Mario Martone told us about the work done for Over there someone loves me, the documentary on Massimo Troisi in theaters from February 23rd, after the previews on the 19th.
It will be definitively in theaters from February 23 in over 400 copies, but Someone down there loves me will also have a substantial preview on the 19th in 200 cinemas throughout Italy, on the day of the 70th anniversary of the birth of Massimo Troisi, the famous Neapolitan comedian, actor and director who is explored with intelligence and depth in this new work by Mario Martone. We had the opportunity to meet the director in Berlin, where the film was presented in the Berlinale Special section, to let us talk about his vision of the Neapolitan artist and the choices made for the construction of the film.
The video interview with Mario Martone
The modernity of Massimo Troisi
We got very excited while watching Someone down there loves mebut we also wondered how much our sensations are distorted by personal experience, how different the perception of Massimo Troisi can be from the generation of the writer to that of young people who are discovering him today. “Massimo Troisi was so ahead” He told us Mario Martone, “to be able to speak very well even to today’s world. Many of the things he expressed are in fact all around us, starting with that fragility that he told with his character in a revolutionary way. There wasn’t then the idea of putting on I screen such a fragile person towards women, towards life, towards himself.” Aspects that are increasingly evident today, in a society that is changing and experiencing a crisis that envelops everything. “This living in delicate balance is something that young people of our time know well and can identify with.”
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Respect your audience
What strikes someone over there loves me is not only the completeness of Troisi’s story as a figure and artist, but also the ability to start from him to talk about cinema and not just his cinema, between comparisons with the New wave and construction of staging and comedy. A modern way of approaching the documentaryas already done by Giuseppe Tornatore in Enniuswhere the director hasn’t given up on talking about music. “I think it’s a way of respecting and loving the spectators” martone said, “don’t think they are inferior and that you have to lower your work to reach more viewers. It takes honesty to do what you intend to do and hope you meet the viewers.”
The emotion of Massimo Troisi’s thoughts
A precious element of the documentary concerns the possibility of drawing on Massimo Troisi’s writings, from the agenda of the times of the first heart operation in America to the “sheets” on which he jotted down ideas and notes, jealously guarded by Anna Pavignano, his co-screenwriter, whose involvement in the project is fundamental to the idea of Troisi and his work that Martone intends to convey. “An Incredible Emotion” the director told us recalling the first time he had the opportunity to sift through those unpublished documents, “it’s like seeing a thought that passes into writing and it’s immediate and in between there are some crazy pearls like the poems you hear in the film.”
But where would Massimo Troisi have arrived if he hadn’t left us so soon? “I think he would have alternated films with other directors, because he had this desire and it was one of the things I really liked about Massimo… maybe even one with me, since we were talking about it! But he would have continued to make his own.” On one thing, however, Martone admonishes and rightly so: “There is no need to have regrets. The pain that it no longer exists is inevitable, but it had the opportunity to make its own cinema, which we must consider as something that has been expressed and which still makes it alive today.”
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