The director brings to the Rome Festival the series inspired by Corbucci’s classic spaghetti western with Matthias Schoenaerts in the role of Franco Nero and Noomi Rapace in that of the villain
The lone gunslinger who walks dragging a coffin in the mud is back. In the series arriving on Sky early 2023, premiered yesterday at the Film Festival, Django has the wounded and sly look of Matthias Schoenaerts (but Franco Nero, as seen from the first images released, will make an appearance of him). “Ours is an anti-hero refractory to power, fighting against demons that live both inside and outside of himself”, summarizes Francesca Comencini, director with David Evans and Enrico Maria Artale and artistic manager of the project. Ambitious, very ambitious. Renewing the myth of one of the key characters in the spaghetti western tradition, who made “the other Sergio”, Corbucci, a director revered by Quentin Tarantino like Sergio Leone, to the point of celebrating him in Django Unchained. Many others have measured themselves, from Pasquale Squitieri (but signing William Redford) to Takashi Miike. With Django the series Comencini & C (the ten episodes of the series are written by Leonardo Fasoli and Maddalena Ravagli) take us to Texas in the late 1800s. Django (Schoenaerts) is a lone wolf, a wandering cowboy in search of his daughter Sarah (Lisa Vicari), who survived in massacre of his family. He happens to be in New Babylon, a free city built on the bottom of a crater, where he discovers that the young woman is marrying community founder John Ellis (Nicholas Pinnock). In the role of the antagonist we find Elizabeth Thurman (Noomi Rapace), villain ruthless and fundamentalist who made the destruction of New Babylon the goal of his crusade. Six months of filming in Romania, mostly in the crater of an inactive volcano where New Babylon was built.
Masculinity
«It was a crazy challenge – Comencini comments -. The attempt is to tell the conflicts and contradictions of our time through a genre that I adore, a huge cinematic dream. In the western you feel a constant sense of danger, of impending crisis. Very current ». Movies like Wild Bunch in Peckinpah, I compared of Altman, the various spaghetti westerns, he says, also contributed to his political formation. «They are great black tales for adults with which you can tell the darkest corners, exorcising them. Films capable of intercepting the sensitivity of the time even better than many denouncing films ». Here the great social conflicts on which history is grafted are racism (“paradoxically more ferocious in the aftermath of the end of the civil war that should have overcome it”) and relations between men and women. «We use the western, that is the genre that more than any other has established the codes of masculinity to tell its crisis. Django is a man who has lost his certainties, he is looking for a second chance starting from his family ties ». He will clash with two women who are not ready to make discounts. The daughter, who doesn’t trust him. And Elizabeth Thurman. «A bad one as we have seen few – assures Comencini -. It’s not just about bringing generically strong female characters to the screen, it would just risk another cliché. But to also tell someone like her, capable of ferocious actions and full of contradictions ». A woman who does not accept the idea that there can be a reality founded on acceptance, beyond any belonging, such as New Babylon and which aims, in the name of her dogmatism, at the annihilation of the different. “I find it very timely to question why the fiercest guardians of the patriarchate are often women,” observes the director. A point of arrival Django the series for Comencini who passes through the experience of Gomorrah, also produced by Cattleya. “I think I convinced them when I directed episode 10, which I shot as a western. In common there is the possibility of telling a family saga within a black macro-story, and alternating action scenes with others of high emotional depth ». The preparation was long, for the very free adaptation of Corbucci’s film, Fasoli and Ravaglia also based themselves on the diaries of the first vaqueros. “We shot in English with a cast of many nationalities, a true Tower of Babel. We were a 5 hour drive from Bucharest, away from everything. Cool but very funny. Sometimes I found myself wondering: are they really letting me do it? », Tells the director who, presenting the series, she wanted to make a premise. “I want to make a statement in memory of Masha Amini and express support and solidarity for the young people in Iran who are fighting for freedom.”
October 16, 2022 (change October 16, 2022 | 20:22)
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