Matteo Garrone: The Hollywood Interview

Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone.

MATTEO GARRONE TAKES IT TO THE STREETS WITH GOMORRAH
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the February issue of Venice Magazine.

Born in Rome in 1968, Matteo Garrone graduated art school, then cut his cinematic teeth as an assistant cameraman and spent several years devoted to painting full-time, before directing his first award-winning short film, Silhouette in 1996. Garrone’s eighth film is the internationally-lauded drama Gomorrah, which won the Grand Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, among other plaudits. Based on journalist Roberto Saviano’s best-selling expose of the same name, Gomorrah shows the effect of the notorious Camorra crime family in the Naples and Caserta regions of Italy. The book caused such a sensation, on both sides of the law, that Saviano was forced to go into hiding, once it was learned the Camorras had put a price on Saviano’s head.

An Italian mobster gets some sun the new-fashioned way in Gomorrah.

In transferring a non-fiction subject to the screen, Garrone followed the lead of his filmmaking heroes, Italian neo-realists such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who were noted for casting non-professionals in their gritty, true-to-life stories of Italian peasants struggling to survive. “Most of the cast were from a local theater company, some from a prison theater company, and some were not actors at all,” Garrone explained recently during a stopover in L.A. “It was very important for me to choose the right face, as it was for Pasolini, so I always start with the actor’s face, then hopefully the rest of the actor would follow.”

The price of gangland violence strikes close to home in Gomorrah.

A tableaux-like story, Gomorrah follows six characters: a local “Don” who finds that his power is quickly slipping; a 13 year-old boy who finds the mean streets of his neighborhood steering his destiny in the wrong direction; two dim-witted young men who idolize Brian de Palma’s Scarface and foolishly try to start a criminal empire of their own; a college-graduate with a seemingly bright future who finds that working with the Camorras tests his moral fiber to the breaking point; and a gifted tailor who finds himself in the middle of a war between the Camorras and their Chinese competitors.

The film's most iconic image: two teens take target practice with a cache of guns foolishly stolen from gangsters.

“I had a lot of very rich, complex storylines to deal with, so I tried to film them in as straightforward a style as I could, as if I were a passerby with a camera who happened to be there by chance,” Garrone explains. “Also, I’m hoping that, like the films of Pasolini and De Sica, it will make the film always feel contemporary.”

Garrone lines up a shot on the set of Gomorrah.

Garrone’s admiration for author Saviano is palpable as he talks about the young writer. “It’s a very sad situation with Roberto Saviano: he’s 29 years-old and remains in hiding. There’s no coming back from where he is because he’s become a symbol against Camorra. Roberto grew up there, and wrote this best-selling book, and denounced not only the crime family, but the police were aware of most of the things he wrote in the book, so it made them look bad, too.” Garrone is aware of the parallels between Savino and other authors who have had to suffer to bring their story and their message to light. “It’s similar to what Salman Rushdie went through. The book was so explosive, the government in Italy brought the army into Naples, declaring war against Camorra. So literally, they are at war.” A brutal war, in fact that, over the last thirty years, has cost the lives of over 4,000 people, which is a higher body count than notorious groups like the IRA, ETA, Islamic terror organizations and La Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia) have ever racked up.


The trailer for Gomorrah.

Garrone hopes that, like Saviano’s book, his film adaptation of Gomorrah will have a lasting, positive effect for Italy and its people. “As Roberto says, ‘It’s not the book, but how many people read the book, that makes its message powerful, and helps weaken the Camorra in some way.' I’m hoping that the film has the same effect.”