In Sicilian Letters [+lee también:
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entrevista: Fabio Grassadonia y Antoni…
ficha de la película], in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Elio Germano is a fugitive mafia boss (inspired by the real criminal Matteo Messina Denaro) who establishes an assiduous correspondence, the so-called “pizzini”, with a former politician close to his clan, played by Toni Servillo. We talked to directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza about the creation of this singular grotesque comedy.

Cineuropa: Your third film brings you back to talking about the mafia. Do you feel the need to analyse again a phenomenon that has changed the destiny of Sicily and of a part of the world?
Fabio Grassadonia: It has changed our generation in particular. We were kids in the 1980s and 1990s, the season of the major mafia massacres. This changes your point of view, your perception of reality. This film, which closes the trilogy and maybe also the theme of organised Sicilian criminality, asks questions about a dark page in the story of the Republic, not only of Sicily. About why it took 30 years to capture this boss.

Antonio Piazza: The figure of Matteo Messina Denaro was very interesting to us because he lived, as an “enfant prodige”, the most ferocious and bloody epic of Corleone’s mafia, because his father was the most faithful ally to the bosses Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. Matteo was the “predestined one”, for his total coldness. After that bloody season, he transforms the Cosa Nostra, makes it “disappear”, mixes it in an indistinguishable way with the legal economy, with the higher spheres. The first two films were dealing with our experience as Sicilians who grew up in a climate of cultural, moral and physical oppression. With the third film, this character allows us to talk about the social and anthropological consequences of these three decades of domination.

To document yourselves, you must have dived into thousands of pages of investigations. How did you identify the elements that make up the screenplay?
FG: The research work was significant, it lasted 5 years. We were also aiming to distinguish facts from all the tales within a man who has become a ghost. What made the difference was coming across his “pizzini”: that made us understand that there was a film there. These pizzini demonstrated a strange epistolary writer, able to modulate his tone in relation to the interlocutor. In particular, there later was this correspondence with the former mayor of Castelvetrano, played masterfully by Servillo, in which the hypertrophy of his narcissism emerged clearly, also fed by his particular readings: in his hideout, they found books by Dostoevsky, Vargas Llosa, Baudelaire, the biography of Agassi, 212 DVD’s amongst which Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni. A singular personality compared to the image we have of the semi-alphabet boss.

How did you build, instead, the character of his interlocutor?
AP: This former mayor was the local political arm of Matteo’s father, a very close relationship arises from there, which is the reason why the secret services involve him to capture the fugitive. He can have influence on the boss and trap him. They have narcissism and vanity in common. Even in his baroque way, Catello is more cultured than the average of his citizens, he is intelligent and cunning. We wanted to make a kind of grotesque dark comedy and, thanks to the presence of an extraordinary actor like Toni Servillo, to pay homage to the great “masks” of Italian comedy of the golden age. Therefore we took more liberties when building the character. It was crucial to calibrate the character, to avoid caricature: we wanted a desperate acrobat but also, like the fugitive boss, a real human being, who generates the tragic and the ridicule by his very human essence.

There are two female characters in the film: the woman who hosts and takes care of the fugitive boss and the detective who fights her own solitary battle.
AP: They have been called the Tupperware ladies, the vivandières of hidden criminals. In that forced and claustrophobic cohabitation, they are two animals in cages who face each other. As regards the cleaning lady, there have been honest and determined investigators over the years who came close to capturing Denaro and they saw their careers hindered. We wanted a truly blameless figure, but she also falls prey to an obsession that prevents her from understanding that she is inside a game that will crush her.