21/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: The director spoke to us about his documentary on Massimo Troisi, an homage to the great Neapolitan filmmaker’s work “from one director to another”

(© Gianmarco Chieregato)

On 19 February 2023, Massimo Troisi would have been 70 years old. A special birthday which Mario Martone decided to celebrate with a documentary, Massimo Troisi: Somebody Down There Likes Me [+see also:
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interview: Mario Martone
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interview: Mario Martone
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film profile] brought the genius of the great Neapolitan actor, director and screenwriter - who passed away prematurely in 1994 - to the screens of the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, where the film was presented in the Berlinale Special line-up.

Cineuropa: How was the film received by the festival’s international audience?
Mario Martone: I was anxious about it; I wondered how many would come to see it, but the room was full, there was a real buzz. The audience and the foreign press only know Troisi for Il postino (The Postman); his entire universe was new to them. What fascinated them the most was my relationship with him, our common ground (Naples), aside from the link that many of them highlighted between this film and my other one, about Eduardo Scarpetta, The King of Laughter.

You offer various keys to reading Troisi’s work, but the one that stands out the most is its comparison with the New Wave and with Truffaut. Massimo is described as the “Italian Antoine Doinel”. How did this intuition come about?
The feeling that there was a link with the New Wave came about when Massimo was still alive, from several conversations with Enrico Ghezzi. A minority of us were convinced that this link existed. Troisi was often considered to be a comic actor, his films were seen as a collage of sketches, whereas I’ve always thought his films had a clear cinematographic thread running through them. So I took the liberty of being provocative. François Truffaut is an all-time cinema legend, but maybe it helps to understand why these films might be seen as more significant: whether for the themes they explore, such as love, and the personal becoming political (which is central to the New Wave), or for their stylistic freedom, their digressions, their slowness combined with sudden moments of acceleration and witty remarks. In brief, the incredibly free form of Massimo’s films allowed us to take such a risk.

Aside from the focus on Troisi as a director, your documentary sets itself apart for its use of unseen footage, provided by the person who co-wrote all of Massimo’s films. How did this collaboration with Anna Pavignano come about?
Comparing notes with Anna was really important. I was interested in understanding who this person was who wrote films with Troisi, and to find out that it was a young woman with a passion for writing, but who was by no means a screenwriter from the Italian film world… Because at the time, Troisi could have worked with anyone. The material she had – notes, photos, private recordings – were invaluable, and she entrusted it all to me. It was also crucial, in my mind, that we were able to edit Massimo’s films, which isn’t an easy ask from a rights perspective. The producers did a brilliant job.

Yours is an affectionate homage, from one director to another, which you personally appear in. Was this your intention from the outset?
Not really. But after watching the film and carrying out those initial interviews, I wondered how I was going to lend the film structure, since I couldn’t interview Massimo directly. In the end, with a certain reluctance - because I don’t like being in front of the cameras -  it seemed that the right thing to do would be to lend the film the form of a dialogue between me and him, between two directors sharing and watching his works together. So I needed to appear in the film too.

Has Troisi also influenced your work in any way?
I couldn’t say, unlike Sorrentino who says he’s had a very precise influence on him. I’ve always made a very different kind of cinema. But when Massimo saw my first film Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, he was blown away and wanted to talk to me about it in private. We were in Montpellier, at a restaurant with other people from the festival. He didn’t say a word during dinner. Then, on the way back to the hotel, he took hold of my arm and started to say some really lovely things about my film – and that tells you everything you need to know about him, about his discretion, his elegance, his not wanting to get involved in small talk. He found the Naples that he wanted to extract from stereotypes in Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician. As much as our films were different from each other, we understood one another, we felt we were both restless children of our city.

(Translated from Italian)