Inside "The System": An Interview with Matteo Garrone
by Richard Porton
Before Gomorrah (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and winner of the Best Film Prize at the 2008 European Film Awards) was released to great acclaim in Europe, the director Matteo Garrone was primarily known in the United States for two visually striking films bound up with the perversities of obsessional desire—The Embalmer(2002) and Primo amore (2004). Both films also meld an almost clinical interest in the excesses of monomania with an acute sensitivity to Italian regional peculiarities. The Embalmer, an oddly poetic tale of a taxidermist with Mafia affiliations and his unrequited infatuation for a hunky waiter, reflects Southern Italy’s profound uneasiness with homosexuality. Primo amore, on the other hand, deploys the legendary charm of Verona in Northern Italy as an ironic contrast to the central masochistic romance between a crazed goldsmith and his object of desire, a woman who reluctantly embraces anorexia to fulfill her lover’s warped ideal of feminine beauty.
Gomorrah is a much more ambitious project than anything Garrone has tackled previously—and the enormous success of the source material, Roberto Saviano’s epic book of the same name synthesizing the techniques of the “non-fiction novel,” courageous muckraking, and sociological inquiry, immediately made the film adaptation an eagerly awaited event in Italy. Subtitled “a personal journey into the violent international empire of Naples’ organized crime system,” Saviano’s book dissects what is euphemistically termed “the System”—a synonym for the Neapolitan crime syndicate known as the Camorra that points to its stranglehold on the local economy and political scene as well as its increasingly global tentacles. Saviano is far from the first author to tackle the Camorra’s sordid netherworld and the reason for Gomorrah’s enormous popular success is probably attributable to several interlocked factors. First, Saviano’s personal immersion in his research, captured in vivid novelistic portraits of Camorra bosses entrenched in the Naples suburbs of Scampia and Secondigliano, goes far beyond a mere scholarly or journalistic gloss on the “true crime” genre. In addition, the fact that Saviano has been under police protection since 2006 has certainly increased his fame. In October 2008, press reports claimed that the Camorra had demanded Saviano’s murder “by Christmas,” a plea that fortunately proved unsuccessful.
Unlike previous chroniclers of organized crime, Saviano does not simply assemble facts; he processes hundreds of gruesome details involving the extent of the Camorra’s drug trafficking, control of the illegal market in haute couture, the construction trade, and dumping of toxic waste into a wide-ranging political indictment. The crux of the book’s argument might be summed up in his assertion that “(T) he logic of the criminal entrepreneur coincides with that of the most aggressive neoliberalism.” What seems like a dry, abstract argument, however, appealed to a huge readership because Saviano’s vivid prose is far removed from academic discourse. Saviano has an extraordinary talent for capturing the rapaciousness of the crime syndicate with pithy anecdotes. To cite one example that plays a crucial role in Garrone’s film, once a dress cutter subcontracted to work for the Camorristi decides to share the secrets of his craft with one of the syndicate’s Chinese rivals, the consequences prove dire (although they prove considerably more dire in the movie). As Saviano points out, unlike the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra sees itself not as an adjunct of the Italian State but as a malleable multinational corporation. This argument is encapsulated in the book in an exegesis of the machinations of the Casalesi clan: “Alliances with Nigerian and Albanian clans meant that they no longer had to be involved in direct peddling and narcotrafficking operations. Pacts with clans in Lagos and Benin City, alliances with Mafia families in Pristina and Tirana, and agreements with Ukrainian Mafiosi in Leopolis and Kiev liberated the Casalesi from bottom-rung criminal activities.” This truly defines the dark underbelly of globalization, a world that’s become “flat” in a manner that makes Thomas Friedman’s bromides seem ludicrous.
While a director like Francesco Rosi might have attempted to replicate Saviano’s treatise with a similarly contextualist strategy of “thick description,” Garrone, who straddles disparate Italian cinematic traditions, deemphasizes context and exploits the latent genre elements submerged in Saviano’s sober treatise. By constructing a mosaic of five interlinked narratives foraged from the book, Garrone mixes genres with seamless proficiency. The sad tale of the dress cutter’s defection is rendered as poignant melodrama. Two teenage boys’ doomed efforts to defy the Camorra’s domain by becoming freelancers reaches a violent apogee that recalls gangster films such as Brian De Palma’s Scarface—a film the kids worship and use to model their behavior. The story of a money runner, whose fate is sealed by internecine warfare within the clan, holds out the promise of pathos while refusing to deliver even a hint of sentimentality. A contretemps between a toxic waste distributor and his young protégé plays out against desolate landscapes that recall Antonioni’s compositions in Red Desert. Perhaps most disturbingly, the initiation of a thirteen-year-old boy into the world of drug dealing was shot adjacent to the site of actual drug deals, imbuing these sequences with a quasineorealist tone that diverges sharply from the film’s hyperstylized predilections.
In a recent article in The London Review of Books, the novelist Tim Parks faults Garrone’s film for not “offering a shred of optimism” and argues that this adaptation “makes clear that Saviano’s book would not be so interesting without its author’s visceral obsessive concern, and his consequent vulnerability.” Yet Parks, with his literary bias, misses the point that, as Garrone explains in the following interview, the film version is animated by a distinctly different esthetic agenda. While Saviano aims for intellectual provocation by marshalling facts and political outrage within a narrative framework, Garrone is more concerned with creating emotional frisson with startling images. Trained as a painter, Garrone possesses one of the sharpest eyes in contemporary cinema. Gomorrah teems with memorable compositions that offer visual equivalents to Saviano’s more analytical perspective: the grotesque, if absurd, spectacle of naked gangsters tanning themselves in a solarium before a violent outburst interrupts their leisure as the film opens; a car swerving through a statuary park after another ghastly shoot out; two crazed kids emptying their machine guns on a beach; and a hapless truck driver splattered with toxic sludge.
Cineaste interviewed Garrone shortly before Gomorrah’s American premiere at the New York Film Festival. Self-effacing and occasionally effusive, Garrone ably laid out his indebtedness to a handful of Italian cinematic forebears—as well as his determination to stake out new filmic terrain.
Cineaste: Since your best-known earlier films—The Embalmer and Primo amore were small-scale character studies—were you intrigued by Gomorrah’s larger scope?
Matteo Garrone: I found Saviano’s book very interesting and powerful. In some respects, my approach is not that different in Gomorrah than in the other films. The Embalmer, based on a short story, is also connected in that there’s the backdrop of the Camorra as well. But Saviano’s book also struck me as visually powerful. This book was very popular in Italy and many Italian directors wanted to make a movie. I thought that Saviano wrote the book from “the inside,” thereby changing how the Mafia was characterized in literature. I also tried to write from “the inside,” choosing certain characters from the book without glamorizing them.
Gomorrah features gangsters without Armani suits
Cineaste: And the fact that a few of your teenage protagonists admire the glamorous life of Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface is an important element in the film.
Garrone: I was very interested in the contrast between their lives and what they admired on the screen. In the first scene, when the kids are talking about Scarface, I shot in an actual villa that was inspired by De Palma’s movie. The owner gave instructions to an architect to build a villa based on Tony Montana’s in the film. He gave him the tape of the Pacino film. I think Saviano is correct in the book in saying that it’s not cinema that’s influenced by reality, it’s reality that’s influenced by cinema. I thought it was possible to rewrite the “imaginary” of the Mafia in movies by adapting Gomorrah for the screen.
Cineaste: Since I noticed that five screenwriters were credited on the film, I wondered how you collaborated with them in fleshing the book into a more streamlined narrative. Although there are narrative elements in the book, it’s also, in many respects, a work of popular sociology.
Garrone: Yes, that’s true. We decided on five stories and main characters. We wanted to make not only a crime film about Naples but also a metaphor about a more global situation. We wrote the screenplay in Rome. I went to Naples and talked to Saviano and the people I met there, who had experienced that world, functioned like a periscope. This allowed me to transform some parts of the script written in Rome, as I eventually did again when I was working with actors. In this respect, the process is almost documentarylike. While we were always writing with images in mind, sometimes we came up with different images while in Naples. For example, when I learned that some of the bosses went to a tanning room every day that gave me a wonderful idea for the opening. It’s also a classic gangster image—like the barbershop scene in The Godfather.
Cineaste: So the idea of opening the film with the shoot out in the solarium was in the script from early on in the process?
Garrone: Yes, when we were writing the script the idea was to convey to the audience the fact that the war in Scampia and Secondigliano started from inside the clan, not outside it; they were friends and then they started killing each other. I could also show the contrast between their concern with their appearance and their brutal killings. When you stay in this area for six months, you see all of the contradictions. The reality is very confused—good and bad, illegal and legal coexisting. It could be easy to make a mistake and become a victim of the war.
Cineaste: Of course, there’s been a lot of publicity about the fact that Saviano has had to be under constant police protection since the publication of his book in 2006. Knowing this must have presented some logistical headaches as well.
Garrone: I was very worried when I went to prepare to the film. The situation was quite different when I went to shoot the film in the summer of 2006. The book had only been published two weeks before, Saviano was completely unknown, and the book was not yet a bestseller. Even though I was worried, the local people love cinema and were very eager to help. I didn’t want to make a film against “the System,” but about “the System.” I wanted to make a film that didn’t judge, that showed how they lived and the human conflicts. The audience can judge, if it likes.
Fortunately, I’m not under protection. I wasn’t, unlike Saviano, strictly interested in a journalistic type of denunciation. When I met him to discuss the project, I told him that, if “you agree to work with me, I’m going to go in another direction.” I feel that the book and the movie complement each other.
Cineaste: I’ve read that you made a documentary in Naples in 1998. So you already had some familiarity with the city.
Garrone: Yes, it was a film on the city’s most famous wedding photographer. It was fun, but it was a film that was shot in only a week. Although it was a less serious film, there is some connection to Gomorrah inasmuch as he photographed weddings of some of the Camorrista. But, although the story involved following him through different situations, the Camorra was not the focus.
Cineaste: Your film also is quite a contrast to the Francesco Rosi approach, which features a considerable amount of context and editorializing.
Garrone: I met Rosi and he loved the movie; he loved the idea of deriving overlapping stories from Saviano’s book. He said, for him, the strongest element was the importance put on the faces of the actors; he thinks these faces have anthropological value. I very much appreciated his praise since he’s a master and has made important films on the Mafia such as Salvatore Giuliano. To be honest, however, my point of reference for Gomorrah is not a Mafia movie but a war movie—Rossellini’s Paisan.
Cineaste: Were you inspired by the episodic structure, which parallels Gomorrah’s approach?
Garrone: Yes, the episodic nature of the film, as well as the fact that you just follow the characters without judging them. At the time, the film represented a new, honest perspective that surprised audiences.
Cineaste: In terms of Rosi’s praise for your concentration on faces, many critics have praised your use of close-ups. Was it a deliberate strategy to avoid long shots and focus on the physiognomy of the face?
Garrone: That comes from studying many of the masters of cinema—Dreyer, for one. And this is also something Pasolini writes about of course. But, yes, close-ups of faces were very important for this movie. I was lucky to have found some actors who had a background in theater but also were from the area; they knew what they were talking about when they said the lines. There was an interesting marriage between the characters and the actors’ personalities. While many of the actors came from the theater, a friend of mine works at a prison and helped me to recruit some of the prisoners, a few of whom were extraordinary actors. So it’s a very diverse cast.
Cineaste: Did you employ some of the local residents as extras?
Garrone: Yes, they were happy to participate in the film and share their experiences. To a certain extent, they were the first audience for the film since they were always behind the monitor watching the film as I was shooting. They could tell me if a certain detail was correct. When I was shooting the scene with Totó and the drug dealer, the camera was at the top of the building. During the scene, an actual drug dealer, thinking this scene was real, came from the back to engage in an actual drug transaction. Then the drug dealer came and saw the scene on the monitor and advised us on how a drug deal should be conducted. In instances such as these, I was very concerned to get all of the specifics correct. While the story was not merely a replication of a reality but instead a transfiguration of reality, it was important to be careful about every detail. Since it’s a movie about “the System,” It was important to work with the people who have been conditioned by “the System.” No one ever told me not to shoot at a certain place or to avoid depicting a certain subject. Since they had grown up in this environment, they weren’t really aware that it was anything abnormal.
Cineaste: On the other hand, you use Toni Servillo, one of the most seasoned professional actors in contemporary Italian cinema.
Garrone: Yes, he’s now one of the most famous actors in Italy. I used to see him in plays when I was eighteen since my father was a theater critic. So, although he was very well known for his work in Italian theater, he’s now famous for cinema because of his role as Giulio Andreotti in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo. Although his film is shot in a completely different style, Paolo and I share some things in common. We’re both interested in visual style and are more interested in human conflict than in making traditional “message” movies. In Italy, there’s a strong emphasis on social commitment. But I think Sorrentino was more interested in documenting the relationship between Andreotti and the power structure than in engaging in political denunciations. And I was also attracted more to adapting Saviano’s book because of the characters and the images, not because of the message.
Cineaste: But you’re obviously interested in the cinema. Gomorrah occasionally evokes earlier Italian films; the statue being lifted off evokes memories of La Dolce Vita while the preoccupation with toxic waste is reminiscent of Red Desert.
Garrone: Although I wasn’t necessarily conscious of these films as influences, both of those directors certainly have a preference for the visual. I’d obviously like to find my own way and not be considered an imitator. Some have claimed my style is a new neorealism. But neorealism is of course a style that is connected to an earlier period of Italian cinema. I do owe a great debt to those directors—to Rossellini and many others.
Cineaste: In any case, it’s obvious that there are a number of very strong images in the film. The shoot out in the statuary park is, for example, one of the most memorable moments. Was that storyboarded?
Garrone: That’s one of my favorite shots in the film. As I told you before, when we wrote the script we worked from images. But sometimes when you write something it’s subject to surprises during the filming. When we wrote this, I didn’t know that it would turn out to be so powerful. There’s something esoteric and mysterious about images such as this one—it depends on the light and the locations you find, the way the car swerves. It’s something you really can’t control. Sometimes you write something that you don’t think is so powerful as it turns out to be—and sometimes the opposite is true. It’s the problem of representation vs. reality in art.
Cineaste: I noticed that you worked on earlier films with the same cinematographer, editor, and art director.
Garrone: Yes, I have a group of friends that I like to work with. In some ways, we grew up and learned about cinema together. I didn’t go to film school; I trained as a painter. Since I was interested in figurative art and composition, this helped me when I became involved in filmmaking. Perhaps all of the paintings I saw from my days of museumgoing stuck in my unconscious. In the case of Gomorrah, I might have been unconsciously invoking Francis Bacon, whose paintings are very animalistic and carnal.
Cineaste: Americans tend to be more familiar with the Sicilian Mafia than with the Camorra. Although Saviano’s book has made a tremendous impact, I assume this is less true in Italy.
Garrone: There were a number of previous books on this topic published in Italy. But Saviano found an extraordinary way to present this problem. Of course, the attention paid the book by the media was aided enormously by the fact that, like Salman Rushdie years earlier, he was under protection. This meant that the media attention led many people to read the book who weren’t particularly interested in the Camorra. The book sold over a million copies in Italy originally. When the movie came out in 2008, it brought the book back to public attention and returned it to the bestseller list.
Cineaste: It almost seems that, to benefit people who haven’t read the book, you include some concluding titles that provide a bit more context. The audience is informed that the Camorra has killed more people than most of the leading terrorist organizations and even invested in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in New York.
Garrone: Yes, it’s a change of register. As we mentioned before, the film is less journalistic than the book and goes in a different direction. But at the end, we thought, yes, it’s important to point out that this situation is something more universal. It’s just not that there have been a handful of people killed; there have been thousands. To be honest, I don’t know if including these titles at the end were the right decision. And putting them at the beginning would have predetermined the audience’s response; another kind of film would have been expected. A change of register might be jarring. It’s the only thing about the film I’m not sure about.
Cineaste: I suppose there’s the contradiction that, although there are documentary elements in the film, you’re also making a genre film. Some people have even compared it to The Wire.
Garrone: Yes, I’ve heard about these comparisons with The Wire, although I haven’t seen the program. The use of sound is also very important in the film since Leslie Shatz was the sound designer. While I recorded the sound in Naples, I went to work with him on the design in L.A. It was a great experience working with him. We wanted to make this element invisible, however. If the audience starts thinking about the artistry of the sound design, or how you’ve moved the camera, you’re finished. The subject of the movie was so powerful that you didn’t need any embellishments.
Cineaste: Although the film might not be totally despairing, it seems clear that there are no easy solutions to the problems you depict.
Garrone: As you might have read, the new government wants to wage war against the Camorra. [In October 2008, the Berlusconi government, deployed 500 army paratroopers to take on the Camorra.—RP] Since you have to understand this phenomenon, as I’ve said, “from the inside,” I don’t think it will work. If outsiders wage war on the Camorra, it probably won’t be successful. There have to be efforts to improve education, the unemployment problem, and the relationship of the citizens to established institutions. If you don’t solve these problems, people will still find ways to cheat.
Cineaste: And of course the Camorra is not just a local problem but also a global phenomenon.
Garrone: Yes, absolutely. And the problems I just outlined are probably applicable to many other countries, including the United States. Anyway, I don’t think the army can do much to solve the problem of the Camorra. When I was in Naples, I was very surprised by some of the people connected to “the System.” In many cases, these were people you never would have suspected at all. They became involved without being conscious of the consequences. If I had grown up there, I’m sure I could have made similar mistakes. That’s why I didn’t want to judge these characters; I just wanted to show their conflicts. This is because all of these characters are close to me. I understand them. This story is told from the point of view of the slaves, not the masters.
Richard Porton has edited an anthology, Dekalog 3: Film Festivals, to be published this Spring by Wallflower Press
To buy the novel Gomorrah click here
Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV No.2 2009
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