02/09/2002 - Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game, out of competition, explores the middle years of Patricia Highsmith’s gentle and refined killer, the devious Tom Ripley

Directing Ripley’s game, was always on the cards for Italy’s Liliana Cavani. She is a long-time fan of Patricia Highsmith’s novels and was delighted to accept American producer Ileen Maisel’s offer to direct Ripley's Game. Maisel bought the rights to Highsmith’s third novel featuring Tom Ripley back in 1998. “Maisel said she really liked my Night Porter.” Although it was made a long time ago, it is a film that audiences still love to see. "People are always telling me how seeing The Night Porter influenced and changed them,” confesses Cavani. Ripley’s Game heralds her return to filmmaking, almost ten years after Dove siete? Io sono qui. During that “sabbatical” Cavani staged a number of operas and famously sat on the board of Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI.
Cavani tells us that the title of a recently published book by Italo-American Princeton professor, Gaetana Marrone: The Look and the Labyrinth is "a perfect description of my films. Like exponents of the Italian Nouvelle Vague like Marco Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci, I have always tried to portray inner turmoil and a kind of egoistic reality in my films.
Cavani, a native of Carpi, wanted to become an archaeologist but after getting a degree in ancient literature from Bologna University, she decided to try her hand at filmmaking at Rome’s famous Centro Sperimentale. “I was always going to filmclubs. I adored De Sica, especially Umberto D. and Napoli Milionaria and still think they are masterpieces of modern cinema. When I was a child, my mother used to take me to the pictures on Sunday afternoons. I remember seeing a film about Beethoven called The Iron Mask and realising that film was the perfect medium for telling any story, even what you were thinking.” A recurring theme of many of Cavani’s films is ambiguity and the victim's rebellion against their tormentor. This is true of Tom Ripley’s perverse games. He is a character that has fascinated filmmakers from René Clemen to Wim Wenders (L’ami americain and, more recently, Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley).
“My Ripley, John Malkovich, is a middle-aged man who has reinvented himself again into a kind and cultured landowner, but continues to be the merciless free spirit of his youth."

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