Edoardo Gabbriellini • Director of The City of the Living
“The film was conceived around a subtle approach; I don’t like voyeuristic approaches which turn morbid"
- VENICE 2026: The Italian director talks us through his film adaptation of an investigative novel about a heinous murder case
Presented in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section, The City of the Living reconstructs the murder of Luca Varani, which took place in Rome in March 2016 and shocked the public for its cruelty. We discussed the movie with director Edoardo Gabbriellini.
Cineuropa: Screenwriters Damiano and Fabio D'Innocenzo have removed their names from the film credits. What happened?
Edoardo Gabbriellini: It’s something that really saddens me. I took a few liberties when developing the film, because it’s such a delicate piece, both in terms of staging and editing which is the later, final stage involved in writing a film. I definitely made cuts to the original script: in the production phase, films often organically take an unexpected shape which isn’t immediately obvious, because a film comes to life through bodies, voices and spaces that are slightly different from what’s on the page. Once it starts taking shape, all you can do is follow it. Evidently, they didn’t agree with those changes.
As opposed to Nicola Lagioia’s book of the same name, from which your film is adapted, the movie adopts the victim’s perspective. Is this a betrayal of the text?
Texts always have to be betrayed; Nicola Lagioia himself said so, and he used a phrase I loved: “it’s like the chapter I didn’t write in the book”. I was very happy to see how moved he was after the first screening. But obviously, the adaptation then takes on the form and specificity of cinema.
How would you have described your relationship with Lagioia - who’s credited with the film’s story – during the movie-making process?
We had a fully open, 360-degree dialogue from the outset. He has this wonderfully non-dogmatic approach, so I felt he trusted our project, giving me the space to do the job I was asked to do: to be the director, who stages the story. Inevitably, the film is a reduced version of the book. And Nicola’s novel is also quite substantial. A more faithful transposition would have risked disappointing the book’s readers. We picked up on an undercurrent, a through-line that exists in the book but which is kept more underground, and we brought it to light. The book struck a few other notes and chords. There was also a beautiful podcast by Nicola, which offers another variation on the theme. We wanted to provide audiences with yet another way to experience this material.
The film’s young leads deliver very natural performances. How did you approach directing the actors?
It was a case of “tuning different instruments” because Valerio Mastrandrea is a seasoned professional with a long film career, and Emanuele Maria Di Stefano is young but already has some experience under his belt, so he’s a talented actor with a good career ahead of him, even though he’s still green. And then there’s Gaia Merlonghi, who we found after a long street-casting process in a Roman neighbourhood. All three have a great capacity for listening, and they were in sync with one another immediately.
You incorporated the book’s graphic violence without showing it directly, opting instead for a long take through bloodstained rooms.
The whole film was conceived around an idea of tenderness, a subtle approach, so it was never our intention to remain in that apartment during those long and ferocious moments. Hitchcock teaches us that suggestion is more powerful than explicitly showing actions. I don’t like slightly voyeuristic approaches which turn morbid.
As is the case with many other families, the family in this film doesn’t know what their children get up to when they leave the house.
As the father of a 22-year-old son, what drove me viscerally to tell this story was the desire to exorcise this reality, to restore the right distance between me and what terrifies me as a parent. Because I remember that period in my life quite well, and it’s a time when it’s very easy to lose your footing. You’re twenty, you want everything, and you want it now. But you don’t really know what you want; everything is out of focus. And in a society like today’s, where you’re overstimulated, it seems the world can offer you many things without actually guaranteeing a single thing.
(Translated from Italian)
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