From the Tragic to the Comic and Back Again

by c.d.m.

28/09/2005 - Fausto Paravidino was born in Genoa in 1976 and grew up in Rocca Grimalda, a town of 1,310 in the southern Piedmont region. He attended the Teatro Stabile di Genova theatre school and worked with Jurij Ferrini’s company, performing in numerous plays by Shakespeare and Harold Pinter. In the cinema, he has appeared in No Deposit, No Return by Massimo Costa, La via degli Angeli by Pupi Avati and Guido Chiesa’s Il Partigiano Johnny.

Author of numerous theatrical texts, in October of 1999 he staged his first play, Trinciapollo, which he wrote in 1996. His subsequent work, 2 Fratelli (1998), won the Ubu Prize and the Teatro di Riccione Tondelli Prize with the following motivation: "The play’s force, enthusiastically received by jury members like a breath of fresh air, lies precisely in its closing upon itself, upon this family and, ironically, in its self-sufficiency, which keeps it in a state of suspension, simultaneously reproducing, through a games of mirrors, the mechanisms of our daily lives: something simple and straightforward, yet which expresses a sincere need, and it entertains and disturbs us because it pertains to us."

Paravidino also wrote (together with Lello Arena and Giampero Rappa) and directed Tutta colpa di Cupido (1999), La malattia della famiglia (2000), Natura morta in un fosso, Peanuts-noccioline and Genova 01 (2001). The latter two plays were commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in London and Genova 01 was inspired by events that took place during the G8 Summit in Genoa in July, 2001.
He translated Pinter’s One For the Road into Italian, as well as Shakespeare’s Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III.

Texas is his first experience writing and directing for the screen. "My film debut is a very Chekhovian story with very Pinter-esque dialogue. The end result jumps continuously back and forth between the tragic and the comic, avoiding comedy and drama. The stories I write for the theatre rarely become something else, whereas this story, which I wrote together with Carlo Orlando and Iris Fusetti, immediately took on a cinematic form because there are many characters and, in part, it is very much a landscape film."