: What is your relationship with horror cinema?

JOE: I make horror films because I have a lot of fun making them. I make movies of all genres, but I make horror movies with particular pleasure. Above all, I am a technician, so for Buio Omega the journalists wrote that I had shot a real autopsy. Actually, I simply used some giblets that I bought at the butcher shop. For Antropophagus, too, the journalists wrote that I used a real human fetus. Actually, I simply used a blood-soaked, skinned rabbit. This is to say that I have a lot of fun when I make horror films. I also think that I did a very good job while shooting those scenes, if somebody thought that they were real. […]

D: You are often compared to Jess Franco…

JOE: Yes, it is because we both produce and direct our own films. I have also been compared to Roger Corman. It is for the same reason, I think: we do everything ourselves.

Interview with Pedro Costa (2015)

A talk with Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, whose latest film Vitalina Varela (2019) has just won the Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival 2019. The interview took place in Munich in spring 2015, and was originally published by BOMB Magazine online (integral version) and in print (abridged version). The integral version can be found here. The topics of the conversation include the film Cavalo Dinheiro / Horse Money (2014), Jacob Riis, Gil Scott-Heron and… young rebels needing knives.

The interview was conducted as part of the research work for the Italian-language monograph Questi fiori malati. Il cinema di Pedro Costa, published by Bébert in 2017. The monograph can be purchased here.

Interview with Béla Tarr, Fred Kelemen and Mihály Víg (2014)

An interview with Hungarian film director Béla Tarr, German cinematographer and film director Fred Kelemen and Hungarian composer Mihály Víg. The interview first appeared in Italian as an appendix to Marco Grosoli’s Italian-language monograph Armonie contro il giorno: il cinema di Béla Tarr (Bébert, 2014). An English version of the interview was published online in BOMB and can be read here.

Interview with Corrado Farina (summer 2015)

A talk with Corrado Farina about his film …Hanno cambiato faccia. This interview was made to gather data for the monograph Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). If you are interested in buying the book, feel free to use the launch discount code EVENT30 for 30% off.

Michael Guarneri: You directed …Hanno cambiato faccia in 1970-1971. Why did you decide to make a vampire movie in Italy at the beginning of the 1970s?

Corrado Farina: I have always been fascinated by the vampire figure. As a young man, I had liked a lot the vampire films by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava, and Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958) too. Moreover, I have always been interested in Vlad the Impaler, a figure suspended between historical facts and legend. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was a cineamatore, which means that I occasionally made 8mm films with a group of friends, purely for fun. One of these short, amateurish movies was a parody of the vampire films that were flooding Italian screens in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The title I chose was Il figlio di Dracula, i.e. ‘The son of Dracula’. It was made in 1960, I think. As for …Hanno cambiato faccia, I didn’t really want to make a parody of horror movies. At the same time, though, making a ‘classic’ vampire film would have been too expensive. It was Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man (which came out in Italian translation only in 1967) that triggered my imagination. Thanks to One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse quickly became one of the leading theorists of the 1968 protests and the ensuing contestazione [anti-authoritarian revolt] years: he wrote about our everyday reality as a world in which technology allows those in power to suck humanity’s blood in order to artificially prolong their lives. This metaphor fitted well with the post-1968 class struggle in Italy: students and workers versus i padroni [the masters, those in power]. However, it is necessary to clarify the concept of padrone. In …Hanno cambiato faccia, Ingegnere Giovanni Nosferatu is not simply a master, a man who has power. Rather, he is il padrone dei padroni, that is to say the master of the masters. He sucks the blood of everybody, to keep alive not himself but a structure of power, a system, an organism that is not made of flesh. Ingegnere Nosferatu is il padrone di tutti i cattivi, the master of all the villains, and it is not by chance that actor Adolfo Celi was cast in the role, since he had already played a supervillain in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965) and Diabolik / Danger: Diabolik (Mario Bava, 1968). It is possible that while I was outlining the Ingegnere Nosferatu character I had the Avvocato Gianni [Giovanni] Agnelli in mind (both have a walking stick and white hair, for instance). The idea I wanted to express through the Ingegnere Nosferatu character was that of a potere occulto, a secret power, a master of the masters, a member of a sort of financial-industrial-aristocratic elite. In fact, at that time, Agnelli was not a politician, he didn’t hold any political power formally, but he owned everything: industry FIAT and newspaper La Stampa.

MG: You mentioned the fact that you couldn’t afford to make an expensive movie. How much did …Hanno cambiato faccia cost?

CF: …Hanno cambiato faccia was produced by a cooperative called Filmsettanta. Myself, the crew and the cast (with the exception of Adolfo Celi and a few others) were in partecipazione, that is to say we were financing the movie ourselves. The budget was around 50 million lire.

MG: What do you think …Hanno cambiato faccia is: a horror, a satire, a genre movie, an auteur film?

CF: To me, it is a hybrid: it is a genre movie (namely a horror movie), and it is also a post-1968 political film. I like to define it a ‘political-fantastic’ film or, maybe, a ‘dystopic’ film. In a way, it is an auteur film and a satire. It is a patchwork: each spectator can see what he or she wants in it!

MG: Is protagonist Alberto Valle your alter ego? You worked as an advertiser for many years prior to making …Hanno cambiato faccia, so I was wondering if white-collar worker Valle’s alienation somehow reflected your feelings during your career in the advertising industry.

CF: During the 1960s I worked for the biggest and most important advertising agency in Italy, the one owned by Armando Testa. The beginning of my career was wonderful, I wrote and directed about 500 caroselli [brief TV commercials aired on Italian State TV]. Then, I started developing a critical attitude towards the advertising world, as shown by my comic strips titled Il Grande Persuasore, ‘the Great Persuader’, which I made in 1966-1967. I slowly started to see the advertising industry as co-responsible for all the problems that afflicted, and still afflict, the Western world. A period of impatience on my part began, which led to my leaving Armando Testa’s advertising agency. After two years, I moved from my hometown Turin to Rome with my family and, after making a lot of commercials, I finally had the chance to work for cinema – first as an assistant on various film sets, then as a director of …Hanno cambiato faccia, whose treatment I wrote when I was still living in Turin.

MG: You and your friend and co-screenwriter Giulio Berruti were active in left-wing organisations in the 1960s and 1970s? Turin, for instance, was a Lotta Continua stronghold. I ask you because the violent revolt the Valle character talks about at a certain point echoes the post-1968 extraparliamentary left-wing’s rhetoric.

CF: Giulio [Berruti] and I were never active in any political party or organisation, and we were not hanging out with students during the contestazione years. I would say that …Hanno cambiato faccia is an ‘unconsciously 1968’ film. In 1965-1966 I had already made two sci-fi, 8-mm short movies because I was a great fan of dystopic science fiction, or, as I like to call it, ‘sociological sci-fi’: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Robert Sheckley, and so on. In the first 8mm short I showed the end of humanity because of humanity’s excessive pride (Man thinks He can control the machines, while it is actually the machines that control Him); the second 8mm short was something similar to Alphaville (Jean-Luc Gordard, 1965). All this is to say that I have been a sort of protester well before the 1968 protests exploded worldwide, and that at that time there was no unified cinema movement, but just a bunch of directors working on a series of ideas that were ‘in the air’, often making films that were quite similar in their assumptions and/or conclusions.

MG: Talking about this idea of being influenced by the zeitgeist, in your film there is a hippy girl who tries to convince petit bourgeois Valle to change his life. Hippy characters start appearing in Italian cinema at the end of the 1960s.

CF: The hippy girl of …Hanno cambiato faccia comes from the American flower children of the pre-1968 period. In my film I mixed the typical hippy character with the Marcusean idea of rebellious youths being co-opted by a vampiric technocracy. At that time I was quite fascinated by the ‘swinging London’ myth, and in 1968 I saw this film called I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (Michael Winner, 1967), which really impressed me. It was a film about the powers that be ‘re-absorbing’ the rebellion of an individual who wants to get out of ‘the system’. Incidentally, I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname was set in the world of advertising, a world I was increasingly growing weary of at that time, just like the character played by Oliver Reed in the film.

MG: The original ending of …Hanno cambiato faccia is different from the one you actually shot.

CF: Yes, in the original ending – which was probably inspired by the ending of Dance of the Vampires (Roman Polanski, 1967) – Valle and the hippy girl seem to be able to run away and save themselves, but the taxi in which they are travelling is actually driven by Ingegnere Nosferatu.

MG: During your career as an advertiser, you shot hundreds of caroselli, and in …Hanno cambiato faccia you have inserted three fake caroselli.

CF: Yes, one is a satire of the Godardian militant cinema of the contestazione years; one is a satire of Federico Fellini; one is a satire of sexploitation, which was slowly starting to take root in Italian cinema, as in the late 1960s the Italian Censorship Office was not harsh and inflexible as it used to be.

MG: Well, the Italian Censorship Office hadn’t become all that permissive. …Hanno cambiato faccia, for instance, was rated VM18 [forbidden to all those under the age of eighteen] in Italy, ‘for the scenes of sadism and eroticism’.

CF: Yes, but I actually think it was because of the nude scenes only, because of the naked breasts I mean. I remember that in the screenplay of …Hanno cambiato faccia there was a line mentioning a crucifix, uttered in relation to the third, Sade-inspired carosello. Giulio [Berruti] and I removed the word ‘crucifix’ from the finished film because we wanted to avoid problems with the Italian Censorship Office.

MG: Personally, I don’t find the film offensive to the Church as a religious institution, even though on the periodical Segnalazioni cinematografiche the Vatican censors rated your film as gravely offensive to Catholicism.

CF: The ‘basis’ of the Church, in my view, is heroic. Regardless of one’s own beliefs in matters of religion, it must be recognised that many priests did, and still do, great, heroic work. The problem is the high ranks of the Church, which use the moral alibi to influence politics, as decades of Christian-Democrat rule in Italy have demonstrated. Somebody even mentioned to me that Ingegnere Nosferatu could be an allusion to the secret power of Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti.

MG: But to go back on the main track: you mentioned Sade, who is the main author for intellectuals reflecting on issues of power starting ever since the mid-1960s.

CF: I read Sade’s Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) at the end of the 1960s. In the late 1960s I went to Paris to meet Éric Losfeld, the publisher of sexy sci-fi comic-book Barbarella (1962-1964). At that time in Paris there was this publisher called Pauvert, who specialised in books about fantastic and erotic cinema. Pauvert was also publishing Sade’s whole body of work and I read some of the books in the original French.

MG: I asked you about Sade because the central metaphor of …Hanno cambiato faccia (youth rebellion is vampirised and co-opted by the powers that be) reminded me of Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma / Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), which was based on Sade’s writings.

CF: Thank you for the interesting comparison, but the main inspiration for …Hanno cambiato faccia is Marcuse, not Sade.