Talk:Gillo Pontecorvo
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Gillo Pontecorvo: First of all, it was [Italian filmmaker Roberto] Rossellini. I believe he is the most important talent in the history of cinema because he brought forward a completely new approach to reality—a love for reality that was not there before. So for me, Rossellini is the person that I love the most and with whom I was a good friend and admired very much.
The writers that have had a strong hold over me were people like [Isaac Bashevis] Singer, for example. I was not familiar with the Jewish world in Europe, outside Italy, and so I developed a passion for a whole series of novels, not only by Singer, but similar writers. It is not that I think he is the most important, but he is one that I remember the most.
Above all, my main creative influence was Rossellini. I was also a friend of [filmmaker Federico] Fellini, who was an extremely intelligent, witty and creative person, but the cinema that I loved and wanted to make was very far from the world of Fellini. Rossellini, I repeat, was my model. He had the love and affection for reality which I have.
About three years ago the BBC defined my work as “the dictatorship of truth”. In my cinema, when faced with the choice of distancing oneself from reality or using an effect that might be used to win the popularity with the public, I always renounce these possibilities and stay close to reality.
ME: Is this why you decided to make The Battle of Algiers in documentary style?
GP: Yes.
Let me explain how much this love for reality, the reality that surrounds us, weighed on me. I only spent four days doing the screen tests for the actors in The Battle of Algiers, but a month looking for the right kind of photography that would best convey this sense of truth.
The difficulty was to find the right sort of look that would imitate grainy photography with strong contrasts, like those of the newsreels, and yet, because it had to be shown in the cinemas where people paid to see it, it had to retain a certain formal dignity, a formal beauty. It therefore took us a month to discover the technique required. The method that finally guided us was to take the original negative and make a copy of it and then re-photograph the copy.
ME: How long did it take to prepare the production and was it difficult to get funding?
GP: Although the time spent writing the script was very brief—only two months—the research phase was extremely long. Scriptwriter Franco Solinas and I spent weeks and weeks inside the Casbah in order to get an idea of the reality of the horror that had taken place. Then we went to France and had long discussions with high officials who had been paratroopers. So we spent a long time obtaining this information and a rather brief time writing the script.
It was extremely difficult to raise funds for the film. Although I had a good relationship with producers because my previous film Kapó had been nominated for an Oscar, they wanted me to make films that I did not want to do. When I proposed making The Battle of Algiers, they would tell me, “No, you’re crazy. Do you think Italians care about a story about blacks?” I replied that they were not “blacks” and “it wasn’t true that Italians were not interested in this—it’s very close to us.” In the end no one wanted to produce it. The producers would all say, “I’ll let you do what you want, but this film, really no.”
One producer even asked whether I thought he had “fool” written on his forehead for me to propose a film that “no one will ever see.” I asked this producer for the minimum—a very small amount of money—and something that the film collected in less than 20 days after its release. In the end we decided to form a sort of cooperative, with each of us putting money into it—the director, scriptwriter, etc.—and eventually raised the money ourselves.
To give you an idea of how little money this was, we left for Algeria without the script girl, even though such a job is essential for continuity or retakes. We told ourselves that we’d find a person and teach him or her how to do it there. But after 15 days, there was such chaos and turmoil that we were forced to get a real script girl from Italy even though we didn’t have a penny for it.
[edit] WTF is that...?
who s the author of the lines showed above?? Is it a joke??? Gilgamesh 19:00, 26 Oct 2006 (UTC)
