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Your movie Bloodline
- in a few words, what is it about?
It's s respectful
tribute to horror movies of
the eighties, more in tune with early Raimi
than Italian horror directors Fulci [Lucio
Fulci bio - click here] or Argento … Now how did this
project come into being in the first place? It's long story, from
a galaxy far, far away
:)
In fact Bloodline
was not my brainchild, and until production
started, I was not even on the project ... at
one point the producer Mario
Magnet, who was to be the
director - would have been his debut - was looking for a technical
assistant director. Taijo Yamanuchi,
the art director, with whom I
had worked on several of
my short films, met
me by chance and asked me if
I would be interested in co-directing ... why
not? But to do good work,
you have to marry well, and
the script that he gave me had lots of
“holes”, so I tried
to "straighten" things out, throwing in a lot of irony
and mixing all genres
of horror from my childhood, and
I found myself promoted from assistant
director to direct the
film Please talk
about the writing process on Bloodline
for a bit, and what can you tell us about your co-writers?
The first version was very
beautiful, it was written by Tentori
(former Fulci-writer)
and Lizzani: fun,
with lots of zombies, but
over budget.
The revision, by the
producer Virgilio Olivari, was more modern but still above our budget.
The third version was by the
other producer and the art
director ... a small tragedy - I remember that I
cried when I read it. I
was in a dark period, I was unable to find the money for one of my films, and
the script sucked - it had nothing to do with the two previous scripts :( I re-wrote 12 versions before they
(Mario and Taijo) gave me the
okay, two months of rewriting with
my hands tied... I
just have to ask: Why a porn set (not that I'm complaining)?
It was already in the first script: I think it was supposed to be smart and
attract a larger audience ... just that
I do not like this mode of operation ... if you want to see
tits and ass, go
to rent a porn movie - and thus I approached that part without any nudity! I
have called Bloodline
a "throwback to Italian supernatural horror from the
1980's" with "an over-the-top script with wild plottwists, plenty of gruesome
gore effects, cool music, weirdness, sudden shocks, suspense, and of
course its fair share of sleaze" - a comment you can at all live with, and to what extent can
you identify with these movies of old?
Heheh,
thanks for the nice words,
but I think Bloodline
like more a
small unpretentious film,
made with €50,000,
with the sole purpose to "entertain" the viewer ...
in any way the goal was reached, happy to have made a
goal!
I believe that empathy with the films
of the eighties is the precise point here, inasmuch as anything
can happen, without trying too hard to explain why it
happens in unnecessary
dialogues ...
Related to my
last question, on Bloodline
you have worked with genre veterans Sergio Stivaletti (FX) and Claudio
Simonetti (score) - so what were these collaborations like, and how did
you get them to begin with? Sergio is a long-standing professional,
traditionally good in
make up, but I did not
feel very well: there was an
exchange of ideas on how
to make a scene better,
and sometimes that led to effects
that have forced me to change
the dynamics because it did not fit
the script ...
Claudio is
a "gentleman", super
helpful, ready for anything! You of course also have to
talk about your key cast for a bit, and why exactly these people? When
I came
on board, the fim was already partially cast, mostly friends of the art director:
not all I liked, but
most of them I could work with. On whom I insisted,
creating a rift with the art
director, was the protagonist: Francesca Faiella is
a fantastic actress with whom I
have worked in the past,
but she did not like Taijo
... fortunately, the
protagonist he wanted skipped anyways, and even then with
difficulty I managed to
pull in Francesca.
To be clear, all actors have
the right faces,
unfortunately it
feels that among them there
are great differences in level of
professionalism ...
A
few words about your location, and how did you find it?
Virtue of
necessity ...
the owner of the location is a friend
of the producer, thus it was free:
so I wrote the script with exactly the location in mind, to safe
money to "invest"
in certain scenery and in the
photography department, which strangely
producers did not seem to
be interested - Paul
Dore (production designer) and Marina Kissopoulos
(director of photography)
have saved the movie!
Many compromises had to be made as well: for example, the
labyrinth is actually a
hedge of
10 meters by 10 meters
...
The best result was the Surgeon's dungeon, I think the
most of the budget went into buying the cellophan :) What
can you tell us about the actual shoot and the on-set atmosphere?
The
thing that made
me happy was
that with Bloodline, I began to stand
behind the camera: I had
in fact set the
direction with two D7,
the first held by Marina (dop),
the other run by me ...
since it was the first time,
I was still in charge of the close
ups of the actors, while I asked Marina to change position every two
takes,
indicating the new "field":
this way I ran the acting, and Marina covered
a lot of the action shots, allowing me to have
continuity in editing,
and a big variety
of shots.
The atmosphere on set was terrible ...
the art director hated the
main actress chosen by me, and
all the time he made
his opposition to be heard, I think sometimes in front of the other
actors ... if nothing
else, Francesca, who is
very good, told me that this has
placed her in a position to play
even better, lowering herself
more in the role Please
talk about audience and critical reception of your movie for a bit! In Italy,
Bloodline has sharply divided the
public into two parts: those
who loved it, having fun
and understanding the irony, and those expecting a horror according to
Fulci [Lucio Fulci bio - click
here] and thus did not like it at all. Although the reviews have
followed this principle, the good ones won out over the bad ones :) Where the film is not
liked at akk is in Germany: Because
of misunderstandings with the German distributors, the film has
suffered sound problems, with
a really bad dubbing
... all reviews have
panned the movie- In the United States however there if fortunately some
kind of nostalgia concerning the
80s :)
According
to my information, you have shot a few episodes for the P.O.E.
anthology-movies of late - would you like to talk about those, and what do the writings of Edgar
Allan Poe mean to you, personally? With pleasure :) - we shot two movies about Poe, but
with total freedom of
reinterpretation, indeed it was imperative not
to follow philological writings
of Poe ... needed
to update and re-read
according to their own style. Poetry Of Eerie, which these days has gotten distribution
with a small distribution house (Distribution Independent
who oversaw the distribution of Bloodline), consists of 11
small segments, different
in style and visual: I
chose Valdemar (my episode: https://vimeo.com/33829824), playing with
irony - after Bloodline I
wanted to go back to using the
images without production guidelines:
every director in P.O.E.
is also a producer ...
in my episode I also have a
small role, a fake TV magician that who reads numbers by way of
mesmerization ;)
- https://vimeo.com/45367653
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The new P.O.E.
will be distributed internationally
with the Elite. We were a party of eight, and we created Project Of
Evil: a reading of Poe at his most violent and bloody
... I have done Loss
Of Breath, always
playing with the irony, but this time taking on Italian indie style
filmmaking,
for I have put everything I had been challenged making Bloodline
into this short ... How did you get into
filmmaking to begin with, and did you receive any formal training on the
subject?
Fortunately,
after some
exceptional travel experiences
in solitary, I had a desire to tell my
point of view on what
I had experienced, finding the Italian
news fake and false
... I took advantage of being discarded from compulsory
military service (it was 1995)
and feVVWS the last chance to
become a part of the National
Center of Cinematography, the
National Film School OD Italy
... I've been lucky
and won one of the five places
in the class of direction,
and after three years (I graduated in 1999) I
started working as a freelance in
many jobs, especially short
films ... for example,
this was my essay
diplpoma, and still is
the work that I feel
is best in style and innovations:
https://vimeo.com/23066176
What can you tell us about your filmwork prior
to Bloodline?
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Edo Tagliavini |
I had the
good fortune to work in 35mm
and with real budget: Bloodline
was a
big risk, not so much for little
money (€50,000), but for the
presumption and arrogance
of the production stuff
...
Anyway,
I am a person who always tries
to experiment, and in
many of my past works I think you'll see this well,
as for example in this
short film: https://vimeo.com/26465077
Bloodline instead was a constant
compromise to end
the scene and do not have an incomplete film: this
has led to many
ideas having to remain virtual. I hope with the next film to be able to
return to put in beautiful
workable ideas :) Any
future projects you'd like to talk about? We
currently are
in the process of writing: I'm
working with Francesco Malcom
(former porn actor and
also star ofin Bloodline)
on a comedy that
sees a former porn actor
(heheh), who because
of the crisis must go
back to porn, as production
reality changed
... Tron ss.
Anderson's Boogie Nights.
I thenplanm to make a film based on a
novel by Eraldo Baldini,
a paranormal thriller
with veins, and there's another paranormal thriller I'm
writing with another writer:
the story of a girl who gradually
sees all the people who mean well stop loving her ...
Ah, then I hope by
the end of the year to shoot my third episode of P.O.E., Tell-Tale Heart.
How would you
describe yourself as a director?
Hmmm
... let's say I like
to tell stories (at least I
try) - to explain where
that comes from is likesaying for the
color green, use red and
yellow ... I like to entertain
people, but then leave them
in the thought that
behind the laughter there
is something to think about…
It’s
however difficult,
partly because I do not always have
the right means to tell stories properly, not always the luck:
this short is from 2003,
but I'm very proud -
https://vimeo.com/23036573
Filmmakers who inspire
you?
Mister Herzog! Not
so much for his
films, which I find still very
powerful, but for his life - before
being a director he is a man, an
explorer, a "walker". However, my
training, or melgar
my love for the cinema, certainly stems from the early Raimi
and Jackson, and Cronenberg,
Romero, Carpenter, and
Cameron, Lynch.
Your favourite movies?
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Trivial choice, but I think the perfect
movie Blade Runner.
In second place, maybe a dead
heat, Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo - two
films that go beyond the
film. ... and of
course, films you really deplore?
Hmm, I do not think there
are bad movies, I think there
are unnecessary films
... in my opinion Man of Steel is one of
these, but I digress ... no,
I can think of no film deprecating - apart from the whole slew of Italian films which
I fortunately never see and thus have little information on, bad
comedy films that
have nothing, real sad ... Your/your movie's
website, Facebook, whatever else? I put some work on Vimeo,
even if the address is not
accessible to all:
https://vimeo.com/user3831682/videos. Paradoxically though, I'm
not a tech-geek - a
website I have yet to get myself ;) Anything else you are
dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask? I
do not think so, I just
wanted to apologize for my bad
English, helped in an equally bad way by Google
translator :)
Thanks
for the interview!
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