"I had a great need to lean on my literary background." "My background was poetry." "I had written a book of poems." "My father was a famous poet." "So I felt that the right thing to do was to give myself over to moments of lyricism." "In my first films, I needed to lean on a literary work in some way." "Even if I didn't keep to it exactly, but it was like a security blanket, a crutch." "When I worked with Pier PaoIo on Accattone, the most important thing wasn't just that I was on a set for the first time, and so I saw how a film was made, but I saw how cinema came into being." "Because for Pier PaoIo, having been very far removed from the world of film until then, it wasn't about a cinephile - which he wasn't - searching through his memory for models, examples, etc." "His decision was very simple when he began working on Accattone." "He told me," ""I want to do a Iot of cIose-ups" "like in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc." "But my visual point of reference will be the early Tuscan painters, from Sassetta on. "" "In fact, all of Accattone is like that." "It's a study in frontaIity." "Everything is seen frontally, and thus there's also an element of the sacred in it, and - why not?" " of the religious, a bit like an altarpiece." "My privilege was to witness the birth of cinema." "Because Pier PaoIo wasn't about referring back to other films." "He invented filmmaking." "I, on the other hand, made La Commare Secca at 2 1, worked as an assistant on Accattone at 20, and I was a cinephile." "After Accattone, which was a great success with the public, a whole series of things was set into motion." "For exampIe, Antonio Cervi, who owned a treatment by PasoIini called La Commare Secca, decided to make it into a film." "AII of PasoIini's desire and imagination at the time were already focused on Mamma Roma, so he lost interest in La Commare Secca, which he had written a few years earlier." "He tried to help this producer who had bought it, Antonio Cervi." "He said, "Why don't you have two people whom I will suggest write the screenplay, and have the film directed by someone else?"" "The two mystery screenwriters... were Sergio Citti and myself." "Sergio Citti had been close to Pier PaoIo when he wrote his novels." "Pier PaoIo used to call him "my living dictionary. "" "In any case, when Antonio Cervi, who owned La Commare Secca, suggested I write the screenplay with Citti, he told me very clearly, "We want a PasoIini-type film."" "It should be as if such a genre existed." "He had only made one film, Accattone, which was wonderful, a masterpiece." "So he wanted to make something very similar to it." "Sergio and I decided to go to Parma, where my family still had a house in the country, which was later sold." "So Sergio and I stayed there and wrote this Roman story, trying as hard as we could to make it as close as possible... to the ideal film that Pier PaoIo would have made, though he didn't want to make this one." "So we invented the "PasoIinian" genre." "I remember it was a beautiful September, in 1 961 , I think it was." "We were in the country, and in the evenings we'd go to Parma." "We used to go to Piazza GaribaIdi, where my friends and everyone I knew spent their evenings, eating ice cream, etc." "Sergio Citti was with me." "He was sort of an alien on the Parma scene." "Everyone liked him." "Sergio is a man of great intelligence." "I think if Pier PaoIo wanted him nearby, it was because he admired him greatly." "I think in less than two months the screenplay was ready." "We went back to Rome, and Antonio Cervi read it." "Then he called me into his office and said," ""I think this screenplay is very close to your sensibilities." "I have an idea." "Why don't you direct it?"" "I was 21 years old." "My only experience was that I had been very close to PasoIini during Accattone," "and that was it." "At 1 6, I had shot two little home movies." "So I didn't have any experience on a set, much less as a director." "When Cervi suggested I do the film, naturally I said, "Of course,"" "pretending to be very calm and collected, very happy, very confident." "actually, my legs were shaking," "I was completely... overwhelmed by this offer." "I'd never made a film before." "I was in my second year of university, and here I was being asked to direct a real feature film." "Anyway, I found myself - I don't remember anything anymore " "I don't know if it was March, april or February - on the first day of work on the set of La Commare Secca, and I was the director." "I was 21 years old and obviously the youngest member of the crew." "Everyone - from my first assistant to my director of photography to the continuity supervisor and art director - they were all older than me." "And especially the bulk of the crew, whom I hadn't yet met, had a hard time that first day believing that I was the director." "So there was some disbelief among the crew when I got there." "I have a very strange memory of that period." "I usually remember everything about my other films." "But I just remember this one... as a period of intense sIeepwaIking." "I'd go to the set... knowing I'd enter into a kind of trance." "It was partly an attempt to avoid... the ironic glances and misgivings about so young a director." "My ideas about how to make the film were pretty clear." "We already said that Pier PaoIo filmed very much in a frontal manner, more or less like in Tuscan religious paintings, aItarpieces, the gold backgrounds, etc." "well, my work would always be in motion." "So I started to film, and the camera was always in motion." "It also moved as a reaction against this stationary approach it was to have been modeled after." "Because clearly, when I found myself making my first film from a screenplay that I wrote for someone else," "I was going to do everything to bring the film back closer to myself." "The setting, characters and story remained PasoIini's, but the approach to the story was mine." "It was almost like a stylistic appropriation... of something that started out as someone else's." "What is La Commare Secca today?" "It's a film that was structured..." "like a famous Japanese film that I hadn't yet seen:" "Kurosawa's Rashomon." "It's about a crime." "A prostitute is murdered." "An investigation is carried out." "Various people are interrogated, and each interrogation is an episode." "The identity of the prostitute's murderer is revealed at the end." "What interested me... wasn't just the tragic end of this poor and no Ionger young woman... murdered on the banks of the Tiber River." "I was more interested in telling how the hours went by, how time consumed" "the hours of waiting before this crime occurred." "What did the various characters do during this time?" "From a story about a crime, a thriller," "I found myself trying to make a film about the simple passing of time... the unimportant hours, their everyday quality... an ordinariness." "The film was nothing more than my attempt to tell " "I thought at the time, though perhaps I was deluding myself, that it was possible to write poetry with a movie camera." "In fact, there's a kind of refrain or Ieitmotif in the film." "At a certain point in each episode, and thus in each story about the characters suspected of murder by the police," "in each episode there comes a point when you hear thunder... and it begins to rain." "There's a sudden thunderstorm, as often happens in Rome." "Each time, this storm brings us to the prostitute's house as she awakens from what could be an afternoon nap." "She gets ready." "She puts on her makeup and makes coffee, and then she goes out." "This was also my way... of finding a poetic thread that is more than just prose." "I remember we went to Venice that year, where there was a Iarge group of first-time filmmakers, or italian films by young directors, including La Commare Secca." "About two or three weeks earlier, my first and only book of poems," "In Search of Mystery, had been presented in Viareggio and won the award for literary debut." "So in Venice there was some suspicion, and perhaps rightly so, about the fact that at 21 I was coming to Venice with my first film having just won an award for my first book of poetry in Viareggio." "So I don't remember there being a great sense of people liking me." "It seemed a bit like I had my finger in too many pies for it to be believable, but time showed it was." "Some critics liked the film in general, but italian critics were unanimous" "in calling it a PasoIinian film." "AII my superhuman efforts to guide the film from its beginnings as PasoIini's story and try and make it my own seemed to have been in vain."