A charismatic, destructive mother confronts her son on a lively Christmas Eve. Edoardo De Angelis brings The Fire Within You into the competition of the Venice Film Festival, creating an emotional battlefield in a work adapted from the novel of the same name by Antonio Franchini.

Cineuropa: Together with the screenwriters, you chose to condense Antonio Franchini’s memoir into a single day, Christmas Eve.
Edoardo De Angelis: Indeed, it seemed like a very tall order. In truth, I was at ease because in that book, there is a primordial yet very powerful unifying element, which is the character of Angela, so I kept telling the other screenwriters that we could rewrite it countless times, but everything we needed was already there. Franchini entrusts his memories to a tale that spans decades, but I don’t like flashbacks; I like cinema to be, most of all, an art of the present day, and I like to see characters in the full swing of their actions. All that was left was to find the right time and the right place. I found it in the home because for me, the home is the battlefield where human beings wage a kind of epic fight for emotional survival. And the pitched battle is Christmas Eve, the moment when conflicts surface and explode. Angela bursts into her son’s house like a tsunami and sweeps everything away. In this film, I wanted to assert the primacy of the characters over the plot, which is of course still there, but it doesn’t shackle them; rather, it emanates from them. This is a story written by emanation.

What kind of collaboration did you have with Franchini?
Franchini told me he was writing this book about his mother, and I felt a very strong resonance with my own life story. When I learned that producer Roberto Sessa was developing it and had entrusted the writing to Ilaria Macchia and Francesco Piccolo, I thought it was worth trying to engage with the project. Franchini said: "Now it’s yours; do whatever you want with it." As a refined intellectual, Franchini knows very well that transposing a work into another kind of language means engaging with the very flesh of the text and teasing out something different, while the character herself remains the same.

She's a Neapolitan mother figure who is, in fact, universal. 
I think it has to do with a mother’s desire to love her son as long as he is under her control, as long as he is lit by her own light. Outside of that sphere of influence, the son must feel the cold and must feel alone because only then will he be able to come back. I believe there are human patterns that have repeated across all cultures since time immemorial. The only way to be truly universal is not to aim for universality. We cannot be everyone; we can only be ourselves. And so the cinematic approach that cleaves closest to my deepest nature is the only approach I consider acceptable, because it is the only one that contains my truth. That truth of mine can be recognised on the other side of the world as such and can be transposed into another culture.

As in The Commander, you chose a confined space in which to shoot.
I like a tight cinematic space because it’s something within which one can orient oneself more. I don’t see it as a limitation. In this movie, the house is a prairie, it’s the world. I completely deregulated my directorial set-up. I removed any shooting tool other than the camera: no tracks, no dollies, no stabilisers; I got rid of stands, of any light source that wasn’t integrated into the set. I also asked the actors to make the technical gesture of the craft disappear. So it was a process that, in the first week, led us into some moments of deep disorientation because everything had gone, and it felt as if there was no film left any more. And it’s precisely from there that the film began to emerge.

What was it like to direct Vanessa Scalera, who is especially popular on TV?
Vanessa harbours within her an immense, mysterious treasure that she still has to offer. I feel a huge force and a monumental talent within her that completely transcends her previous experiences, which are nevertheless excellent. I have the feeling she is truly an artist beyond boundaries. I think we are at a historical moment when we can break the limits of certain stylistic conventions tied to the cinematic language we’ve grown used to.