Beyond doubt one of the more prolific Italian directors, with a career these days spanning seven decades and counting, ever-versatile Bologna native Pupi Avati’s latest work, American Backyard [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Pupi Avati
fiche film], has premiered as the closing film, out of competition, at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. Paying homage to his youth cinema favourites of the 1940s, his new outing, a black-and-white gothic horror tale, sees him revisiting his Italian giallo yesteryears. The former representative at the Findus frozen foods company also has a few suggestions for the newly instated Italian Minister of Culture when it comes to sensible cinema politics, not least regarding Italian film budgets.

Cineuropa: Can you tell us the number of this work in your filmography?
Pupi Avati: I can. This is number 55.

Fifty-five films in all sorts of genres, including, from time to time, a horror or giallo story, notably The House of the Laughing Windows in 1976. American Backyard is furthermore in black and white, looking very 1940s in style. What attracted you to this aesthetic?
As you know, I’ve made many movies, but not much cinema. This is cinema. I’m sitting there on set, everything’s prepared, the actors are in place, and I say, “Action!” We roll, and I look into the monitor. There – aah! – everything’s in black and white. There in the monitor is my reality, not that other “reality” out there. On top of this, there are a number of frames in the film that were openly and proudly inspired by those films of my youth in the 1940s, American ones – Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Erich von Stroheim…

…all of them originally Europeans, one notes. Would you say that the Europeans made the best American films in that period?
For sure!

How difficult was it to realise and release a film in black and white in 2024?
Not difficult. I shoot my movies with a low budget. The best way to be free to make exactly the film you want to make is to shoot with a low budget. Now, in Italy, we spend a lot of money, and on movies that there isn’t a market for. My movie is the cheapest of all the Italian films at the festival. I know this because I know the budgets of the others. Mine is €3 million, and I shot in the USA and in Italy with that money, and everybody got paid. A few days ago, in Italy, we got a new Minister of Culture [Alessandro Giuli], and I have a suggestion for him. I want to propose that we set up an initiative in Italy to teach people how to make films at low cost. In this country, we can burn through sums like €55 million in budgets. It can’t go on like this.

You are now in your seventh decade in this career. How would you sum things up thus far?
It has been more pain than joy. Not only for me, but also for my brother [Antonio Avati, who often produces or co-produces], for my family, for everybody. It’s a very egotistical type of job. All of the people around you are paying the price. So maybe my wife is right when she says to me that I have to go back to my old job, as the representative at Findus frozen foods in the Emilia-Romagna region.

So if you got to start all over, is that where you would go – down the frozen-foods road?
Good heavens, no. Those four years at Findus were the worst of my life. If I’m born again one day, I will again be a filmmaker.