In Rider, the closing film of this year’s Venice International Film Critics' Week, Sami is a food delivery rider who experiences the city’s highs and lows as he cycles through Milan – and is now facing the longest night of his life, on New Year’s Eve. Directors Roan Johnson and Davide Pavanello tell us more about what is behind this film and this story.

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Cineuropa: I find it intriguing that you decided to make this kind of urban musical. Where did it come from?
Davide Pavanello: We tried to find a new language. I come from the world of music – I’m a producer –, and this is my first film as a director, while Roan, who has some experience in cinema, wanted to make a record or write songs. Combining our aspirations led us to create something unique, but we wouldn’t call it an “urban musical.” For us, it’s not a musical – in our film, people don’t suddenly break into a dance –, but we did want to add music to the story, which led us to rap music, because it can be a form of storytelling, right?

Roan Johnson: I came to directing by chance. I was never one of those film geeks who watch thousands of movies. I started out as a writer and moved into directing partly because Paolo Virzì always told me: “You’re more of a director than a screenwriter.”

While working on Rider, I realised that what I want is to tell stories. There are many ways to do that. I had dreamed of making a narrative album which would tell a story through songs, using dialogue-based rap music – we call that “skits” – to connect one track to the next. Rap music has been part of my life since I was a teenager. This project allowed me to come full circle.

Did you actually know each other before?
DP: We were complete strangers. He was shooting a film and asked Margherita Vicario to sing a song. She told him: “Ok, but I want Dade to produce it.” She’s like a sister to me. And so we wrote and recorded the song and that day, something special happened between Roan and me. It was as if we had known each other for twenty years.

RJ: There was an immediate connection. I really liked him as a person, but I was also drawn to the way he worked. He is incredibly versatile and can move from rap to pop music in a second, which fascinated me. I told him about this slightly crazy idea I had and not only did he embrace it, but he also became the one who believed in it the most.

DP: I had always said I wanted to learn how to make films. Then I arrived on set and realised I knew absolutely nothing. I contributed, most of all, to the musical elements while Roan was the one who solved problems on set. Before that, at one point, we suddenly didn’t want to do this project anymore but then, on the very same day we had this fight, someone came and asked us to do it [laughter]. Rider was an incredible journey. But in the beginning, nobody believed in it.

Was it hard to find the right collaborators, especially for the music part?
DP: I needed people who understood that you have to put your ego aside. Rappers usually sing about themselves but in this case, they had to embody fictional characters. All of the actors are actually singers, and I’m a big fan of each of them: Ensi, Johnny Marsiglia and Axos are three of the best pens in Italian rap.

RJ: Italy has a very vibrant rap scene today, and young Italians listen to a lot of Italian music. This may sound obvious, but it actually isn’t. So the question became: why not try to bring together a rap album and a story?

Why did you want this guy to be a rider? He sees everything because of his job, but he’s invisible to so many people.
DP: We started writing during Covid, when we all became dependent on delivery riders. They were the only ones who could deliver food. They were also the only ones who were really free while we were locked up at home.

RJ: Sami is loosely based on Crime and Punishment. The story is set in today’s Milan, one of the capitals of the advanced capitalism we live in. We wanted to tell the story of this very specific character while creating something that could as easily belong in Frankfurt, London, Paris or New York.

There is an interesting paradox in the word “rider.” In English, it evokes something grand, almost the image of a knight, whereas today, it refers to one of the humblest jobs there is. But Sami is not only invisible to other people: he is someone who sees them. He enters their homes, observes their lives and he is free, always on the move astride his modern-day horse. This is what made talking about his final night, his last delivery and his encounter with this girl so interesting.

After the premiere, would you like this story to exist as more than just a soundtrack? Are you thinking about concerts, for example?
PD: Here in Venice, we will perform live songs with our artists at the closing party. As we say in the film, we made a film by Roan and Dade and an album by Dade and Roan. We care about the album as much as we care about the film.

What we would like to do is to release an 80-minute album with dialogues from the film. People have tried to talk us out of it, saying that listeners don’t have the attention span for it, so we will release an album just with the songs, but we would still like to release another version of it. Rider could be a movie you listen to and an album you watch.

RJ: The desire to experiment with music came before the film. The film came later, partly because we couldn’t find a format that would realistically fit in the current music production landscape. At one point, we considered making a 50-minute music video. Eventually, we told ourselves that we had to make an album that served a story and a film that served an album.