03/10/2007

A producer of successful films through the outfit Cattleya and president of the Anica Producers section (national association of cinema and audiovisual industries) since June 2006, Riccardo Tozzi takes a look at the state of Italian cinema.

Cineuropa: How is Italian cinema doing?
Riccardo Tozzi: Domestically, the market share for Italian films has risen regularly since 2000 and it will continue increase because of the range of very different films, which are also better made because their budgets have been increased slightly. And when films succeed in getting back in favour with its national public, they also eventually get distributed abroad. However, not all films are destined for instant international success. For example in France we are still talking about films by Risi, Comencini and Monicelli, but at the start of their careers, no-one had heard of their films. They weren’t programmed at festivals because they weren’t considered artistic enough and were only discovered abroad years later – so films don’t necessarily travel quickly.

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How can international awareness of Italian films be improved?
Creating a star system is the only way to circulate films. This is what we were able to do for Don Camillo, which starred a French and an Italian actor, Le Guépard with a Texan cowboy and Rocco and His Brothers with Alain Delon. With the original version, the stars have become national and the co-production system has been destroyed. We need to reconstruct a European star system, which is based on national star systems. Romanzo criminale [+see also:
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film profile] had a positive effect in this sense because Italian actors are now recognised in France (Kim Rossi Stuart, Stefano Accorsi) like the way French, some German and many Spanish actors are in Italy. Sergio Castellitto and Pierfrancesco Favino are starring in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Giovanna Mezzogiorno was chosen to appear in Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera.

How can funding from Italian television broadcasters be increased in national film production?
We want television funding in cinema to be related more to automatic criteria and less to discretionary criteria. We also want to see the introduction of anti-trust elements and for limits to be placed on the quantity of resources that the television groups can channel through their subsidiaries. The state can impose these changes but they can also be discussed with television broadcasters (whose interest it is to have good relationships with cinema) and arrive at legal measures that are not too tough on cinema. We are realistic and we want the revision to be reasonable. Acquisition costs for television do have to be increased, but not excessively so, and each broadcaster has to buy only their own rights. Also, we already have an agreement with Sky, which we’re not happy with from an economic standpoint and which needs to be changed. But it’s a good example of collaboration because the agreement is based on automatic criteria, so it is transparent. Nevertheless, we would like to introduce the concept of pre-sales by linking it to precise parameters, in particular film budgets.

Do you think that the future law on cinema will finally come into being?
The Italian government is in a very difficult situation in all areas because it doesn’t have a margin of manoeuvre at the parliament. And the future law on cinema is no exception. So a long battle can be expected to get deductions for the cinema branch as a whole and for the creation of a national cinema centre. But everyone agrees that a system of tax incentive measures need to be introduced for cinema, which could be adopted sooner rather than later. But the government should not have to wait for systematic support for cinema. Voting is one thing and fighting to get what you want is another. The government should be ready to come under strong criticism from cinema and culture in general.