The great director of photography, three times Oscar winner, will be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Valdarno Festival. I am completing the restoration of the films shot with Bertolucci
September is a good month to be in Paris. Beautiful to shoot a film, light at its best, assures the master of light Vittorio Storaro, three times Oscar winner. And now he enjoys it on the banks of the Seine, director of photography of the next Woody Allen, who against the backdrop where he had shot 12 years ago Midnight in Paris, has just started shooting his new film. The fiftieth. Unofficial title Wasp 22. Wasp as wasp, but also as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the American high society so present in Allen’s cinema.
In realt Wasp stands for Woody Allen Summer Project. Woody’s conventional acronym to which the year 22 is added. For him the title comes after shooting, indeed after editing. As with a child, it is best to choose the name after seeing it.
A bright comedy or, as Allen would have confided, a Match Point noir?
I know the story, but with Woody the top secret of rigor. Not to say thatMatch Point
let him be the reference… Allen is a master in interweaving drama and comedy with priceless lightness, each time calibrating them in a very different way. I can say that everything takes place in our day, there will be laughter but also chills. The rest locked in the script.
true that you are among the few that Allen allows to read it in advance?
It has been like this since our first movie, Caf Society
. Before accepting I asked to read the script. You can’t, Allen is told in a poke, the agent warned me. I can, I replied. In a story I have to recognize myself, if I don’t have a figurative idea how can I tell it? The script arrived. With my name imprinted on each page in a light but indelible way: Storaro. So that if by chance something had leaked, you knew immediately who to trace it to. Common practice in America.
Since then he has read all the scripts.
The 1930s Bronx Jewish community that I rebuilt for Caf Society
through period expressionist painting, Woody really liked it. “Exactly what I wrote,” he told me. Since then he has wanted me for the next films, from The wheel of wonders
a Rifkin’s Festival a A rainy day in New York. And now this, the fifth.
The last? There was a rumor …
Immediately denied. Woody likes to tell, too curious to see how his stories unfold, to experiment with new techniques. For this film I am using HDR, High Dynamic Range, a system already requested by Amazon and Netflix, which allows you to show something like 200 billion shades of color with 4K and 16 Bit. At the moment all projectors in the world, including those in Cannes and Venice, can only project images in 4K and 12 Bit, 77 million shades. But new frontiers are on the way. Woody and I are working on the cinema of the future. Two eighty-year-olds, I 82 he almost 87, having fun like bad boys.
Who’s with Woody on the set?
Sister Letty, wife Soon-yi, adopted daughter Manzie, also engaged in the series Emily in Paris… Pure Coppola brought children and grandchildren to the set, even in the jungle of Apocalypse now. “We are gypsies, traveling in wagons with family below”, she told me.
On 8 October at the Valdarno Film Festival he will receive the Marzocco Lifetime Achievement Award.
An Italian recognition today is even more welcome since I am completing the restoration of the 10 films made with Bertolucci. I have already transcribed 5, I will complete the work next year. A promise made to Bernard before he left. And in 2023 we should receive a new scanner that will allow us to preserve films with the DOTS digital optical system for at least 500 years. More future than that.
September 27, 2022 (change September 28, 2022 | 10:59)
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