The actor and director retraced his career: “De Filippo took me as an extra, since I was a child I watch a film a day”
He was five years old Vincenzo Salemme the first time he set foot in a cinema: «I left the house without telling my parents and went to a nearby room that belonged to a great uncle of mine, asleep at the box office. I went in and saw two movies in a row. Then I went home and found the Carabinieri, as well as my mother who was crying because they couldn’t find me. From that moment on, I started going to the cinema every day and still today I watch at least one film a day ».
Actor, playwright, director, screenwriter and writer, Salemme, 64, has a decades-long career in the name of comedy that moves between theater, cinema and television. If entering a room as a child made him a voracious spectator, what changed his life forever was the meeting with Eduardo De Filippo, which took place when he was 19 in Cinecittà: “I arrived from Bacoli, my village near Naples, because I knew that Eduardo was looking for extras for comedies. He looked at me and decided to have me say a few lines to get me an actor’s salary. I didn’t understand why, but then he told me that he had seen me so skinny that he was worried that I didn’t eat. ‘ Salemme spent that first money for the other shock that had welcomed him at Cinecittà, enlisted on the set of “The Cylinder”: «I met Monica Vitti, I found her in suspenders two meters from me and I had a heart attack. I lost my head and used almost all my salary to give her I don’t know how many orchids ».
The Neapolitan actor and director told about himself yesterday in Fuoricinema
, the exhibition conceived by Cristiana Capotondi and Cristiana Mainardi which until tonight brings meetings and screenings to the Milan Triennale (but also in streaming on time.news). With De Filippo, who hired him in his company, Salemme experienced a golden moment of the theater: «When we did a show, people queued at night for tickets. Now you have to beg them to get them to come to the theater. In the theater we see the transformation of a society and that era no longer exists there ».
The actual cinema, on the other hand, arrived with Nanni Moretti in the early 1980s: «He came to the theater in Rome and we became friends. I did “Sweet Dreams”, “Bianca” then “Mass is over”. We were close friends, we spent the holidays together, but then Nanni tends to create and close friendships. But that’s right. ” Irony always at hand, Salemme also confessed to identifying his whole life with cinema: «I go into analysis for this because for me it’s all a film and I can’t stay in reality. Outside I get lost, I become a bum, I don’t even have my wallet on ».
And if the appointment with the Neapolitan actor opened yesterday the second day of Fuoricinema, after him the director Marco Bellocchio offered a reflection on his cinema, while the singer-songwriter Ron has outlined his 50-year career between words and notes. In the evening, dialogue with the actress Valentina Cervi, fresh from the Venice Film Festival, and speech by Toni Servillo and director Leonardo Di Costanzo before the screening of Ariaferma. Today final day: the director Silvio Soldini and the actress Alba Rohrwacher, the director Giorgio Rights, but also the Blue Butterflies of rhythmic gymnastics arrive. Closing with the screening of «Fortuna», introduced by the director Nicolangelo Gelormini.
September 18, 2021 (change September 18, 2021 | 21:57)
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