My selfish fifties and the things that success cannot say

What is really surprising is the point of view of the teenagers, in this case Vittoria (Margherita Pantaleo), Anna and Paolo's daughter. "Teaching acting in my spare time I have to deal with young people ranging from 15 to 25 years old, so I know perfectly well who Vittoria is and who Blu is - Beatrice Savignani, a philosophy student in the film ed. Young people do not have the filters of disenchantment that, on the other hand, adults add with experience, disappointed by things that did not go as they wanted. Young people are hopefully not yet wounded, they have the truths in their pockets and the naivety to think that if you love, you do it absolutely and forever. This makes them strong, powerful, impetuous and deflagrating. But in Vittoria's character there is a sentimental diseducation, because the parents are selfish, turned towards their own narcissisms, their own fear of growing old, rather than embracing ageing and maintaining the role of parents. Thus, children in an age where you no longer verbalise with your voice, with your body, but with a mobile phone, are unprepared for the formative disappointments of growing up, which build character and make you accept abandonment. What the very young really lack is being together in an analogical way, because that is where our collectivity is formed, the knowledge of the body and how to relate it to that of others'.

In this the cinema and the auditorium can help. "The cinema is a wonderful optical box in which we all get together and share emotions. This film also has a lot of them and is full of impulses. I can tell by the reactions of the audience, which is very attentive. Sometimes it bursts into cathartic laughter, because there are tragicomic or even simply comic moments. The audience's response is much greater than I expected. I was afraid they would get confused in this labyrinth of characters that, instead, they decode very well. I start from my point of observation, which has always been that of someone outside the arena. I have had a ten-year apprenticeship, so when I made my debut I was ready to tell my view of the world knowing what language of cinema I wanted to use, learning more and more how to direct actors and bring them up to that temperature that many directors consider exhausting. For me, it is a mode of exasperation that lies within my characters, who arrive at a crossroads, dragging a different crisis from the one that intellectuals make explicit by reading and feeding on silences.

My protagonists are like many of us, sometimes exhausted and on the brink, wanting to drastically change their lives. It is a leitmotif that recurs in all my films, even the American ones, such as The Pursuit of Happiness, Seven Souls, Fathers and Daughters. My heroes try to change the course of their lives and that is why I decided to be a director'. There will also be a more cinematic reason.... "Bicycle Thieves and Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. Especially the latter, which in his simple, ordinary life tells a macroscopic and universal story. And in some ways that is what I also try to do: observe people and their intimate relationships. Individuals who are, all in all, simple, but very articulate, because we are, in any case, very complicated'.

In The Unspoken Things the camera is very mobile, with a marked use of slow motion. "Slow motion is the fragmentation of what the eye fails to capture. For example, the micro expressions we make at important moments, which are often unreadable because they are too fast. Slow motion makes the moment rarefied and explores it cinematically to present it to the viewer. Emotionally it has an important impact, a kind of boldness underneath the words'.

In 2023 and 2024, the Roman director happened to be in front of the camera playing himself in Vita da Carlo 2 and Call my agent-Italia. "In truth, when I was 21 I acted for nine months in a sitcom produced by Pupi Avati, but I already wanted to be a director. I suffered a lot because I was totally uncomfortable, but it helped me to understand the torments of actors more deeply. In Call my agent-Italy I parodied myself, having fun being ironic about all my neuroses'. Since he appeared with a giant horn around his neck, perhaps superstition was among them... 'No, it was a necklace I found in my hands. I don't have any form of superstition, on the contrary, I go towards him. If there's a ladder I go under it, if a black cat crosses I jump right behind it. In my second film, Come te nessuno mai, the main character was dressed all in purple'.

Would you remake one of his films? "I would love to remake Remember Me, because it is so visionary that it could be a nice experiment. Hitchcock did it with The Man Who Knew Too Much 20 years later, and it also won an Oscar (for best song, Que sera sera, sung by Doris Day, ed.). It would be an interesting challenge, although it never does me any good to look at my films again, because if they are good, I am afraid that I am no longer up to making an equally good one. If they are mediocre, I am ashamed.

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