«Cinema debut with a visionary film on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in our day»- Corriere.it

Davide Livermore, the director of the four consecutive season openings at La Scala, speaks of an «initiatory journey towards new visual horizons» and one must let him gallop in his imaginative world, he is a jockey who runs without reins at the Palio. He talks about his film debut with The Opera! He is shooting it (for Showlab with Rai Cinema) together with Paolo Gep Cucco who has always taken care of the visual effects which are so central to his projects. He starts from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to make it, with a large cast of singers and actors, an opera musical, a pastiche Moulin Rouge. “I would call him tale cinematic. We are talking about contemporary men». It is the myth brought back to the present day. «It will be a visionary film, a virtual sets that breaks schemes and preconceptions».

«Meanwhile from a technical point of view, using for the first time in Italy the last frontier of special effects and environment reconstructions, with huge circular Ledwalls, and all in 3D. The film is visually divided into two parts: you will experience the story of the two lovers in modern times, and you will discover that nothing is as it seemed and the story told belongs to our daily lives, without mythology».

«The myth is current because mythology uses behavioral archetypes of man and the sublimation of pain that the archetype brings with it. You live and you die, it’s the human condition. This is a great love story, of Orpheus, wonderful loser, and Eurydice. Its essence lives within each work, love and death are always there, then death can be a snake, an illness, a stake, a shooting. It is the two of them who in fact relive in Mimì and Rodolfo della Bohème and throughout the repertoire. It won’t be a snake that kills Eurydice but Pluto who will make a real kidnapping during her wedding. There is nothing in Gluck’s work except the Dance of the Furies, if anything Monteverdi and the Camerata de’ Bardi, the first offspring of melodrama».

«I am in the wake of Vivaldi who in Bajazet does the greatest hits of his time. But she is not one playlists. Without changing a word, Erwin Schrott sings Mephistopheles di Boito and the two protagonists, Valentino Buzza and Mariam Battistelli whom I discovered at the “Domingo” center in Valencia. They sing Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. The only recorded voice, functional to the story, that of Pavarotti in The woman is mobilewithout tell the Rigolettothe verses are decontextualized».

«Vincent Cassel is Charon who explains the rules of the game and in a taxi chase leads Orpheus to his beloved, trying in vain to dissuade him from continuing his journey to the underworld. Our Hades humanizes the Greek gods, it is not Hell that has its own judgment, it is a gigantic large hotel with a rationalist architecture of a kilometer in 3D, in the concierge we find Caterina Murino, and the guests of the Ades hotel will float among the waves. Rossy de Palma is one of the Moires, the goddesses of destiny but here she is human and material, the opposite of Fanny Ardant’s ethereal Proserpina. Orfeo’s mother is Angela Finocchiaro. The costumes that accompany us on the journey into the metaphysics of the myth are by Dolce & Gabbana. There will be a surreal fashion show on a 1950s trolleybus that winks at Miyazaki and crosses the ocean. A continuous interpenetration of sung and recited words, of scenes filmed in real locations alternating with virtual spaces: we will make La Scala a theater suspended over water. Sometimes it will seem to be inside a painting by Hopper. It is an ambitious film with international characteristics. It is the desire to amaze that every time brings me to the theatre».

Livermore, she is from Turin, with this surname…

“English. You have to go to Suffolk, the horse racing capital. My ancestors were very good jockeys, who are sentient animal psychologists. I lived my childhood in working-class Turin, the barricades and the world of horses, an absolute aesthetic beauty that brings together unattainable heights and total desperation».

For the betting jungle?

«Horse racing is a world of excess, of artistic craftsmanship».

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