"I'd say to do it here, that's the best place for an interview, isn't it?" "What say?" "This oestrus of his, this persona, so strong, these films, so different from all the others, so personal." "Then there was the legend, that De Santis was stubborn." "Giuseppe was indeed stubborn, but because he defended his ideas." "De Santis has been for me, maybe more than others, in a way, a father." "The capacity of mockery, his capacity of irony..." "He became, in some respects, not only for his young pupils at CSC, but for his friends as well, a reference point." "To Peppe, doing his job has always also meant an emotional exchange." "To him it was a game." "He said it had to be a game and we had to have fun." "To Giuseppe De Santis, I owe a lot, indeed, everything." "He let me join "Cinema" magazine, in 1942, to collaborate as a critic, and then he wanted me as a writer and assistant director." "And finally, he was the first to encourage me to become a director." "If I were to make a recommendation to historians, it would be this: to consider everything that I was not allowed to do - the scripts and the subjects of my films - as a very, very important period of my life, which" "must be taken into account, because that would give a more complete picture of my message of man as a democratic Italian intellectual." "There's two of them coming." "What do we do?" "If anything happens, go with the rice pickers." "Keep the thing on you, it's worth millions." "De Santis is one of the few names in Italian cinema to be known internationally, thanks to "Riso amaro", which he directed." "This film played a central role in one his experiences in America." "There was a party with movie people." "De Santis was with Roberto Rossellini." "They tried to get into the party by flaunting their names to the doorman." "But they were turned away." "Rossellini was ready to give up, but De Santis had an insight." "He went to the doorman and simply said:" ""Bitter Rice", "Open City"." "This opened the door to this exclusive party, and the two were thoroughly welcomed." "Once, at the train station in Milan, at night, waiting for the train to Rome," "I saw the trains coming from the rice fields, packed with rice-weeders." "Spending a night with the rice-weeders with their songs and stories gave birth to the idea of shooting a film in the rice fields." "Riso amaro is the manifesto of a certain Italy, a certain cinema, an epic one, since De Santis shot in an epic manner." "That's why, I think, he made me study westerns,.." "and not sentimental films or the commedia Italiana." "The high point of our collaboration was certainly Riso amaro." "Together we got an Oscar nomination for best screenplay in 1950." "We had some extraordinary encounters checking the locations with Cesare Pavese, then with Raf Vallone, who as journalist advised us and escorted us." "Then there was the explosion in the film of the figure of Silvana Mangano." "This marvelous Mangano, invented by my father... because indeed she was a great invention." "My father had a remarkable instinct for women, hence the invention of this marvelous Mangano... there had been nothing like her in cinema!" "She came to me like any girl coming to be seen by a director, especially in those years..." "covered with cosmetics, paint, make up." "At the time, the fad was also to have hair combed back... in short, she was horrible, really awful!" "I sent her away without a second look." "Then one day I was walking along" "Via Veneto, it was drizzling, and I met her, dressed very simply." "In the rain, with wet hair and no make up, I remember she captured the sense of a character and a soul." "She had a small rose in her hand." "He had a talent for discovering the actress in a woman." "In the original script, Silvana Mangano was not meant to be the protagonist." "The protagonist was supposed to be the American, Doris Dowling." "During filming, he realized the photogenic power of this girl and shifted the story towards Silvana." "This is the famous scene in "Riso amaro" where the rice pickers bathe in the canal, and this is" "Bosè, at Sperlonga, waiting to shoot a scene of "Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi"." "He has this rapport with the feminine element that is extraordinary." "He can portray women like no other." "The sensuality that he captures from a feminine image, without exposing absolutely anything!" "This is extraordinary about Peppe." "The dance of Bosè in "Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi", in my opinion is one of the most erotic sequences in the history of cinema." "I find it absolutely erotic." "I thought he was a ladies' man!" "He was." "My father liked women a lot." "But he always respected them." "Women at work..." "My father's movies were quite respectful towards women." "Especially with actresses..he said "you have a great advantage over actors because from the moment you appear you're already one step ahead of both the director and the audience." "Then the story does the rest." "But you must always remember that as women you already create an emotion just by being there."" "I'm often accused of having used beautiful girls, Mangano, Bosè," "Pampanini, etc., to create an easy rapport with the audience." "But I'm very happy about that and I don't find it a fair criticism." "I went in the direction that cinema needed to go in order to take deep root in the heart of a large popular audience." "It was unusual for a woman to be at the center of a story." "The woman was utilized as mother, as lover, as whore...but never as" "a woman with problems, and with rights and duties." ""Anna Zaccheo" ends with a woman slapping a man who's pestering her." "It was a woman with charisma." "A woman who... had to fight." "A woman... who had to know what she was doing." "I remember for example the great success that Silvana had with "Anna Zaccheo" in the Soviet Union." "I remember the echoes from it, and I had a first hand experience." "I was in Moscow with her, and the police were there with vans and clubs, because she was besieged by the crowd." "If there ever was a "star system" in Neorealism, it was invented by De Santis." "Not by Rossellini, not even by De Sica who for all his life was persecuted by Lamberto Maggiorani to make more films, badgering him at every opportunity." "The only one who had a vision of the "star system"" "and how to make film spectacles was De Santis." "Let's just say that he is the "Hollywood soul" of Italian cinema." "Peppe, who in life was a very nice and cheerful man, on the set was a kind of despot." "You couldn't hear a sound, there was to be total silence." "However, as director, he was very nice with the actors, explaining what they had to do." "He even posed to show how to be kissed, or how to make a move... he mimicked everything." "I think those who knew him understand how he worked." "Before shooting a scene, he explained it and made you understand how it would be presented." "Often, if there was time, he asked the crew how they would have shot it." "My father was there, showing the actors the scenes!" "There are famous pictures showing him sitting on Mastroianni's lap, doing Vlady's role." "Peppe approached the actors "by gut", if I may say so." "He explained the scene to me so well that just by listening to him" "I conveyed it, and he said to me:" ""Silvane, you express a lot, but, don't express too much, it's enough just to show what you're thinking." "There are directors who love actors, and directors who can't stand actors." "Well, Peppe was one who loved actors extraordinarily." "He liked to see them act well." "There is a film, "La strada lunga un anno", where I had an extraordinary rapport with the director, Giuseppe De Santis, and professional satisfaction because, with that film I won an award at the San Francisco Festival... but in Italy, unfortunately it had no success." "The final scene in "Ossessione", when the truck tips over in the river, and Clara Calamai dies, was shot, including takes and trials, forty-five times." "It was about taking Clara Calamai's dead body in my arms, climbing a steep and very slippery riverbank, then laying the body on the road." "After all these takes, you can imagine" "I had almost fainted, and at that point Visconti said: "There we are!" "This is really good." "Thanks!"" "We tried to set this typically American story in an Italian reality, so we chose a reality that everyone knows, that of Ferrara, because we felt that somehow it resembled more closely the myth of American culture in those years, as we lived and imagined it." "Soon after the war, when this movement was born, that would later be called neorealism, the most prepared ideologically was Giuseppe De Santis." "The generation to which I belong, is a generation born during the climate, the hottest climate, of Italian neo-realism." "Visconti is born in the "Cinema" group, and has De Santis as an assistant in his first film, "Ossessione", first as screenwriter, then as assistant director." "It is often said that neo-realism had fathers:" "Rosselini, Zavattini, De Sica, etc." "Not to take issue with the "fathers", but I would say instead that neorealist cinema had above all a great mother, which is the Italian Resistance." "It's no coincidence that the protagonists of neo-realist movies were, for the first time in Italian cinema, the same people who created the Italian Resistance." "Fishermen, laborers, craftsmen." "Women and children, besieged and starved." "This was the tragic legacy left to the Italian people by Fascism, liar and monopolist of the love of our country." "So, maybe, we need to step back from that moment, because there has been around cinema a group of intellectuals - and I don't exclude the group from "Cinema" magazine who began in the late years of Fascism to lead a battle." "In this battle, we acknowledged as masters the works of Blasetti, Camerini, and these were the first bonds formed within the magazine "Cinema" between this fraternity of authors" "close to their debut, like Visconti, De Santis and later myself and the masters of Italian cinema." "Just after the war, De Santis, after his experience with "Ossessione", alongside Visconti, took me with him to Milan, and in 1946 it was possible, thanks to adventurous backers, to make a film," ""Il sole sorge ancora"." "De Santis and I were screenwriters, and De Santis was also assistant director." "As screenwriter De Santis sensed, and you can see this in a key scene, the execution, in which" "I play a young partisan priest and Gillo Pontecorvo a partisan." "In this sequence you can already see what will become one of De Santis' stylistic modes:" "the gradual passage from an individual to a choir, which expands more and more, both in visual and in sound." "De Santis will be able to implement this style.." "as director in his first movie, "Caccia tragica", which has many scenes that are stylistically surprising." "They see us!" " Let them see." "Hey!" "Keep her tight or she'll elope!" " Was she good, the girl?" "Be quiet!" " Bravo!" "Hey, it's better than grappa, at this hour!" "A fine thing, the way you make me look!" "That's how you have breakfast in the morning, huh?" "De Santis has been a hero of modernity." "Of cinematographic modernity." "Now typically cinematographic modernity is associated with the advent of television, with the late 50s or early 60s." "De Santis was modern before then because he combined the communication of ideas, even strong ideas, he combined ideological values with cinematographic entertainment." "He combined the aesthetics of Soviet realism with Hollywood spectacle." "His use of the dolly that so characterized him is a way of seeing cinema with an airiness, with an attention to moving masses, that was not so common." "The dolly..." "Blasetti had already used it, but with Peppe it assumes a narrative value," "an aesthetic value, but also a value of content." "Although he made movies "for the audience", as he put it, in fact they were movies for connoisseurs." "Because there was a great film technique, a great passion, actually, for the medium, for cinema." "He invented these things long before the other major "Hollywoodian" of Cinecittà, Sergio Leone." "De Santis was always very attentive to scenography and landscape." "He likes long shots and he likes the construction of a story in the open air, with many people moving simultaneously." "In his first movies" "De Santis shoots "live"." "He is so attracted by the landscape that, in the opening of this film, shot on the hills behind Fondi, he spins the camera 360 degrees, so that at the end we return to the initial framing." "In these wrongs, both new and ancient, one seeks the origin of the gloomy character of Ciociari." "Diffident towards others, and jealous of their own feelings, as quick to anger as to joy, proud and boastful, ruthless in their suffering, and in making others suffer." "Who is speaking to you is the director of this film." "I too was born in these parts, and I know many stories that happened here." "Perhaps there he ran out of this need for landscape, and in a sense, his fourth film, "Roma, ore 11", returns to an environment he knows better - the city, in this case, Rome." "Rome was reconstructed by a great French Art Director, Léon Barsacq, who did an extraordinary job, since I had distrusted Italian architects, that they wouldn't know how to "copy the real thing"." "Much of the film is shot in this setting of the square, with newsstand, cinema, bar... where it becomes the emblematic square." "It was all built in the film studio." "In "Roma ore 11", De Santis had Elio Petri as a young assistant,.." "who later worked with him as screenwriter on many films." "It arises from an inquiry by Elio Petri about something that really happened." "Some girls are waiting in line for a job, the staircase collapses, and some girls are overwhelmed by this collapse." "An event that caused a sensation and was covered by the press was treated as testimony of the difficulties of youth and female employment in those years." "What interested him was the social cross section, as an inquiry, and on this cross section constructing characters that would be of interest to the public." "The inquiry was the Marxist side." "The construction was Hollywood style." "How beautiful, the sky!" "Yeah, it's beautiful." "And we look at it just to know whether it rains or not." "And when do we have the time to look at it for free!" "?" "You say the sky here is the same as in America?" "But with your hunger, where do you find the energy to speak?" "You're really odd, you know that, Angelina?" "Born in Fondi, he became "Roman"." "He became Roman after a few years when my grandpa moved to Rome, but he remained faithful to Fondi all his life." "He used to come here, stop at home, then meet the town." "He had a rapport with the town itself, "with the stones", as he put it, and with the people that were part of the town." "When he strolled, he visited the barber, the craftsmen, and above all, the youth." "When I got to Fondi, I seemed to know it because he had already described it to me in such an extraordinary way." "In this sense, he was a wonderful narrator." "I remember that Peppe always joked with me." "He called me a city rat." "Because I was born, in fact, in Rome's navel, Via dei Coronari." "But Peppe, taking me to Fondi with him, especially for "Non c'è pace...ulivi", introduced me to many folksongs and many aspects of rural life that I did not know and came to appreciate so much." "Ore'!" "Come out, Ore'!" "Nice work, that artichoke son of yours, Pasquale!" ""Giorni d'amore", which is set here in Fondi and in the surrounding countryside, today seems almost a historical testament of a rural culture which unfortunately is no more." "Yet not centuries have passed since we made the movie." ""Giorni d'amore" is the story of two young peasants, Mastroianni and Vlady, who cannot afford wedding expenses, suit, white dress, etc." "As was the custom, they decide to elope then make a reparatory marriage, thus avoiding the expenses." "Pasqua'!" " Angelina!" "We go...to the hut?" " Yes." ""Giorni d'amore"." "aside from Mastroianni and Vlady, its whole contour originates in this town." "For instance, the woman who plays" "Mastroianni's mother actually nursed me, held me in her arms, and when I directed her, it wasn't about her obeying me... she'd say "Baby!" "," "I held you in my arms...!", as to say:" ""Look!" "I held him in my arms and now he wants to command me!" That's how it was." ""Giorni d'amore" is definitely a comedy, though a comedy anchored in a social context." "However, he wanted to make an entertaining movie." "The film that he had long prepared, "Italiani, brava gente", kept being postponed month to month, then year to year." "And we thought together, "The Visit"." "We had already written the subject, the treatment, we were satisfied but then came the news that Peppe had to leave because "Italiani, brava gente"" "had been "cleared" to start shooting." "Giuseppe De Santis tackles the snow in the Soviet Union to shoot" ""Italiani, brava gente"." "The lead is Tatyana Samojlova from "The Cranes Are Flying"." "Raffaele Pisu plays an Italian soldier." "The film is shot around Moscow and deals with the Italian campaign in Russia." "The crew does not have it easy." "Shooting with these storms is not easy." "Imagine waging war!" "Throughout his career he always paid attention to the spectacle cinema even in his less successful films." "In "Italiani, brava gente", there are masses that fight, that struggle, the "100,000 mess tins of ice", and so on, just as in a big film by De Laurentiis, even if the movie was less great than he wanted." "The projects that he made, his westerns, the stories he wrote to try to return to directing, they were always highly spectacular films." "Just reading proved it." ""La strada lunga un anno", Peppe could not do in Italy for various reasons." "He migrated to Yugoslavia." "But even in Yugoslavia he sought the very stones as he always told me:" ""I will seek even the stones, not only buildings, houses, countryside, but also the stones that may look like my town", because he was so attached to his town." "I have a nice memory of this movie." "I love it very much." "The actors were from all the republics, since in Yugoslavia there were 6 republics." "Now unfortunately they are gone." "There are six states." "There was also a civil commitment, a political choice, to follow me all the way to Yugoslavia to make a film that was considered damned here, that could not be shot." "So much so that the movie came out for only 2 days, then was removed from circulation, as if it were the devil himself." "It all happened by chance." "One day I was leaving the theater with friends, and he passed the theater around 11:30 PM." "The show was over and my girlfriend said:" ""Come to dinner with us because there is a famous director who is shooting a film in Yugoslavia."" "I went to dinner with them:" "it was Peppe." "But nothing more." "After six months I got a call from Valafin, the producer of the film, and I did the audition, and after one or two days I was informed that De Santis had chosen me because he had seen some films I made in Yugoslavia." "At a meeting, he told me:" "you suit me very well, but you should gain weight, at least 15-17 kilos." "So unfortunately, I put on weight to do a peasant." "You're so beautiful!" "Beautiful!" "Angelina!" " Let's make a child." "Our story began with "La strada lunga un anno"." "It lasted forty years." "What can I say, about Peppe?" "That he was an extremely kind man, good, very altruistic, who loved young people, who took care of the young." "In fact, all his former students, actors and directors as well, are really his children." "The transition of his films into Peppe's private life is reflected in "La garçonnière"." "I participated in drafting the treatment along with Elio Petri, and then worked as assistant director." "The drama that Peppe lived, having fallen in love with Gordana Miletic, the protagonist of the film, and at the same time" "having an admiration, respect, and deep affection for Giovanna ... and also fascinated by my mother's mind, by her culture, her intelligence, and very much tied from a cultural standpoint." "They were very... they worked together." "I think my mother was a right arm for my father." "In short, they were a great couple - as I recall, and also as I'm told." "In 1974, the Cinema Show of Pesaro organized a major retrospective on neorealism." "What resulted was that the critical parameters with which we thought about that period were all undermined." "The most striking was Peppe De Santis." "His cinema had been considered highly cultured but above all aligned with the ideological dictates of the movement." "But seeing the films, the cinematic reading suggested a completely different director." "This finding was in some ways thunderous because it opened the doors to a critical rereading of his cinematographic work." "Pesaro '74 was a great compensation, moral and critical, for De Santis." "I remember the examination of his work by Martini, Aprà, Miccichè..." "For him it was truly a moment of reassurance and comfort." "Right in those years, his decline began." ""Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire"" "was his last film." "Peppe knew he was a victim of a certain ostracism." "Ostracism both political and industrial, since he had been uncompromising, both professionally and politically, and he was beginning to pay for this attitude." "It was precious to me just to be close to Peppe during the time of his isolation." "We all know that in the last twenty years, he was prevented from working." "Really an ostracism, political, subtle, sly, unnerving." "Between the producers who want to do as they please and politics which has gone a different way than he would have liked, he begins to have many difficulties in pursuing his projects." "The producers had no voice with him whatsoever." "You had to do that script, that movie, in the way he said." "But I remember the times I spent with him." "He was very merry, I would say a happy man although he had no real reasons in the last twenty years of his life." "In Italy, critics have not mattered very much, but they could matter from the ideological point of view, from the point of view of cultural control, though certainly not from the point of view of production." "They could not change the destiny of a major director like De Santis." "De Santis had wrongly been confined to a certain context that was hard to escape." "There were several reasons, partly political." "De Santis, for anything he wrote, was always seen with a "closed fist"." "He really was branded with the Communist Party." "It's been said that perhaps I've paid too much for my cinema, made of complaints for injustices, old and new, made of" "compromises not accepted." "He said "See, I much regret not working." "But I cannot agree to do something that I don't believe in, that doesn't convince me at all"." "I kept on to writing." "Subjects, screenplays..." "There are more scripts that I haven't made than those that I have." "This lets me create an alibi for myself, that my best films are the ones that I haven't made." "Among the recent films not made are some very important films, such as on the terrorist women prisoners in Turin." "The Gozzini law had just been approved in the late 1980's." "So they wrote this subject, which was a kind of "Roma ore 11" reversed, in that these characters were seeking employment so they could get out of jail." "Even for this latest project on the detained women, he wouldn't give up his rigor, he wouldn't cut." "The film was too long, he decided not to cut it." "And he told me," ""No, I don't want to cut, this is the film."" "He had a sort of stubbornness." "He didn't cut it, and the film was never done." "This was his last wish." "Peppe wanted so much to make this film." "But these films, no one ever lets me do them!" "I'll just mention one which incidentally has a very beautiful title." "I hope you're not shocked, it was called "Roundbreast", which was the nickname of a countryside prostitute." "And it's written all attached." "From Puglia." "It's the story of a prostitute who in summer is an agricultural laborer." "In winter, when there is no agricultural labor, she survives by being a prostitute." "But this film, nobody has let me do it!" "About "I fatti di Andria", which was commissioned by RAI..." "Peppe wrote it, and for a month and a half he went looking for locations with Gianni Minervini." "Then, when the screenplay was written and made," "RAI improvidently disappeared." "Gianni Minervini phoned and the managers responsible for the film could not be found." "Almost fifty years after the movies that he shot at Fondi," ""Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi" and "Giorni d'amore"," "Peppe had the idea of describing his city through its dialect, which he considered the best way to dig into the culture and social fabric of this land." "And so was born "Paese mio"." "I still remember with emotion the first sequence." "The film opens with two elderly peasants who want to make love in the morning." "The husband uncovers the sheet, and rather than framing the woman's belly, the camera frames "L'origine du monde" by Gustave Courbet, then fade to an aerial panorama, shot by helicopter over the whole town." "This was to be followed by tracking shots on the hills and the sea surrounding Fondi." "I remember that when he was our teacher, maybe even then, there was an ability to sell oneself that he did not have." "He was more of a poet and less of an entrepreneur for himself." "He was ruled by a resigned melancholy." "He was too intelligent not to understand that the past would not return." "He was also too smart and sensitive not to understand.." "that what he could have given to the cinema was out of tempo with the present." "Peppe continued to imagine films, to write them, but felt increasingly distant from the cinema around him." "Choosing to teach at CSC and to work with youth was also a way to feel alive and protect himself from the rest." "It was De Santis, realizing that I had this passion, who brought me to the CSC, had me auditioned and prepared me." "I did not attend the Center because I was not accepted, but it was Peppe who accompanied me on this path, to prepare me, to be close to me at that stage, which is also the most critical stage," "because you're very young, you don't know which way to go, how to behave." "The amazing thing was this sweetness of Giuseppe, this wanting to accompany you" "towards a world and a life that was absolutely new to me." "We have the testimony of his pupils." "It is clear that De Santis must have been a teacher not only a teacher of directing, but a master of life." "They always say "He's our Papa"." "Not "director", "our Papa", they still call him that today." "I can also say that he suffered his whole life for not being able to make any more movies." "But in some cases when he could make them, he was also maybe too strict." "He warped people's personalities, as they often have warped his or as he warped his own since he signed his Westerns as "Joseph Saint"... the western subjects he made." "We made a pun from there about Neri Parenti, that if he ever made westerns, he should sign them as "Black Relatives"." "It would be a nick with certain success." "When Spielberg taught in Los Angeles, he showed Peppe's films." "He froze the images of the famous trolleys, cranes and dollies that Ettore described before, to teach Peppe's directing, how he moved the camera, his absolute mastery of the camera." "I understand that he suffered much, until the end, until... he was gone." "And he hoped, even to the last, to succeed to be able to do something." "He hoped and believed it until the end." "He believed it until the end." "Peppe De Santis was, for me, also a great master of life." "In 1945-1946, I was very disoriented." "Italian cinema had not yet had its great successes abroad, and could hardly make its way in the midst of a flood of films, American, French... that we loved, but they were not our cinema." "So I was still undecided whether to continue political activity or dedicate myself to the movies." "And Peppe said to me: "Look, Carlo, even with cinema we can help our country to grow, to become a democratic and modern country." "And with his films, Peppe did this." "I have never seen this...but this is not a citron, is it?" "It looks like a pomelo, eh?" "It's a mix, a graft between..." "For us, between the orange and the citron, there's a second called Cedrangolo." "What is the word?" "It's citron." "Feel..." "It's huge!" "I've never seen it before." "Cedrangolo..." "how do you say that in Italian?" "Citron." "Then it's this!" "The legacy by Giuseppe De Santis is loyalty." "To the story you want to tell, to the characters, the love for the characters." "The legacy of a particular moral ethic and of a lively sympathy." "I think that, sadly, he left very little legacy, because it is a type of Cinema and more generally a cultural product that in Italy are by now untraceable." "So, the legacy is this:" "to convey to young people that it's not enough to be a director and to love cinema, as many believe." "Leopardi said, "He who loves one thing and ignores all others does not even love the thing he thinks he loves." "He was right." "Cinema should not be an isolated microcosm." "On the contrary, it should be open to the rest of the world and somehow manage to convey some of that richness;" "if not, it conveys only poverty." "The memory of Giuseppe De Santis lives on in educational activities, conferences and exhibitions." "Every year the Fondi Film Festival presents the" "De Santis Golden Dolly to renew the attention he always gave to the young." "Subtitles: edam17  filmnutz November, 2011"