Livio Garzanti was the genius and cult Milan editor who discovered Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Goffredo Parisi. Shortly before being killed, in November 1975, Pasolini met Garzanti, who later recalled from this last evening the final salute, the very tight and silent hug from the poet and filmmaker. Garzanti had published, 20 years prior, his debut novel, Ragazzi di vita. With this episode opens the documentary Livio Garzanti, il gran viziato, directed by Giacomo Gatti, in which Toni Servillo talks about the two worlds, the editorial and the private, of a beloved and feared editor, with incredible flair, an intellectual who hated rhetoric. The documentary premiered at Biografilm in Bologna.

Cineuropa: What idea did you get of this man while preparing the documentary, meeting the people who knew him and reading the documents at your disposal?
Giacomo Gatti: For me, it has been a great discovery, because he was a man with many faces, even if he only showed a few. But I already knew the end of that story: his legacy. During his life, he appeared like a prince, at times capricious, who could decide the literary fortunes of an author and didn’t have any remorse when treating people badly. When he died in 2015, he left 90 million euros to his foundation, la Vidad, to help isolated older people and those suffering from Alzheimer’s. It also turns out that in total secrecy, he supported the likes of Emergency, which offers medical and surgical care to war victims; Libera, which fights organised crime, and Naga, a Milan association offering social and legal assistance to illegal immigrants and refugees and fights against discrimination. We’re talking about the 1980s and 1990s. Developing the documentary chronologically, I saw his coquetry, his apparent egoism and his narcissism in light of this parallel secret activity dedicated to the last in society.

How did you organise the material at your disposal?
There was so much repertoire material when we reached the editing stage that 3D Produzione managed to find, which is amazing because it wasn’t easy. My research instead started with the reconstruction of the family story and of the main events, because there is no existing biography of Garzanti. I did it with the help of his son, Eduardo. We started from correspondence, interviews published in papers. This work allowed us to create a very structured chronology, and in that journey we discovered that Livio’s father, Aldo Garzanti, had managed to save from precariousness many Milanese Jewish writers who were looking to escape deportation and who worked illegally for him on the first encyclopedias that were then the basis on which Livio would build his editorial architecture. We wanted to meet and interview many people who had known him also because one of our objectives was to gather testimonies from the last survivors, looking to create a rich archive of the memory that will remain at the foundation, in addition to the film, and will be available as studio material.

Garzanti was next to Pasolini after his accusation of obscenity against his first book, Ragazzi di vita.
As a filmmaker, Pasolini changed producers many times throughout his life, suffering from censorship and distribution problems, but Garzanti was the only editor of his literary works, with the exception of his last few months, when fatigue and opposition set in. But without forgetting this hug that we reconstructed and which was part of a series of suggestions that I’d have liked to include in the film. They were almost the same age but called each other by their names all their lives. In a few interviews, Garzanti gives an amazing description of it, I don’t think anyone has ever analysed Pasolini in such a lucid and clear way, on the one hand with the recognition of a masterful literary ability, and on the other by focusing on his flaws, his limits, his humanity. Garzanti looked to “lighten up” and polish up the first version of Ragazzi di vita and that cost Pasolini a lot. Garzanti defended him to the hilt in the trial that ended in acquittal.

How was the experience of directing Toni Servillo as a “narrator”?
It was a truly beautiful experience, without any reservations. I wanted to create a greater degree of identification between Servillo and Garzanti – they look very similar by the way – but we went more in the docu-film direction. We managed anyway to have this great actor, who had such humanity, sensibility and availability that really impressed me.