It didn’t make the final cut for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar
nominations, but Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, the Grand Prix winner at
the Cannes Film Festival last year, drew favorable comparisons to
plenty of trailblazing American cinema for its Altman-esque juggling of
disparate, thematically intertwined storylines. A gritty ensemble drama about the tidal pull of
despair and entrapment that Italian organized crime wreaks, the movie
interweaves a half dozen sprawling, bird’s-eye story strands; its characters include a family
involved in shady waste management dealings, a haute couture tailor who
accepts under-the-table work from cut-rate Chinese competitors, and two
stray-dog teens (below) with unruly criminal impulses but no order to their
schemes. I spoke with Garrone before the final Oscar selections,
and he talked about Gomorrah‘s theatrical success in his homeland, the state of the
Italian government’s war on the mafia, and what Oliver Stone thought about his film. The interview is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: Was Roberto Saviano’s novel something you were familiar with prior to signing on to the movie?

Matteo Garrone: I started to work on this project before it became a bestseller. It had just been published two weeks prior when producer Domenico Procacci got the rights. So I talked to Roberto about the idea of making a movie, and at that time he was under [police] protection. But I never had any hesitation to make this movie, because I thought it was a very important book and also a great opportunity for me as a filmmaker.

BS: Was the actual production of the film dangerous?

MG: Yes, we changed the title of the movie when we were shooting, but we discovered that people love cinema so much that they were happy anyway to work on an artistic project. Fortunately, we found great collaboration from the people that live in that territory, where we shot. We found the help of the people valuable because we wanted to tell a story about the Camorra (or mafia) from the inside, from the bottom up, from the point-of-view of people involved in these conflicts every day, and just trying to survive. We didn’t want to make a movie just against Camorra, or to show how bad things are. It’s a movie about Camorra more than just against them.

BS: How long was the shoot?

MG: Three months, with three months of preparation. So I spent about six months living in that area, and for me it was very surprising to find out that in Italy in 2008 there was a territory in the middle of a war. But you also talk with people who are happy to live like that, and you can meet people who you feel are really not aware about their condition, because if you grow up there, you know no different.

BS: The film has six credited screenwriters, which is an awful lot. What was that collaboration like?

MG: We gathered and wrote in Rome, but there was rewriting. Even after editing, we wrote some more scenes and [went] back to shoot again. It was a long process. Every writer handled a specific part of the screenplay. Saviano came, but he started to have more and more problems with the Camorra, so he started to come more rarely, and with police protection. We worked for four months on the script, and the writers came to the set during shooting to give their advice. My way of working is that everyone helps one another — the editor helps the screenwriter, and the screenwriter helps the set designer, you know? We are all friends.

BS: You’ve said that you filmed Gomorrah in a very straightforward fashion to reproduce the feelings that you were having while shooting. Is that approach different than your other movies?

MG: In this case the material was so strong that it was very important not to make any comment on it, because there’s the risk of banalizing what you’re working on. It was important and advisable to be very simple. I come from painting, so I’m a very visual director — there is always composition of the frame. But sometimes I shoot like something was happening just in the moment, like reportage in a war. We wanted to give this idea to the audience — to [put them] there, on the inside.

BS: So had you shot any of your other films in this manner?

MG: Not in this way. There is always a relation with documentary, but in a different way. For me it’s always very important to go [on location], and talk with people, know the detail of every part of the reality that I’m talking about. Then I try to make an interpretation of that reality — not an imitation. Those are very different. I’m not interested in the latter.

BS: I’ve seen a number of documentaries on the Camorra, but I wasn’t aware of the toxic dumping, and how big an issue that is, how long it’s been going on. Is that matter well known and reported on in Italy?

MG: To be honest, I didn’t know about it, and that’s why we decided to develop those characters and that story, and also to talk about the environment. I went to the real territory and saw the place where they used to dump this toxic waste… it’s amazing. Cancer there is 20 percent higher, and it’s incredible because the first people who died are the ones that weren’t making enough money through agriculture, so they rented the area to make more money.

BS: Marco and Zero, the two young boys in the film, have a preoccupation with Scarface —

MG: (interrupting, smiling broadly) Well, that’s an idea to talk about the confusion between reality and fiction. They are like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a modern way, you know? But it could be Scarface, it could be anything.

BS: That’s interesting, because Scarface seems to have a pan-cultural appeal, as well as a lot of currency in the African-American hip hop culture…

MG: That is interesting. Actually, yesterday evening there was a screening with (Scarface screenwriter) Oliver Stone there, and I wished I could have asked him about that. All what makes me curious.

BS: What was his reaction to Gomorrah?

MG: He said liked it a lot.

BS: The film has set box office records in Italy. Was that surprising to you, given the subject matter?

MG: Well, we expected success, because the book was very popular, but we couldn’t expect such big success because the movie is quite different, and the structure mixes many stories. There isn’t a hero that fights against the bad people. It’s a gangster movie, but a gangster movie without a character at the top — there’s no [evil] boss. Instead of the emperor, it’s more like we see all the slaves. And when it came out in Italy it came out with subtitles, because the dialect was so strict that no one could understand. Only people from that region, and maybe the center of Naples, could understand. That was another [commercial] risk, but fortunately the audience [embraced] discovering such reality, without any filter.

BS: The end of the film makes mention of the mob’s 200,000 supporters, and you also mentioned Roberto Saviano needing police protection, so what does the modern war on the Camorra look like?

MG: Well, the book and the movie are complementary, and together became explosive, because now all the world knows about the Camorra — the government couldn’t ignore that, they had to do something. They declared war against Camorra and brought the army into Naples. That’s the situation. For sure, it’s good, but the army is not enough if you don’t start to solve the problem from inside. It’s important to understand why it’s so strong, and why people don’t trust in governmental institutions, which is the real problem.