Paolo Strippoli has brought The Spiral to the competition of the Venice Film Festival. The psychological thriller with elements of horror has its roots in classic family melodrama, featuring a deliciously diabolical Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. We discussed the movie with the director.

Cineuropa: The Spiral is a family drama shot using the codes of genre cinema, from thriller to horror.
Paolo Strippoli: It’s a film my co-writer and I had been thinking about for a long time; it wasn’t an easy one to pitch, because although it has a fairly linear structure and a classical narrative, as it’s rooted in family melodrama, it is also very much a psychological thriller with smatterings of horror. This protean nature isn’t easy to explain to a producer, who reads the script and wonders: what kind of beast is this? The main goal was to make a movie that would entertain audiences, as opposed to films that adhere more closely to certain codes that Italian cinema doesn’t often explore. I wanted its Italian-ness to be deeply felt: the film kicks off on Ferragosto, the only truly Italian holiday, within Bari’s turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie. Compared to my previous films, here, the setting is as important as the characters.

But there are elements they have in common…
There’s continuity both in terms of motifs, like water, and thematically. Flowing, The Holy Boy and The Spiral are three films about control, each in a different key. In this movie, a woman fights to keep control when life, in fact, simply keeps on happening, and that drives her insane. This theme terrifies me, and I love tackling it; it gives me the sensation of losing control - I resemble my characters a bit - and above all, I like to explore it through family dynamics because I believe the theme of control has a lot to do with society and with the modern world. Parents are the filter through which society first enters children’s lives. If that filter doesn’t work, damage is inevitably done.

Many have labelled this outright as a horror, and once again, the debate has opened up about what a genre film is doing in competition.
Anyone who wants to call it horror pays me a great compliment because to me, horror is the noblest genre there is. I don’t see it as a horror flick, because I didn’t make it thinking it was one. For me, it’s a psychological thriller, a film about a mystery that is revealed scene by scene. I hope this debate is brought to the attention of those who make the decisions, above all. I already know Venice is miles ahead of many other festivals. There’s a strong desire to see these movies compete with films from other genres or with unabashedly auteur-driven works. We need to free ourselves from the idea that horror is just a set of codes that repeat because that’s why horror gets criticised. In reality, horror is the freest genre there is, visually too. Within those codes, you can express yourself freely.

I read you had Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in mind for the role of the "estranea" from the very start.
Yes, it had to be Valeria - it was important to me. I have to say she threw herself into the project with a huge degree of generosity, and I didn’t even have to fight too hard to convince her, because she told me she knows the character of the estranea, as I do, so we had this common ground, this shared “friend”. I wrote this character for Valeria, and in the first draft, I imagined her as a somewhat darker figure, with a certain elegance and her own sensuality, but darker. And I thought that the things she says, with Valeria playing her, would land with greater malice. The film you’ve seen exists also because Valeria accepted to embody this character; otherwise, I would have changed it.

She goes head-to-head with Jasmine Trinca, who plays an ambiguous, decidedly non-nurturing mother.
She, too, has a certain cruelty to her. I think my point of view becomes clear at the end of the film. Each of us knows an estranea, but I believe we all know the character of Claudia as well, and we can recognise an estranea in her. But I’ve come to believe that everyone should be free to offer their own interpretation, which that final image pretty much suggests. The film doesn’t have an open ending.