“At the cinema I play a pop Pirandello, but my love remains the theater” – Corriere.it

ROME
Characters burst onto the scene, they want to be heard. At the Film Festival it is the day of
“The strangeness“the film in which Roberto went imagine that i “Six characters in search of an author” arise from one bizarre suggestion. Pirandello returns to Sicily after a long time for Verga’s 80th birthday and for his funeral beloved nurse, who had introduced him to folk songs and litany. And he attends the acting in a show of two gravediggers, Ficarra and Piconewho are amateur comedians, and seeing jokes and cackles of the audience, he decides to write a “daring and revolutionary” play, as Toni Servillo says in the role of the playwright. Oddity is also the release of a pop movieswhich brings together for the first time the two historical antagonists, Rai Cinema and Medusa (in the middle is Angelo Barbagallo). Released on 27 in 460 copies; we will go hunting for screenings for students, a website has been created for this purpose: [email protected].

Toni Servillo, however, Pirandello can be scary.

«We removed it from the clichés of conceptuality and intellectual heaviness, being and appearing, from its monumentality. In the invention of the background from which it arose “Six characters in search of an author”, We made him a fragile, brilliant man, with a sympathy for the popular world, recounting in a creative venture the birth of a text that at the Teatro Valle, on 9 May 1921, was greeted by the cries of buffoons and asylum. It is a film in which you can have fun thinking and you can think while having fun, without taking anything away from the anxiety about what crowds in the author’s head, about his private life, about his wife hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, about him coming out of a creative crisis “.

His physical resemblance to Pirandello impresses.

“I never noticed it before but it’s true. The preparation of the make-up lasted twenty minutes, the goatee and away ».

At the center is an investigation into the act of creation, between reason and fantasy?

“Yes, it is the making of a work, where Pirandello resumes contact with Sicilian rites, faces, landscapes, and in an improvised funeral he meets those two gravediggers. There is the vitality of the creative mystery, sprinkled by the obsession with people and characters, we could say goodbye from the film without knowing if the two gravediggers existed ».

Ficarra and Picone, a very pleasant surprise?

«The mechanism that fascinated me is that there were two actors like them. There was an ancient promise to work with them on the part of Andò, which started from the confused relationship between reality and fiction. They drop fences on the separation between comedic and dramatic actors, it’s something you remember “Kaos”By Vittorio and Paolo Taviani: in that film, I imagined nothing but Franchi and Ingrassia».

Does Pirandello invent theater in life?

«No artist who considers himself as such can be separated from life, in Pirandello’s case it is an obsession, people chase after characters and vice versa, he needs that in order to live we need to create another identity. And it is in the character of the Sicilians and Neapolitans (to which I belong), who decline it more on the side of comedy. Pirandello makes it the subject of his reflections ».

Are extras in this story important?

“It’s the public reaction. Here he has a role, both in the amateur theater where he intervened and shouted, and at the premiere at the Teatro Valle: an arrogant and ignorant bourgeoisie hurled himself against the author, as in Paris with Stravinsky and his “Festival”. It is an audience in search of an author, like the play ».

Il Valle has been closed since 2011, a story of abuse, hypocrisy, political powerlessness …

“We didn’t find it in excellent condition. It is the theater where I have performed almost all of my plays, where I have seen Brook and Vassiliev. But even Argentina, which is a police station, is not doing well ».

Nor the cinema.

«Cinema is a way to get to know the world, I was able to cultivate my curiosity for diversity, the first thing I ask in a project abroad is, how do you do things, to measure the difference with us. Today it is homologated on figurative and thematic standards, there is a risk that we can only consume it in its entirety digitally ».

Here he reunites his two loves, theater and cinema.

«Jokingly, I dream of this epitaph on my grave: here lies Toni Servillo, actor. Toni at the theater and Servillo at the cinema. I don’t do rankings but I come from the stage, it is the world in which I reflect on the meaning of my profession in an intimate and daily way ».