After other interviews over the years with Gianfranco Rosi, I was concerned after our fourth he might think it was a waste of time when I confessed that as edifying as it is to talk to him, I still never have a clue as to how he ends up putting together the films he does. It took me aback that he feels the same way.
“For me, every time I do a film, it’s like the first and the last film, so I’m very relaxed when I [think] I’m not going to do another, so I can do whatever I want on this film,” Rosi said with a hearty laugh. “I challenge myself with this idea that there is not going to be another film after the one I’m doing, so I don’t know how I do it either. It’s all new.”
Rosi’s process has been largely the same up until now, though it must always feel different when it allows him to work a lot on instinct, spending years at a time before turning on a camera to inhabit a place and connect with its natural rhythms for such full-scale immersions such as “Fire at Sea,” documenting the migration crisis across Europe by focusing on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, or “Notturno,” in which he summoned the full scope of the devastating cost of conflict in the Middle East.
However, his latest “Pompei: Below the Clouds” took a different path to the screen, even if it feels like a powerful culmination of the director’s interests to date when he reverses an idea central to his work of capturing a single moment in time to explore it in all its complexities to consider time itself as he roams around Naples where few are allowed to enter or even dare to to observe how the past, present and future all seem to occupy the same space. In an exceptionally anxious modern moment when it can seem as if everyone around the world feels as if they’re living beneath an active volcano, Rosi visits the city most well-known for succumbing to an eruption of Mount Vesuvius that sits above it, naturally gravitating towards an emergency call center where residents can be heard airing out all variety of concerns and as ambulances are dispatched, the filmmaker was compelled to start filming immediately to catch all the action. However, he also considers the survival of a society that was left for ruin once already with trips to a local museum where antiquities are cared for and catalogued and Villa Augustea, where a team of Japanese archeologists have devoted themselves to unearthing what life was like centuries prior, as well as those who seek safe harbor on its shores such as a Syrian sailor named Aboud who brings grain from abroad.
As is always the case with Rosi’s films, the imagery is resplendent when his patience for the light to be just right for any given scene is painterly, but also only growing stronger over the years is his ability to see clearly the place of people in the grander scheme of things, at once in part responsible for the conditions around them and at the same time having no control over them whatsoever. The push and pull between those two truths results in a film that can often be exhilarating for as calm as it is and with “Pompei: Below the Clouds” now headed to theaters across the U.S. following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last fall, Rosi generously took the time to talk about how his good friend “Martin Eden” director Pietro Marcello led him to go on this particular adventure, merging the processes of filming and editing in a way he had never done before and how moved he was to be simply be selected as part of the competition at Venice, let alone winning one of the festival’s top prizes.
I’ve heard that Pietro Marcello may have put you up to this one, but how’d this become something you wanted to take on?
Why is the first question is always about Pietro? [laughs] I’m joking, but Pietro and I are very close friends and he challenged me when he said, “I always wanted to make a film where I grew up around the area of Pompei. I remember when I was a kid, I used to go there with my girlfriends and kissing in the middle of these Roman sites was so beautiful. You should make a film about lovers and Pompei.” He’d never been to Pompeii since probably when he was 15 or 16 and Pompeii changed a lot. Now it’s like entering a bank. It’s so impossible just to enter, so the romantic idea that he had of Pompeii to go there and encounter the lovers and the intimacy inside that site didn’t work out. But after he challenged me with the idea of making a film in Naples and I started looking at [the city in] a different way. I’m not from Naples and it’s almost untouchable, like only Neapolitan people can make a film on Naples.
But because of my [last] name and that I’m a director, and Francesco Rosi was from Napoli, everybody thought I was the son of Francesco Rosi, which for a while did help. And then at the end, I had to say, “Well, I’m not the son of Francesco,” so they were always disappointed. “Oh, what do you mean? We gave you so much because we thought you were the son of Francesco and now you’re telling us you’re not.” [laughs] But because I always felt Naples was a big off-screen space, that somehow was the challenge to show what you don’t see or the perfect picture is not what you is in the frame, but what is outside the frame, so this idea of the off-screen became a challenge to show what you don’t see and to create that space. It’s always about the past, the present and a possible future, this passage zone in between these three elements and the challenge was to make a film not so much about a place but more about time Naples has this incredible sense of certification of time that didn’t destroy it, but somehow it constantly stratified reality.
I know Pompei was only added to the official title after its festival premiere, but it does immediately conjure ideas about the end of civilization, which your films have often shown the threats to. Was that actually a way you looked at it yourself from the beginning?
I did start the film in Pompei and at the beginning, the title was actually “Beyond Pompei,” or something like that. Then when I encountered the sentence of [Jean] Cocteau that “Vesuvio creates all the clouds of the world,” I thought that that would be a great title — “Below the Clouds” — to give a sense of universality. It’s a splendid image and [also acknowledges] the fact that this volcano is a live entity, a deity almost and that inside it creates all this smoke that becomes clouds and those clouds go throughout the world, so it gives the sense of a universal city. And in Naples, you never ask when the disaster is going to happen, but how come we didn’t realize that it did already happen? So it’s a perfect metaphor for the condition we are living now in this uncertain world because of the war, because of economic [conditions], because of revolution, because of COVID or whatever.
Disasters are happening and that element of uncertainty that comes into the film through the idea of those volcanoes that are ready to explode any moment, but the people have lived there for thousands of years. People say, “Why do they live under the volcano?” They always have since the Roman times and in Greek time. This is not something new. It was always a way of life, and this is probably what makes Naples special, the fact that you live in a idea of imminent catastrophe, but people have the sense of human comedy that are able to survive it. You can see that in the scene with the fire department when they take all these phone calls during the earthquake. The way people talk, it’s a perfect human comedy there.
Did the call center come to mind pretty quickly as somewhere you’d want to set up a camera? You’ve said in other interviews you end up gravitating towards an institution of the state, but I wonder if that’s actually a foundational element.
In “Sacro Gra,” the film I did in Italy, I had this feeling somehow to put in a Red Cross ambulance. And in “Notturno,” there’s the military and “Fire at Sea” there is the navy that goes go out on the sea to save people from drowning in the Mediterranean. And when I did “Sacro Gra,” I wanted to have the the fire department, and they didn’t give me the permission. But this time they were very generous with me and completely open to let me film inside their own world. But at the end somehow all stories [in “Pompeii”] from the fire department, the prosecutor, the archaeologist are part of the institution and like Pasolini used to say, institutions are the means throughout which a civilization preserves and keeps passing its memory and meaning alive and by giving each other that, that’s when civilization starts. In a way, all the characters in the film are an act of resistance against fear somehow and in that sense, the film also has a political identity and it was important to have that sense of politics without ideology in the film.
For me politics is not about the delivering answers, but revealing the complexity of this world and trust is a big element [not only with the people I film with], but also from the audience. My encounters start by chance. When I start my film, it’s a journey and with no encounter, there’s no film for me. I work as a one-person crew, so it’s easy for me to spend time and to go around and to immerse myself into stories and just let reality come to me. I meet these people completely by chance and then once there’s that strong encounter. they become part of my storytelling. And hopefully, [an audience sees this] on a big screen and gets totally immersed and trusts that this journey is going to take you to an end, but the film is so much based on the element of subtraction of the storytelling that it requires a certain engagement and dialogue. I love the sense that I present a constellation of different stories with different elements and leave the space to let the viewer discover the connections through their own experience. They have to somehow participate directly throughout the film and by giving the audience the freedom of interpret the gap that I leave in the film, it’s a political choice.
We’ve discussed your process before where you’ve said you’ll often spend years in an area you’re going to film in before turning a camera on, but I understand this was different, including the fact you edited simultaneously. Did it change how the story took shape for you?
Yes, on my other films, the editing was done at the end of my work, so I could stay three or four years without looking at anything [while I was filming]. Then at the moment of editing, I immersed myself in the memory and I’d have an assistant with me and I didn’t look at all the material. Out of maybe 100-150 hours from my memory, [I’d say] “Let’s take this.” It’s like when you close your eyes and you start having images of your past. It’s not that you recall everything. There are certain moments that rise up, so I was doing the editing based on whatever my memory was from this experience, and somehow there was always a need of putting myself off to the side and by letting go of my personal experience, I could start editing with the material that was somehow emerging from this.
This film was different because I would wait before I took out the camera [on other films]. When I did “Notturno,” I spent six months traveling all around Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon without a camera. I just had a small [still] camera to taking pictures and try to create a map and [note] people I met, and I remember my producer saying, “But what if something happens and you’re not filming?” But for me, it’s more important when I don’t film than when I do. The experience I had was more important. This film was completely different. I had the need to immerse myself immediately into the shooting and [unusually], I had the urge also to start editing immediately because I didn’t know the process. In the other films, I more or less knew the people I was going to work with that I met throughout these six months of searching. On this film, every day was unknown, meeting someone or [tracking] the the sky, the territory, Pompeii, there were so many elements. Only after three-and-a-half years, I had a complete visual image of the whole thing and editing became a process of rewriting every time I had enough material. I had my editor Fabrizio Federico basically working in a parallel way with me on the editing [as I was filming].
When you said earlier this grew out of a challenge to present archival material, you seem to find an elegant way to express how history lives side-by-side with the present with a variety of different eras coexisting in the frame at any given moment. What was it like to capture something in the present that reflected the past as well?
The choice of black-and-white was a narrative choice because somehow it’s like the present becomes immediately archival. Then when I had to use the archival footage, I was joking about Pietro Marcello before, but Pietro is a master of using archival footage, [wherehe takes] an image of the present and boom is able to put maybe a few seconds on a moment of the past that becomes a counterpoint of the narrative. I had the need somehow not so much to contrast what Pietro was doing, but I wanted something separate from the film and by showing those [archival] images inside an abandoned cinema — and only when I [found] this abandoned cinema — I was able to put the the archive and I wanted those images from the past to feel like a a form of a collective memory, almost as if the past could come alive again in those spaces where people once shared [experiencing those] images together. This abandoned theater became an archaeological site, echoing the stories that are buried under these broken walls and seats. Somehow I felt that this screen being left up with the images that were hitting that white wall became memories.
You also bring in a score, which is unusual for your films, but it’s quite an inventive use of music. What was it like to work on with Daniel Blumberg?
It’s the first time I used a score, but it was only because we knew each other so well and trusted each other so much that I knew that it was the right choice to do it. I knew Daniel for many, many years — it goes back to when we met at the Istanbul Film Festival and we were both chain smokers, so we met outside the theater and start talking. I always loved his experimentation with music, as it was close to my way of [thinking about] images. For me, documentary is experimenting constantly. I didn’t want to To have a traditional score in the film, but something that could create a space that is suspended in time. In certain moment of the film, I wanted a texture of sound where somehow the instrument, you cannot recognize it and Daniel had a very strong idea to record the music underwater. After doing all the improvisation with this incredible musician in London, [Daniel] put some speakers and a microphone underwater to see the way the sound and the music was transformed, so it wasn’t so much a score, but more to create a soundscape to give this this element of suspension, like this sound that’s almost coming from the earth — from the volcano or from the past.
[Daniel] did incredible work and it’s amazing that all this was [done] in 11 days because when I contacted him he was working on “The Brutalist, and then I remember a few days before he won the Oscar, I told him, “Now you have to tell me yes before you get that Oscar because I’m sure you’re going to win,” and the day he won, I called him and said, “Come to Italy. You have to tell me that you’re going to do this movie,” and he literally flew from Los Angeles to Rome with his Oscar in the luggage and watched the movie. The problem was he was working on “The Testament of Ann Lee,” which is an incredible film, and we were finished with the editing, and the film was selected in competition in Venice, so we had two weeks to [finish] the film and we had basically only 11 days to go to London, deciding what to do with the sound, recording with this incredible musician, and go back to Naples to re-record everything underwater in the same site [for] the ending of the film and after that, go to the [sound] mix [where there were] hours and hours of sound to edit and create this soundscape structure from the beginning till the end. I told [Daniel] from the beginning, “There is no plan B here and in three days, we have to give the film to the festival.” But we did it. He did it in an incredible way. And this sound gave to the film such an incredible depth.It was quite well-received in Venice. What was it like getting there after racing to finish?
That’s been a festival that really embraced me since “Below Sea Level” and “El Sicario.” I was lucky enough to win the Golden Lion there with “Sacro Gra,” and then I went back with “Notturno,” and it’s a festival that really gave me so much. Venice meant a lot to me as a festival [with its history] and it makes always a big difference to have the film there in competition. There is courage [it takes] for the director to put a film like mine in competition with the big budget films or [narrative] features and I never think I’m going to win something, but I remember when they called me to [come back] for the award ceremony — you never know what the award is going to be, but there were incredible movies there, and I was going to the airport to leave for Toronto, and then I received this phone call and I canceled the plane.
It was beautiful recognition to win a special jury award, but it felt like such an achievement just to be in competition. My [goal] was always to break that thin line between documentary and fiction from my first film. So to be in a festival and be in the main competition with major feature films was always a challenge for me and [it was meaningful for others to] say yes, I think there’s not much so much difference between documentary and fiction. For me, what is important is the word cinema. That’s what I try to do with my work, to always use the language of cinema.
“Pompeii: Below the Clouds” is now open in New York at the IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center and opens on March 13th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Pleasantville, New York at the Jacob Burns Film Center and Austin at the AFS Cinema, and March 20th in Ohio at Akron’s Nightlight Cinema, the Cleveland Cinematheque and Columbus’ Gateway Film Center and will start streaming on MUBI on March 27th.