CANNES What is an Italian doing in the western epic? Roberto Minervini left Monte Urano, the small village in the Marche where he was born, 24 years ago, moving (“for love”) to the United States. He makes independent, meditative and minimalist cinema, with a documentary style. But now he loads the trigger and shoots: «It’s the first time I’ve shot a film on a normal circuit».
Arrives at the Festival with The damned: in theaters from today, limited budget, 2 and a half million. He is a guest at A certain regard with a history that couldn’t be more American, at the time of the Civil War. The director is glued to a patrol of Northern volunteers who in 1862 patrolled and guarded an unmapped land, teeming with Southerners.
A pacifist like you in the middle of a shootout.
«I wanted to go beyond the rhetoric of war, I tried to rewrite this genre, with the method of real cinema but in a fictional context; I had a dissonant relationship, due to the moral and muscular superstructure that looks to the just cause, where victory transcends the dead.”
It feels like an existentialist western with a Terrence Malick twist.
«For the atmospheres and the spiritual and supernatural element. Northerners talk about God, they ask themselves where they are going, they are men, not soldiers, farmers who don’t expect to find themselves in a fight but need a paycheck. The war that becomes an existential condition. Another reference The Tartar Desert by Dino Buzzati ».
«I went to the City Council of the capital of Montana, and I said: you are free to act and leave. I said to the firefighters who were dismantling the set: put on your uniform and act with the others. Then there are actors and filmmakers that I have had in the past. Everything is the result of improvisation and a lot of research with people who chew history.”
The weapons make a strange sound.
«In my battle the sound distorts, changes and becomes contemporary. It is the sound of all wars, it is not identified in a period, it expands, it recalls from muskets to semi-automatic AR-15 rifles.”
Northerners say, “We are all Americans.”
«Today in the USA there are parallels with the civil war. I think of the dominant polarization. I didn’t want my son to grow up in Houston, in such extreme evangelical Christianity. We moved to New York. People are convinced that Trump will win the presidential election. The Supreme Court is now a biased political body and Trump’s trial will end in nothing. An America anchored to a past worries many people. A potentially apocalyptic scenario: the return to the death penalty at a federal level, to the binary division between genders…”.
In one of his films an officer kills a black boy.
«The whole world on fire was born from a true episode that occurred in 2018. If you ask me what they say in America about Matteo Falcinelli, the Italian boy tied up and beaten by the agents, I reply that the national press doesn’t talk about it. The police union varies from state to state. That incident occurred in Miami, where police can intervene based on simple suspicion. It wouldn’t have happened like this in San Francisco.”
His origins are humble.
«I have done a thousand jobs, worker, waiter, real estate agent, campsite entertainer, professor, computer scientist. As a child I wanted to be an altar boy. My grandfather forbade me, who worked like a madman in a shoe factory, with a nail in his mouth and a photo of Stalin behind him. I understood work as sacrifice thanks to cinema.”
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