Interview with Roger Vadim (1971)

This is the English translation of an interview with screenwriter and director Roger Vadim conducted by Ornella Volta. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in November 1971. 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.

Together with Valerio Riva, Ornella Volta edited the Italian-language, vampire-themed anthology I vampiri tra noi: 37 storie vampiriche, published by Feltrinelli in 1960. The foreword of this anthology was written by Roger Vadim (available here in Italian and here in English) as a tie-in for the Italian release of his feature film Il sangue e la rosa / Blood and Roses (1960).

Ornella Volta: Roger Vadim, so far you have made two movies that belong to the fantastic genre, Il sangue e la rosa (based on a Sheridan Le Fanu novella) and Metzengerstein (based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story [and part of the omnibus Tre passi nel delirio / Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)]), and one science-fiction film, Barbarella (1968). Do you prefer the fantastic or the sci-fi genre?

Roger Vadim: I know that it is rare that a person is interested in both the sci-fi and the fantastic, because an abyss separates the two genres. However, I like them both, even if I am perhaps more partial to sci-fi. For me, the fantastic has the fault of being based on a psychology that is connected too much to the everyday. When we enter the realm of the “fantastic”, there is always someone (the protagonist of the story, the spectator or the reader) who is afraid of something. And fear – nobody can deny it – is a feeling that by now has become too ordinary, too commonplace.

Ornella: In any case, you don’t consider the fantastic as a lesser genre?

Vadim: A lesser genre? For me the fantastic is the future of cinema. If you consider that cinema is the only medium that allows you to “see” ghosts, apparitions and marvels in action, how can you underestimate the extraordinary potential of the fantastic genre? Only a minimal fraction of this potential has been explored so far, due to the lack of resources and to the filmmakers’ lack of courage. I myself haven’t gone as far as I wanted and want to. Maybe because I felt that the audience wasn’t prepared enough to welcome my ideas.

Ornella: Do you think that sci-fi is more ductile?

Vadim: Sure. Sci-fi gives us more freedom. We are free to imagine all sorts of planets without any relation to our world – planets full of individuals with feelings and behaviors completely different from the ones we know. Indeed, my greatest ambition is to bring to the screen human relationships that have never been seen before. Just think of how conventional was female psychology before [my film] Et Dieu… créa la femme / …And God Created Woman (1956). One can easily say that Brigitte Bardot entered the history of cinema like a Martian… And even the realist authors I adapted for the screen managed to strike me only when they clashed against reality.

Ornella: You dislike reality, then? Are you a fan of escapism?

Vadim: Not at all! I like reality very much. But I don’t believe that only what man does is real. I believe that what man would like to do is real too. In sum, I believe that it is a big mistake to underestimate the part of reality that is commonly called “imagination”. Imagined and factual things have the same influence on events. And, in any case, imagination is more enjoyable. I like and I am interested in everything that increases the possibilities of man’s life. Even God can interest me, as long as God is seen as an incommensurable entity. That is to say an entity that can’t be measured and that doesn’t measure other beings. On the contrary, I lose all interest when God is conceived of as a sort of tailor who wants people to wear clothes that are too tight. I lose all interest when God becomes a pretext to make human life more miserable.

Ornella: Did you ever have the temptation to bring to the screen the so-called “parallel universe”?

Vadim: Yes, of course. But I certainly don’t want to do so in order to demonstrate the existence of such “parallel universe”: when ghosts will be decoded, I will lose interest in them.

Ornella: Did you ever deal with occultism and spiritism?

Vadim: I sure did. I even conducted a long research in those milieus. All those occultists and spiritists were lying in the most pathetic way. And yet their lies, their clumsy efforts to demonstrate the indemonstrable, showed that they really did believe. For them, lying was the only way to communicate to a non-initiate something that even they couldn’t quite grasp. The bottom line is that they did believe just like I believe, even if I don’t feel like analyzing this belief of mine in depth. I believe because I myself am an ultra-sensitive medium. When I was a kid, I could make a table shake without touching it, just by keeping my hand at a certain distance from it. I also have prophetic dreams all the time. And I have already met my doppelgänger twice over the course of my life.

Interview with Mario Bava (1969)

This is the English translation of an interview with director Mario Bava conducted by Alfredo Castelli and Tito Monego. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in December 1969. 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.

Castelli & Monego: Mr Bava, your films made you famous as the “Hitchcock of Cinecittà”. Why did you choose terror as a form of expression?

Mario Bava: I don’t know. Terror fascinates me and attracts me for no particular reason. Maybe it’s a psychological thing. In real life I am easily scared, so when I shoot a horror movie it’s as if I am taking revenge on fear itself. The lights, the technicians and the actors on set make me overcome situations that, in real life, would scare me to death.

C&M: What is your idea of “terror”?

MB: Terror is what is inside ourselves. Terror is what is released in nightmares or in madness. Terror is what makes objects around us turn into living and scary entities, when we find ourselves alone in a dark room…

C&M: Sounds like Edgar Allan Poe…

MB: More or less. In cinema, the “monster” doesn’t exist anymore. We are the monsters.

C&M: Mr Bava, in your films we often see scary creatures, vampires and repugnant beings. Doesn’t this contradict what you have just said?

MB: Unfortunately, yes. These are the laws of the market. My films are exported in many countries, especially in the USA and the UK, and over there they can’t conceive of a [horror] movie without “creatures”. Have you seen Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)? It’s a great film, with exceptional acting and direction. But they couldn’t refrain from showing the devil as a sort of scaly Frankenstein, which is quite ridiculous. In the original version of the film they even showed Rosemary’s child… A baby with yellow eyes and little horns on his head – a sight to make you weep. Luckily they cut this scene in the Italian version… Moreover, from a psychological point of view, the monsters don’t work with our [Italian] audience. In the audience there is always someone who wants to be the funny guy, and rightly so. I saw Gamera vs. Guiron (Noriaki Yuasa, 1969) recently: the papier-mâché gorilla was fighting the clay dinosaur and, at every blow, ten skyscrapers collapsed. At some point, a jeep full of soldiers approached the monsters… possibly to make things more suspenseful. A guy in the audience shouted “Here comes the army to separate the contenders!”, and none of us in the theater could take the film seriously anymore… Filmmakers should never offer spectators this kind of psychological hooks. If there is a creaking door or a shadow slowly moving in a corridor, the audience will soon “destroy” the scene with a funny joke. If the shock effect is instantaneous, however, the spectators will literally jump on their seats.

C&M: Just like in the famous scene of Wait until Dark (Terence Young, 1967), with Audrey Hepburn?

MB: I haven’t seen the film, but my daughter saw it and she told me that she did scream during the screening.

C&M: What are your favorite films?

MB: Do you mean horror films? Apart from the classics – Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens / Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) and Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) – I really like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). It scared me a lot. As for “normal” films, I like the movies with Charlie Chaplin. But, above all, I remember All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), a true masterpiece.

C&M: And what about your own films? What is your favorite?

MB: I have no particular preferences. I like the film I am making now, it has a good story…

C&M: Is there any classic story that you would like to turn into a film?

MB: […] I would like to adapt H. P. Lovecraft for the screen, but his novels are too literary: he is a master in describing beings and things that can’t actually be recreated on screen, so if I made a movie based on Lovecraft it would be a bad one. Some time ago I found a great story for me to turn into a film, The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. Unfortunately, the story already served as an inspiration for Un tranquillo posto di campagna / A Quiet Place in the Country (Elio Petri, 1968). I must say that the film is quite good.

C&M: We are talking too much about other people. Tell us about yourself. Do you consider yourself a good director?

MB: Well, I can manage: I don’t care about hitting the big time, I care about staying in the business for a long time. My father [Eugenio Bava] always told me that, he was in the movie business since 1906. Maybe I will never become like Michelangelo Antonioni: I absolutely love improvising, adapting to circumstances and creating new scenes in emergency conditions… In my view, a good director shouldn’t be like me: a good director should follow the production plan strictly and to the letter. Then you can make real masterpieces… Cinema is becoming a dangerous profession. I saw too many people ending up badly because they were too intelligent to follow the current trends or because they were too stupid and got carried away by their first, momentary success… Those who have a long-lasting career are the down-to-earth, hardworking guys: maybe they are not great directors, but they have a constant output. Apropos of that, I will tell you about that time I worked with Boris Karloff. He was a great guy, a true English gentleman. He was never late on set, he never behaved like a capricious film star. We made I tre volti della paura / Black Sabbath (1963) together. We all knew that he had arthritis and terrible pains in his legs, but he never complained about his health with us. Maybe he never acted in a movie masterpiece, but he was in the business for almost 40 years.

C&M: So you are pessimistic about your job?

MB: I am a pessimistic… optimist. At worst, I will just have to change movie genre. What matters to me is to last.

Intervista a Mario Bava (1969)

La seguente intervista al regista Mario Bava, realizzata da Alfredo Castelli e Tito Monego, è stata originariamente pubblicata nel numero 1 della rivista Horror, nel dicembre del 1969, alle pagine 49-50.

Per ulteriori informazioni su molti dei film citati, si veda il libro Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), acquistabile con sconto del 30% inserendo il codice EVENT30.

Interview with Riccardo Freda (1971)

This is the English translation of an interview with director Riccardo Freda conducted by Luigi Cozzi. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in April 1971. 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.

Riccardo Freda: I don’t love cinema too much. The world of cinema is too improvised, too ephemeral to be worthy of consideration. It is impossible to make a logic, consequential discourse from one film to the next one: cinema is ruled by trends, genres and filoni… In order to make a living, I adapted to this situation. I made a lot of movies, especially adventure movies, and I am not ashamed of it. My old collaborator and friend Mario Bava, instead, feels ashamed: he made 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto / Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) and tried to excuse himself by saying that he did it only for the money. It is obvious that we make these films for the money. But if we accept to make a movie, then we must do our best to make the best movie possible, in spite of all the difficulties.

Luigi Cozzi: Do you often go to the movies?

RF: I go to the movies all the time. I watch any kind of movie even if, when I get out of the theatre, I have to tear the film apart. But I am interested in cinema as a medium and I try to keep myself up to date. Moreover, I am working for a state censorship commission these days, so I have to review the films before they are released. I granted 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto the permission to be screened in Italy and I rejected Bava’s Quante volte… quella notte / Four Times That Night (1971), a lesbian-erotic film. Quante volte… quella notte is a horrible movie, to the point that Bava never mentions it as part of his filmography, even if he did direct it. By not granting the film the permission to be screened in Italy I think that I did my friend Bava a big favour.

LC: In your recent erotic giallo A doppia faccia / Double Face (1969), there is a full-frontal-nudity scene. How do you reconcile your activity as a film director with your activity as a film censor?

RF: I reconcile it very well. To make a film is one thing, to watch and judge a film is another thing. And after all, in A doppia faccia you can see “the bush” [il pelo] only in the foreign version [the version edited for foreign markets]. In the Italian version the girl wears her underwear, you can only see her breasts: that’s quite normal, isn’t it? What matters, to me, is the value of the film. The eroticism, or the “audacity”, of the single scene doesn’t matter. I explain myself. In La caduta degli dei / The Damned (1969), Luchino Visconti included an incest and nobody [in the state censorship commission] complained. We approved the film for public screening because it is such a beautiful and intelligent film. But we had to reject Candy (1968), made by an incompetent director called Christian Marquand. I would have greenlighted Candy : Ewa Aulin’s naked breasts and an anal intercourse briefly suggested and seen through the curtains are not that scandalous anymore, nowadays… But then there was the incest theme and the film was so dull and boring that I couldn’t really oppose my colleagues’ decision, so Candy was rejected. After one year, the movie was eventually released in Italy in a heavily cut version and very few people went to see it. It wasn’t a good business for the producers…

LC: How did you start making horror movies?

RF: I started making horror movies because of a bet. I was talking with two producers one day, [Ermanno] Donati and [Luigi] Carpentieri. I said that a film could be made in two weeks, and they replied that it was impossible. I insisted, so they phoned [Goffredo] Lombardo [owner of production and distribution company Titanus]: they explained to Lombardo my proposal and asked if he wanted to distribute the film once it was finished. He accepted without much enthusiasm and I very quickly wrote a screenplay for I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (1957), which was shot in twelve days. Then I quit the job because I had an argument with the producers, and they completed the rest of the picture in two days. The movie was set in Paris but, thanks to the miniatures and tricks I created with cinematographer Mario Bava, we shot it in the courtyard of Titanus studio, in Rome. I believe in a subtle, psychological kind of horror. No vampires, no monsters, please: they are just vulgar, ridiculous tricks. My theory is that horror – the authentic terror – can be achieved with the simplest, most common means. The most terrifying monster is our neighbour cutting his wife’s throat, am I right? The theory behind my film L’orribile segreto del dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962) is this: anybody can marry a lunatic, a raving mad person, a monster… It was a shame that L’orribile segreto del dr. Hichcock had censorship problems.

LC: Which problems?

RF: The film was cut. You see, back in those days they used to cut a film for a half-seen thigh or for a low-cut neckline, and L’orribile segreto del dr. Hichcock dared to deal with the theme of necrophilia, as the protagonist was a doctor who is in love with corpses. So the censors cut the most explicit things like the doctor kissing the corpses. As a result, the film ended up being a bit obscure, because it wasn’t clear that the doctor was a necrophile. That’s why I wanted an opening scene showing the murder in the cemetery: it’s not a film about grave-robbing, it’s a film about necrophilia. But with all the cuts that were made, the logic behind the film was a bit lost.

LC: And what about your film Lo spettro / The Ghost (1963)?

RF: Lo spettro was born to exploit the success of L’orribile segreto del dr. Hichcock. I wrote the screenplay in one day, all in one go. I shot Lo spettro in twelve days and I am happy about it. Barbara Steele was great with me: a real lamb.

LC: And your film Caltiki il mostro immorale / Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959)?

RF: I don’t consider it a film of mine. There are monsters and space jellyfish in it: it is Bava’s stuff, honestly. It is his thing. Caltiki il mostro immorale was born by chance, I made it in order to help Bava. You see, back then he was working as a cinematographer for a director called Pietro Francisci. On set, Francisci was always sleeping, it was Bava who did all the work: setting the camera, creating the tricks, directing the actors, and so on. Basically, Bava was directing the films and bringing them to success. There is nothing wrong with this. But, one day, I discovered that Francisci was always saying bad, humiliating things about Bava. Therefore, since Bava was my friend, I told him to break up with Francisci. Bava agreed with me but his dog was ill, his wife was pregnant and he had to pay his taxes… In one word, he had to make a living… So we met up at his father’s house and we came up with a film: Caltiki il mostro immorale. Then I proposed the film to a production company and it was accepted. I quit the job when the shooting was almost complete, with two days of work left. I directed the film, but Caltiki il mostro immorale is the typical film by Bava. I don’t want to take credit for it. The only thing I remember with pleasure are the statues that we used in the film: I sculpted them myself. As for the horror genre, I am now trying to make this film provisionally titled Il ragno. It is a sinister story, but it is the kind of brivido [thrill] that I like: something real, something possible. No monsters, no bogeymen like the ones that even Roger Corman is forced to use. No, in my film there are real anguish and fears, things that really exist, hidden inside all of us. Anybody can hide a monster inside the depths of his self, right?

LC: What about your film Maciste all’Inferno / The Witch’s Curse (1962)?

RF: Nobody wanted to make the film, because there were too many tricks and special effects to do. But I love tricks and special effects, so I accepted the project. Maciste all’Inferno starts as a witch story, but then it becomes the usual adventure film with Maciste. I would also like to mention my film Romeo e Giulietta (1964), which got great reviews all over the world, and Trappola per l’assassino (1966) (which I made in France, where I lived from 1965 to 1967, after becoming a French citizen). And then I would like to let you know that I made a film with Michelangelo Antonioni.

LC: Really?

RF: Yes, the title was Nel segno di Roma / Sign of the Gladiator (1959) and the credited director is Guido Brignone. Actually, I shot the spectacular scenes (the battle scenes), while the rest of the film was directed by Antonioni. Of course, both Antonioni and I did it for the money…

“The vampires among us” (1960) by Roger Vadim

A few months ago, in December 1959, I had a meal with some friends in a restaurant in Rome. On that occasion, I narrated to one of them – a brilliant writer and Goncourt-prize winner – a shocking dream that I had the night before. My friend, R. V. [Roger Vailland] (we have the same initials), is an uncompromising rationalist, and he takes a particular pleasure in giving Freudian interpretations of people’s dreams.

I told him: “I am in a theater. The seats have been pulled out from the floor and piled up in the orchestra, so that they form a gigantic, messy pyramid. The floor is covered with bits of iron that look like a strange vegetation. I am having a fistfight with a friend. I fall down on the floor and I get up. I look at my hands and I discover that my left hand is missing the little finger. I didn’t even realize that my little finger had been cut off!”.

R. V.: “A castration complex?”…

I never got to know the unsuspected developments of my friend’s interpretation of my dream: I think that, in that very moment, the waiter brought us our spaghetti alla carbonara. However, that very night I was invited to a cocktail party. I went there and I was introduced to a man whom I had never met before. But I will remember him for a long, long time: the little finger of his left hand was missing. The man told me that he lost his little finger in Japan, during the war. A premonition? Or shall we be content with R. V.’s explanation and think that it was all a coincidence?

A strange, complex, indefinable universe exists at the margins of our life, and sometimes this universe expands itself and overflows. There are people among us who have sensed, glimpsed, guessed this universe, if only for an instant. I won’t talk about the supernatural because the topic disgusts me: it could well be that this mysterious universe is nothing but an unexplored, so-far unconceivable aspect of that small area of our bodily life that we very briefly experience – that area that man has been trying to tridimensionally define while every day it breaks laws that until that moment appeared intangible, immutable. The occultists have tried to dominate this liminal universe, just like scientists have regulated the movements of the stars and codified energy sources. But the two universes – the universe of the scientists and the universe of the occultists – still are diametrically opposed. Often, though, poets have taken their inspiration from both universes at the same time.

Among all the poetic manifestations of the occult universe, the myth of the vampire is the most fascinating and awe-inspiring. It seems that the myth of the vampire was born three centuries ago in some villages of the Bohemia-Moravia, based on witch tales and peasant gossip. It certainly wasn’t don Calmet’s infamous book that gave birth to the myth of the vampire. Some people even connect the origin of vampirism to a group of Christians who discovered the mystery of the resurrection of Christ and, after being expelled from Palestine, migrated to Central Europe and became the rulers of the place by practicing blood rites that attracted the wrath of the local peasants (who were already burdened with, and exasperated by, corvées and all kinds of taxes). The people of ancient Egypt also had their own vampires, and so did the people of China and Japan, though these people called vampires by other names. To make a history of the vampire is a dubious and dangerous undertaking. It is better to concern ourselves with vampire stories. I don’t believe in vampire stories. But I believe in what inspired them.

Roger Vadim

“I vampiri tra noi” (1960) di Roger Vadim

Qualche mese fa – un giorno di dicembre del 1959 – ero a tavola con degli amici in una trattoria romana. Raccontavo a uno di loro, brillante letterato e recente premio Goncourt, un sogno che avevo fatto la notte prima e che mi aveva molto impressionato. Da razionalista intransigente, R. V. [Roger Vailland] (ha le mie stesse iniziali) si diverte a trovare nei sogni un significato freudiano.

Io: “Ero in un teatro. Le poltrone erano state divelte dal pavimento, accatastate in mezzo alla platea e formavano un’enorme piramide disordinata. Pezzi di ferro erano sparsi dappertutto sul pavimento, spuntavano dovunque dalla moquette come una strana flora. Io mi accazzottavo con un amico. Cado, mi rialzo. Mi guardo le mani e mi accorgo che alla sinistra manca il mignolo. Me lo ero tagliato di netto, e neanche me ne ero accorto!”.

R. V.: “Complesso di castrazione?”…

Quali insospettati sviluppi potesse avere quell’interpretazione applicata al sogno di un uomo come me, non lo seppi mai: credo che in quel momento abbiano portato in tavola gli spaghetti alla carbonara. Ma quella sera stessa, mi pregarono, come al solito all’ultimo momento, di intervenire a un cocktail. Ci andai e mi fu presentato, tra gli altri, un tale che di certo non avevo mai visto prima in vita mia. Ma di lui mi ricorderò per un pezzo: gli mancava il mignolo della mano sinistra. Mi disse di averlo perso in Giappone durante la guerra. Premonizione? O ci si deve accontentare della spiegazione di R. V. e pensare a una banale coincidenza?

In margine alla nostra vita, esiste uno strano universo, complesso, indefinibile, e talora si effonde, dilaga. Qualcuno tra noi esiste – e con qual diritto? – che per un attimo ha intravisto, intuito, indovinato quell’universo. Non parlerò di sovrannaturale, mi ripugna: può darsi invece benissimo che questo universo misterioso altro non sia che un aspetto inesplorato, finora neanche concepibile, di quel pur angusto settore della vita corporea del quale, per un tempo brevissimo, abbiamo conoscenza. Di quel settore che l’uomo ha cercato di definire tridimensionalmente e che ogni giorno infrange leggi e norme parse fino a quel momento immutabili, intangibili. Questo universo liminare, gli occultisti hanno tentato di dominarlo: come gli scienziati hanno regolato il moto delle stelle e codificato l’energia. Ma i due universi, quello degli occultisti e quello degli scienziati, sono ancora diametralmente opposti. Spesso, tuttavia, i poeti hanno saputo attingere ispirazione ad ambo le fonti, contemporaneamente.

Di tutte le manifestazioni poetiche del mondo occulto, il mito del vampiro è quella che contiene più fascino, quella più ricca di stupore. Pare sia un mito nato tre secoli fa in qualche borgata di buzzurri della Boemia-Moravia, su una trama di storie di streghe e di beghe paesane. Certo, non è stato il famigerato libro di don Calmet a dargli origine. C’è persino chi attribuisce i segreti di questa strana forma di sopravvivenza a un gruppo di cristiani che avrebbero scoperto il mistero della resurrezione del Cristo e che, più di un millennio dopo, cacciati dalla Palestina, emigrarono nell’Europa centrale, e lì divennero despoti e signori praticando il rito rinnovatore del sangue e facendosi guardare con sospetto dai cittadini cui corvée e balzelli fornivano già sufficienti motivi di antipatia. Neanche agli egiziani sono mancati i loro bravi vampiri; e un po’ più in là se ne ritrovano anche fra cinesi e giapponesi. Ma li chiamavano con altri nomi. Far la storia del vampiro è impresa dubbia e pericolosa. Sarà meglio invece cedere il posto alle storie di vampiri. Io alle storie di vampiri non credo. Ma credo a ciò che le ha ispirate.

Roger Vadim

Interview with Ernesto Gastaldi (November 2018)

An e-mail exchange with screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi about his contribution to L’amante del vampiro / The Vampire and the Ballerina (Renato Polselli, 1960), L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962), La cripta e l’incubo / Terror in the Crypt (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964) and Il mostro dell’Opera (Renato Polselli, 1964). 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: I’d like to start with a very general question. As a writer of genre movies active since the late 1950s, what is your opinion about the dichotomy between auteur cinema and genre cinema in the Italian film industry of the 1960s and 1970s? Did you feel discriminated against by the critics at that time?

Ernesto Gastaldi: We screenwriters knew all the critics: most of them were failed auteurs. We used to laugh about their (mostly scathing) reviews of our movies. We knew that genre cinema was important because the money it made allowed producers to try and make bigger, more demanding and prestigious films. We used to distinguish between true auteurs and quaquaraquà [tall-talking posers] like Francesco Maselli. Then Quentin Tarantino came to the Venice Film Festival one summer and kneeled in front of Sergio Martino calling him ‘Maestro’, and all Italian critics suddenly became interested in Italian genre cinema…

MG: Let’s talk about Renato Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro, your official debut as a screenwriter. During my research at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, I couldn’t find any production data about the film. Could you tell me something about the producer and the production company Consorzio Italiano Films?

EG: I got to know the producer Bruno Bolognesi and his wife on the set of L’amante del vampiro, in late 1959. I was the screenwriter and the director’s assistant. Bolognesi was a good and honest man, but he was not a professional. Everything was improvised and disorganised, a total mess, including his company Consorzio Italiano Films.

MG: Was L’amante del vampiro a film financed through the distribution’s minimo garantito [a form of pre-financing based on a rough, minimum estimate of the net box-office receipts the movie would collect at the end of its theatrical run]?

EG: Yes, it was. L’amante del vampiro was financed by a regional distributor, who provided the minimo garantito via cambiali [promissory notes].

MG: Do you have an idea of how much the movie cost? A similar vampire film from the same period, L’ultima preda del vampiro / The Playgirls and the Vampire (Piero Regnoli, 1960), cost 37 million lire, according to the cost statement I found in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato.

EG: Yes, L’amante del vampiro cost around 40 million lire.

MG: I’d like to ask you about this sentence from your 1991 autobiography Voglio entrare nel cinema: ‘The vampire [in L’amante del vampiro] is Walter Brandi, who brought the deal. The friend of the vampire must be a young man from Tuscany, as he is willing to invest some money’. In what sense had Walter Brandi ‘brought the deal’? Did he invest his own money in the production of L’amante del vampiro, as he would do a few months later for L’ultima preda del vampiro?

EG: No, Walter Bigari (‘Walter Brandi’ was a pseudonym) didn’t have capital to invest in L’amante del vampiro. He simply introduced his friend Gino Turini to the producer. Turini wanted to be an actor really badly and he was willing to invest a few millions in the film in order to kickstart his acting career. The producer then gave Turini a role in exchange for the money.

EG: No, no, not at all! Walter was a true Don Juan! I don’t know how he managed, but he had sex with one woman after the other. I became a friend of Walter’s later in my career and every time he met a woman who embraced him, his problem was to remember if he had slept with her already. All his relationships with women lasted a maximum of three or four days. Walter’s career was a rollercoaster, with high peaks and deep abysses, both as an actor and as a producer. As an actor, he became a hero because during the shooting of a film at the Passo del Furlo he saved a colleague from drowning. Then he worked as Michel [sic] Sernas’s body double for a while. In the end, he became a producer and he got some success with a couple of commercial movies. Walter was an extraordinary person: his attitude towards life and towards the people around him was always the same, whether he was driving around in a Ferrari or walking around flat broke.

MG: Was Walter Bigari a homosexual in real life? I ask because of the ‘retroactive/active from the rear vampire’ joke that you make in your autobiography…

MG: French actress Hélène Rémy receives top billing in L’amante del vampiro. Was she hired in order to make an Italo-French co-production deal?

EG: Hélène was living in Rome at that time. I don’t think the producer tried to make any kind of co-production deal. In any case, Hélène was useful to reach the foreign market. I guess that’s why she was cast.

MG: Many of the people hired for L’amante del vampiro (yourself included) studied and graduated at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. According to the Italian law of the time, hiring personnel who graduated at CSC granted fiscal benefits for the producers, didn’t it?

EG: Yes, it did. As former CSC alumni, we tried to create a union, but we didn’t succeed. The CSC law could have given us the keys to Italian cinema. In fact, this law forced producers to hire in every Italian film one artistic cast member and one technical cast member who were CSC graduates. If the producers didn’t abide by the CSC law, they could lose the Italian nationality certificate and all the connected benefits.

MG: Did you ever shoot any scene of L’amante del vampiro in the Istituto Nazionale Luce studios mentioned in the opening credits?

EG: No, the film was shot in Artena, we were staying in a small hotel over there. The Istituto Nazionale Luce studios were hired only as a formality, to fulfil legal obligations.

MG: Contrary to the Italian Gothic horrors to come, the story of L’amante del vampiro is set in Italy (see the opening pan and the typically Italian names of the characters)… Were there particular reasons behind this autarchic choice?

EG: No, there were no particular reasons. Simply, we were still very naïve. Only later did we start using foreign names, pseudonyms and settings.

MG: Were the dance scenes of L’amante del vampiro an attempt to exploit the success of Europa di notte / European Nights (Alessandro Blasetti, 1959)?

EG: No.

MG: The ending of L’amante del vampiro is a bit unclear in my opinion, as we don’t really know if Luisa (Hélène Rémy) is alive, dead or vampirised. Was this ambiguous ending chosen in order to have a chance to make a sequel?

EG: No.

MG: The title of Riccardo Freda’s L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock was chosen to exploit the popularity of Alfred Hitchcock in Italy and worldwide. The title that you originally chose, though, was Raptus…

EG: I was still naïve, I guess. The producers Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri were not, and they chose the ‘Hichcock’ title instead of Raptus…

MG: What follows is the preventive-censorship report on your screenplay for L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock. I’d like to know what you think about it… ‘If we are not mistaken, necrophilia has already been mentioned in other films but, until now, it has never been used as the central theme of a movie. In this sense, the necrophiliac protagonist [of L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock] is a rather original idea. However, this originality was nipped in the bud because, after the first few scenes, the screenplay immediately starts to follow the most abused clichés of the horror genre […]. No remarks to be made about obscenity’.

EG: The criticism is fair enough from a stylistic point of view, but director Riccardo Freda was a genius and the film made a lot of money abroad.

MG: Let’s move on to Camillo Mastrocinque’s Carmilla-inspired La cripta e l’incubo. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 novella Carmilla was published for the first time in Italy in 1960, in a Feltrinelli anthology edited by Ornella Volta and Valerio Riva. Did you read, or were you asked to read, Carmilla before writing La cripta e l’incubo?

EG: My co-screenwriter Tonino Valerii told me about that novella.

MG: Tell me about the idea of having a young-hero character in La cripta e l’incubo. This young male hero is nowhere to be found in Carmilla…

EG: What can I say? A young hero was important for the commercial potential of the film.

MG: What would you think if you read an essay in which the lesbianism of La cripta e l’incubo is connected to the crisis of post-war Italian masculinity and the post-war female emancipation?

EG: Now you sound like Francesco Maselli… 😉

MG: In the opening credits of Polselli’s Il mostro dell’Opera, the story and screenplay are credited to you, to Giuseppe Pellegrini and to Polselli himself. However, I remember an interview you gave a few years ago, in which you denied writing the film. If so, why were you credited?

EG: I don’t remember the exact reason. Maybe the producer needed a CSC graduate.

MG: Il mostro dell’Opera had a lot of troubles. It was shot in 1961, but was released only in 1964, apparently because the producer had financial problems. The film was produced by a company called ‘Nord Industrial Film di Ferdinando Anselmetti’ and based in your hometown, Biella. Did you know this Biella-based producer called Ferdinando Anselmetti?

EG: Yes, I knew the poor wretch: he pretended to be a count, but he was penniless.

Interview with Fabio Frizzi (autumn 2016)

An interview with composer Fabio Frizzi about his contribution to Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (Lucio Fulci, 1975). 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: How did you get involved in the making of Lucio Fulci’s Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza?

Fabio Frizzi: In 1975 I was 24 years old, I was at the very beginning of my career. A few years earlier, I had started studying Law at the University in Rome. My real interest, however, was music, and my ambition was to become a musician. I started as a guitarist and of course I was part of a rock band. My father, Fulvio Frizzi, was an important film distributor. He worked as direttore commerciale [business, sales and marketing manager] for Euro International Film first, and then for Cineriz. Since my father was a prominent figure in the Italian film business, I had the idea of trying my hand at composing music for films. Thanks to my father’s connections, I got into contact with music producer Carlo Andrea Bixio – nephew of Cesare Andrea Bixio, the man who composed hugely popular songs such as Parlami d’amore Mariù, and the founder of Edizioni Musicali Bixio, a company producing soundtracks for Italian movies ever since the 1930s. Carlo decided to give me a chance and his brother Franco taught me the know-how. At that time, in fact, I knew nothing about the technical, material process that leads to the creation of a movie soundtrack. Carlo had me work on TV shows first, to see if I was good enough to be hired for more important jobs. After some successful trials, I made the music for the film Amore libero – Free Love (Pier Ludovico Pavoni, 1974). From 1974, I started to work in the film business on a regular basis, as part of a trio comprising myself, Franco Bixio (mainly a composer) and Vince Tempera (an extraordinary arranger and well-versed in post-production issues). As I was the youngest, least experienced member of the trio, I did a bit of everything, trying to learn as much as I could from my colleagues. Franco, Vince and I made the music for Lucio [Fulci]’s I quattro dell’Apocalisse / The Four of the Apocalypse (1975), and we were immediately asked to work on Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza. Lucio needed to work all the time to make a living, so he was making one film after the other. Back then, hundreds of films were made in Italy every year and for us musicians there was no shortage of work.

MG: Can you tell me about the workflow of the trio during the collaborations with Fulci?

FF: Lucio always had very clear ideas. When we were meeting to discuss the music for this or that film of his, he always used very specific adjectives to describe the atmosphere and the effects that he wanted to create through the music. I remember, for example, that when he wanted some soft, unobtrusive background music he used the adjective ‘transparent’. In other words, the first creative input always came from Lucio: the whole film was in his mind and he had to approve all creative choices in the end, including the music. Practically, my work with Lucio consisted of a series of phases. First of all, while Lucio was shooting the film, I was given the script, which I had to read in order to get an idea of the mood, of the atmosphere of the film. Then I usually met Lucio to exchange ideas and opinions. It was during these meetings that Lucio used to give me the adjectives I told you about. Then, starting from these adjectives, Franco, Vince and I started preparing some music themes, from which Lucio had to choose the ones he preferred. After the film was shot and edited, I watched it on a moviola and did the ‘time keeping’, i.e. I took notes about where exactly Lucio wanted the music within the film (from minute X second X to minute Y second Y, and so on). After that, we recorded the music based on my ‘time keeping’ notes and we had a final meeting with Lucio to check the final result.

MG: In the Italian genre cinema of the 1970s, producers would normally insist on saving as much money as possible, and I imagine it was the same for Fulci’s films. Did the low budget ever affect your work?

FF: Not only was Lucio a very cultured person, interested in jazz and painting, he was also a great artisan. As I told you, he made films for a living. Making a spectacular movie that could earn good box-office receipts proportional to the low budget was essential: the producer would have made profit and Lucio would have had the chance to make a new film straight away. So, yes, saving on production costs was crucial, and Lucio and his collaborators were exceptional professionals, great artisans able to create something exceptional with very little means. The ending of …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà / The Beyond (1981), for instance, was shot in a small room but, thanks to the work of Lucio, director of photography Sergio Salvati and plenty of other technicians, it seems to be shot in a boundless wasteland… in the Great Beyond, indeed… As for my work as a composer: of course, Lucio’s films were made with very little money compared to the big Italian and American productions, but we never allowed ourselves to be sloppy. Both as a member of the trio and in my ‘solo’ career, I have always had enough financial means to do decent (and occasionally even very good) work. We usually worked for about one or two months on each project, from first conception to final recording, it never was something that we did in five minutes. And I think that our care shows, if you watch and listen to the films closely. Yesterday I re-watched Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza, and I must admit that Vince did an outstanding job on the arrangements: they sound good even in the crappy digital copy of the film that I watched on Youtube! However, I was a bit ashamed when I saw the scene of the dinner in the house of the Sicilian relatives of the protagonist. You know, I completely erased from my memory that I did this blatant rip-off of the main theme of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)… We didn’t have the rights for the original because they were too expensive, so I was told by the producer to compose something similar to The Godfather’s score… It would have been better to buy the rights of the original, given my poor imitation! [Laughter]

MG: Do you know the reason why Fulci decided to make Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza? Would you say it was a personal project or a work for commission?

FF: As I told you, Lucio was a commercial filmmaker, in the sense that he made his living with cinema. Directing films was his job – a job in which he made use of both his extraordinary culture and his artisanal know-how. So Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza definitely wasn’t ‘the film of his life’. Lucio needed to work in order to earn his living and solve his own problems: he was constantly pitching his ideas around or being asked to direct this and that, because he was trying to shoot as many films as possible. Back in the 1970s, hundreds of films were produced every year in Italy, and most of the producers were not ‘film people’, film experts, or film buffs, but businessmen, entrepreneurs who decided to enter the ‘film world’, and invest in film production to make money. They exploited some genres that were profitable at that time – western, giallo, horror, etc. But there were also some producers who were totally obsessed by cinema, people who could go bankrupt just to be able to say: ‘This is the film that I produced, this is my film’. Some producers made profit, some went bankrupt, some made loads of films with mixed box-office results and then changed their line of business completely. An example of the latter is Fabrizio De Angelis, who produced several successful horror movies directed by Lucio and then tried his luck in fields other than cinema. For most producers, filmmaking was like betting on horseracing: they had to choose a product to make and place their bets on it. Generally, producers had these long lists of titles and ideas: comedy, horror, western, adventure, erotica, musical, etcetera. These titles and ideas circulated and if somebody liked a certain idea, he would try to develop it and convince a producer to find the money to make it into a film, often in the attempt to exploit the success of a similar movie at the Italian or US box-office. I don’t know exactly how Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza was born: I started working on the project when the film was already in production.

MG: I presume that the idea of having a Sicilian ‘transplanted’ to Northern Italy was due to the fact that Sicilian actor Lando Buzzanca was to star in the film.

FF: I can only make guesses, as I wasn’t involved in the film’s conception. It could be that the film stemmed from a meeting between Lucio and the crazy Milanese guys Beppe [Giuseppe] Viola (a sport journalist), Enzo Jannacci and Franco Nebbia (who became famous in the 1960s as singers and stand-up comedians). Lando Buzzanca was a very popular film comic in 1970s Italy and it could be that he was hired by the producer for reasons of commercial appeal. But you also have to keep in mind that Buzzanca is Sicilian and Lucio also had Sicilian origins. Plus, they had already worked together for Nonostante le apparenze… e purché la nazione non lo sappia… all’Onorevole piacciono le donne / The Eroticist (1972), directed by Lucio and starring Buzzanca.

MG: It could be that Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza was trying to exploit the Italian success of horror parody Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974), or of one of the many comedies about class struggle made in Italy ever since La classe operaia va in Paradiso / Lulu the Tool (Elio Petri, 1971) won the Grand Prix for Best Film in Cannes. I am thinking of Il sindacalista (Luciano Salce, 1972) (also starring Buzzanca as a Sicilian ‘transplanted’ to Northern Italy) and Il padrone e l’operaio (Stefano Vanzina as Steno, 1975). Do you remember if Fulci was satisfied with the finished film? In Paolo Albiero and Giacomo Cacciatore’s book Il terrorista dei generi. Tutto il cinema di Lucio Fulci, I read that Fulci was unhappy because the producer hired Buzzanca as a lead and by that time the actor’s popularity was waning. Moreover, I read that Fulci was also unhappy about the film’s box-office result (which seems a bit harsh on his part as the film did fairly well, making about 200 million lira and ranking as the 79^th out of more than 400 Italian films released in the same season).

FF: Let’s go back to the horseracing metaphor… Do you have friends who are into betting on horseracing? Even when they win, they always complain, it’s never enough. Lucio was probably unsatisfied because the film didn’t make enough money for the producer to hire him to make another film straight away. As I told you, Lucio needed to work all the time, and ranking 9^th out of 400 is always better than ranking 79^thout of 400, isn’t it? [Laughter] 200 million could have been a good box-office result for a film made with economy, but it was nothing compared to the billion lira earned in the same years by Fantozzi (Luciano Salce, 1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (Luciano Salce, 1976)…

MG: Do you remember if, during the making of Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza, Fulci or screenwriters Mario Amendola, Pupi Avati, Bruno Corbucci, Enzo Jannacci and Giuseppe Viola ever mentioned an explicit desire to bring to the screen the problems of mid-1970s Italy, for instance the workers’ struggles, the austerity and the everyday violence of the lead years?

FF: No, I don’t remember them saying anything like this. I have experienced the Sessantotto [1968 revolts] and the contestazione [anti-authoritarian protest] years myself as a young student in Rome, and I can assure you that at the University in the 1970s there were a lot of student protests and young people talking just like the unionist character played by Francesca Romana Coluzzi in Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza. Lucio certainly wasn’t a right-wing person, but I wouldn’t say he was a left-wing militant. I believe (but this is just my personal opinion) that he simply wanted to make people laugh during those very dark and heavy times of our history known as the lead years. At the same time, though, I believe that the film is not purely escapist entertainment. In my view, Lucio used grotesque, farcical, surreal, fantastic and horror elements to make us think about the real-life situation of 1970s Italy, where workers were tricked into giving blood to the capitalist padroni [masters]. So in a way the vampire triumphs in the end: this is certainly no laughing matter! Even if the film is a comedy, it contains serious elements as well.

MG: Tell me about your work on the song Vampiro S.p.A., which sounds very attuned to the post-1968 zeitgeist.

FF: It really is a nice, funny song. But in making it, none of us had explicit political aims. The song was born from an on-set meeting between the trio Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera and Franco Nebbia, who had worked on the film’s script and played the small role of businessman Meniconi. Franco was a man of many talents: musician, stand-up comedian, an extraordinary man, well-read and nice. Today he is mostly remembered for a great song he made in the 1960s, Vademecum Tango. Lucio immediately realised that we (the trio) got along well with Franco, so he told us: ‘Why don’t you guys make a song together for the end credits?’. Thus, the song Vampiro S.p.A. was born and put at the end of the film as a way to summarise the plot.

MG: Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza is told from the point of view of the employer, of the capitalist. Fantozzi and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi, on the other hand, are told from the point of view of the exploited employees. Tell me about your work on the soundtrack of the two Fantozzi films.

FF: Besides the difference that you have noted, there are a lot of similarities between Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza and the two Fantozzi movies, especially as far as themes are concerned (the focus on the workers’ conditions, capitalist exploitation, etc). It could be that Lucio wanted to do something similar to Fantozzi, but changing the point of view, as you said. Surely he wanted to make a smash-hit comedy, just like the films of the Fantozzi series proved to be. As for my work on the first two Fantozzi movies, I worked with actor Paolo Villaggio, who was also the author of the books on which Fantozzi and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi were based. Luciano Salce was a great professional, but he focused exclusively on preparing the shots and directing actors. Villaggio took care of the music: we met and he told me he had fallen in love with this Cat Stevens song from the soundtrack of Harold & Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971). Basically, he wanted something similar for Fantozzi. Starting from this concept, I developed the main musical theme for the film.

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.