We met Giuseppe William Lombardo, the director of Lo scuru who arrives in the cinemas on Monday 23 February. The film is a Mediterranean gothic horror set in a Sicily made of rites, symbols and mysteries, between religion and superstition, and is taken from the homonymous novel by Orazio Labbate.
How did you work on photography, on black and white and how did you integrate elements of the landscape that instead seems suspended over time?
With Sara (Purgatorio), the director of photography, we imagined the black and white film from the stage of writing. Having many open spaces, the goal was to create constant contrasts between the earth and the sky. Not by chance we chose land characterized by a strong presence of black earth, able to oppose a sky that, at certain times, becomes a very bright white. We turned between May and June to exploit the wheat fields; in fact in that period the brown of the crops, once translated into black and white, becomes a deep black. On the set we worked even with staggered colors to accentuate the contrasts of the various characters. In the film they live with different shades of gray. Every stage had to have different shades to visually represent the evolution of the psychosis of Raz, the protagonist. It was meticulous about contrasts. Moreover, Sicily itself is a contrast. There is a feeling of death that permeates her even when there is light. The film was born from a personal episode, an obsessive disorder that I developed after the death of a friend of mine. It was summer, a season usually made of colors and light, but I saw it in black and white. I felt this feeling of death always present. Looking at the photographs of Ferdinando Scianna and Letizia Battaglia, I looked for my way to tell this black and white.
In fact, your black and white does not appear as a simple style exercise.
That’s right. With Sara we chose the format 2.39:1 because I wanted it to be a western to all effects. Looking at the films of Damiano Damiani, but also the cinema of Ciprì and Maresco, I always perceived Sicily as a western territory, an idea that I felt had never been explored to the bottom. I also wanted to recover the aesthetics of American Gothic and Southern Gothic, both literary and filmic, as Death runs on the river to transplant it into the deep South of Sicily.
The protagonist Raz lives a constant tension between clinical diagnosis, folklore, and fate. In transposing the novel by Orazio Labbate, how important it was for you to maintain this ambiguity?
Orazio makes an extremely personal journey in the book and the novel itself coincides with a fundamental period of his life. When I asked him about the rights for the work, I clearly explained to him that I found an answer to my personal experiences among those pages. In fact, I was interested in making my atmospheres to decline them through my experience and my experience. The concept of ambiguity belongs to both, although in the film I chose a more radical approach because I connected it to a speech about Sicily that in the original text is not present. Both the book and the film are united by the intimate experiences we have decided to pour into The Dark. The theme of ambiguity remains something very deep for me since it reflects the way I see the world, in addition to my relationship never entirely solved with Sicily. I’ve seen in the novel the possibility to insert my specific vision. I wanted the film to constantly suggest the coexistence of illness and fate, creating different levels of reading without ever giving a definitive answer.
You worked with actors such as Fabrizio Ferracane and Vincenzo Pirrotta, but in particular with Simona Malato, his performance is more reminiscent of the anthropological horror cinema of Brunello Rondi.
Yes, I think Friedkin was inspired by Rondi’s Devil. Simona was fundamental because it is the key to the film. For me his character is like a fallen angel. It is the most true and most sincere among all, and is what anthropologically fascinated me most. The point was how we represent madness but also all this world of beliefs and Simona gives body, gives physicality to both madness and folklore. I had her witness to the exorcisms that are still made to the church of the Walnut because I wanted her to understand how these bodies dimenate, with movements to the limit of the theatrical that fascinate me very much. Seeing these things, I always wonder what is the limit between possession and madness. I wanted Simona to embody the very meaning of the film.
An interesting element of the film is the integration between local archaic superstitions and rituals brought by new Sicilian immigrants. The character of Rosa (Daniela Scattolin) seems to be the only true light for Raz. Do you think these new generations of Sicilian can bring change?
Sicily is a land of meetings and at a political moment like what we are living I wanted to make understand through Rosa that coexist reality capable of generating a syncretism. Rosa represents an evolution of all the pre-existing cultures in Sicily, from the Greek to the Arab cultures, to their arrival. The place we have occupied now will take them and it is right that it is so if Sicily wants to have a future. Rosa is the figure that accepts pain and makes the earth grow. Remembering that it is the meeting to make us better and produce new products. The best period of our history as Sicilians coincides precisely with the encounter with other cultures and we should go back to doing exactly this.
The shield is a horror. What are the conditions in producing such a genre film rooted in the territory in a market like the Italian one? And how do you see the Italian horror scene right now?
There are authors like Paolo Strippoli or Jacopo Del Giudice who have done great things pushing on an internationality of the product, as well as Mara Fondacaro with The first son produced by Nightswim. They are all attempts that we are carrying out, even because it is not just about making horror or not, but simply finding the kind to use as a lens to deal with certain stories. The problem is that the productions today risk little, but I was lucky enough to have producers like those of Grey Ladder at a difficult time for the sector, marked by the closure of the tax credit. Then Academy Two believed and is bringing the film into more than twenty rooms in Italy, which is a good signal, even if we still talk about sporadic efforts. It is always said that the public does not want these products and only looks at American cinema. Today we should ask ourselves what horror is about to find a way like this that really belongs to us. We must not confront the American horror because they have their culture, while I care more about taking our identity and making it communicable. In short, we simply have to stop imitating.
Are you working on something for now?
I’m working on a writing film about a fact that really happened in Sicily during a certain historical period involving important figures in our history. It will be a gothic thriller based on a true and very delicate affair of which I will take the common point of view to overturn it completely.
The article The shield. Interview with Giuseppe William Lombardo proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
