Matteo Garrone on Staying True to the Migrant Experience in “Io Capitano”

When Matteo Garrone first broke through on the international stage with “Gomorrah,” the electrifying drama that had audiences bracing themselves with its unvarnished and gritty look at the mafia, it appeared as if he had cracked the code for a new wave of Italian neorealism, viscerally thrilling while recognizing the harsh societal realities of the time. If the director has remained true to those goals throughout his career, it hasn’t been in the way one would’ve imagined when Garrone immediately broke away from a documentary style with his ironically titled follow-up “Reality,” about an average Joe enamored by the thought of his life being on display for the world to see after watching “Big Brother,” and since had Salma Hayek feasting on a heart in the surreal fairy tale “Tale of Tales” and Roberto Benigni pulling strings as Gepetto in a reimagining of “Pinocchio.”

The more fantastical forays have only added to how Garrone is able to get at the truth, to go by his latest drama “Io Capitano,” a wrenching look at the migrant crisis in a style that hasn’t been seen before. Starting out in Senegal with Moussa (Moustapha Fall) and Seydou (Seydou Sarr), two teens who believe a better life is waiting for them across the Mediterranean Sea, the film shows the treacherous journey made by so many who have been forced out of their homes by war, climate change or extreme poverty and the strength they have to summon within themselves, often from their dreams, to pull them through. If Garrone had previously made films that resembled nonfiction, filming in locations where the inspiration for his stories actually took place and enlisting nonprofessional actors, the filmmaker took things to a whole other level on “Io Capitano,” filming in sequence and making it a condition for any extra working on the film to have made the trek themselves, drawing on both their stories to create an unusually rich and authentic drama.

“They were discovering for the first time what does it mean to be a migrant and what does it mean to be victim of a system, the injustice and cruelty,” Garrone told me of his two lead actors Sarr and Fall, who were among the minority on set that hadn’t lived through what they were putting on screen, yet their own epiphanies reflect those an audience is bound to have and for the director, who had long resisted taking on such a story in spite of its urgency around the world when he felt it wasn’t his to tell, his distinctive vision paired with a production apparatus rooted in the details of a lived experience during its making yield a film that’s already landed an audience with the Pope and turned heads since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last fall. Now nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars, Garrone spoke on the eve of the film’s Stateside release about how he was able to set up such a unique methodology to make “Io Capitano,” finding his captivating lead actors and building their musical skills into the film and working in a language that wasn’t his own.

You’ve said before that you’ve been wanting to tell a story about the subject for years, but was waiting for the opportunity when it felt right. What gave you the green light?

I decided to tell this story because I felt that the way that we in Italy, and in Europe [generally], knew only the very last part of the journey of [migrants] because we see the boat when they arrive on the news — and often they don’t arrive, but when they arrive and [you see] the count of the people and these [abstract] numbers. So we miss all parts of the journey that are through the African and we tried to give visual form to the part of the journey that we don’t know. That’s what pushed me to tell this story. I wanted to tell this story from [the migrants’] point of view, with them, and I was an intermediary. I listened to their story and I rebuilt the adventure with them, staying with them always – and in front of the camera, all the extras were people that made the journey and behind the monitor, there were people that made the journey, so we made this movie in a very collective way. And that’s what pushed me to make this — to try to finally to give voice to people that usually don’t have a voice.

What is it like to set up a production that way?

The collaboration was born in a spontaneous way because the only way to be truthful in this movie was to do it together and we trust each other. They were happy to finally put a light to [this] to show to the world what they have to do on this epic journey and the violence that they have to [endure]. Sometimes when they try to tell to other people what happened to them during the journey, they are not believed, so this was an opportunity to show to the world the systemic injustice, the violence against them and the modern slavery that they [are thrust into], and they believed in this project and helped me to do it. They were very generous and they supported me in difficult moments. It was an enormous privilege to make the movie together with them.

This seems like a wonderful culmination of an entire career, where there are these surreal flourishes in a story of harsh reality that can remind of both “Gomorrah” and “Dogman.” How did you decide on a style for this?

More than real, I wanted to be true, and sometimes I felt that the movie was close to the approach of “Gomorrah” that was almost documentary and hyper-realistic. But at the same time, I wanted to tell this story also like a dark fairy tale in how it looks, so I tried to combine these two elements. It is like if I combine “Gomorrah” with “Pinocchio,” my last movie, but the two scenes that are more [like Homer’s “The Odyssey”] were necessary to tell to the audience how painful was for this guy to pass through this [extraordinary] event, this tragedy, so through the Homeric moments, you understand the heart, the conscience and the soul of the guy, and his wounds and the unconscious. We wanted to also show how during this journey his innocence is contaminated, but he remains human and innocent until the end.

What sold you on Moustapha and Seydou to play these two characters?

I made a lot of casting around Europe and also in Senegal, and in the end, I thought that the ideal interpreter for this movie was to come from Senegal because it was important that you can see in the eyes that [these character] never discovered the Europe or the occidental world. He’s still innocent, he’s still pure. That was very important for us. And when I saw the casting test for Seydou, I found in him something very sweet and innocent that was perfect for the character, but at the same time, he could bring to the character so many things I didn’t know that he could give. He brought a spiritual dimension, a faith that was very important for the movie and he’s so honest and pure in his interpretation, and this is really the aspect that gives to the movie a power to reach the hearts of the audience.

When this wasn’t in your native language, did you pay attention to the scenes differently?

It’s a strange experience for me because sometimes I had the feeling that I could say “action” and something was going to happen by itself. As I told you, they were [giving] a testimony of something that they lived in first person, so they were recreating moments that were sometimes really unexpected for me and I had to [refrain] often to be not a director, but more a first audience of the movie. And that’s connected to the power of the movie — that they recreate moment that they live, and it gives to the movie an authenticity that brings the audience to live subjectively in this experience. You forget all the artificial aspects that are behind a movie and we tried to give to the audience the feeling to be inside of that journey [that we experienced on set].

The music is also a powerful element of the film, and in part because Seydou and Moustapha contributed to that as well. How did you involve them in that process?

Seydou loves music. He’s a singer, and he and Moustapha wrote his song and when I discovered this, I decided to put it in the script because sometimes I like to make a marriage between the character and the person and when the person has some aspect of his character that can be interesting for the character that we wrote. The fact that [these characters] dream about music was something that is connected with the real dreams of Moustapha and Seydou, so it was very interesting to work on this direction.

The two of them couldn’t look any more thrilled than they did at the film’s U.S. premiere at AFI Fest in Los Angeles and I understand they’ve met the Pope as well in your travels with the film. What have these last few months been like?

It was an incredible honor to meet the Pope, and he said that the images were very intense and his parents were migrants, so he’s very close to this tragedy and he wanted to support our movie because he always supports who gives voice to them and tell the story from their point of view. We had this incredible experience to screen the movie in the Vatican and talk with him and talk with him, so we are so thankful to him. And [screening the movie] is always a surprise because I’ve been following the movie all around Italy and the response of the audience is incredible. It’s a movie that is very universal and accessible to people from every age because it’s an adventure.

In Italy, all the schools will present the movie in March to the students in the morning, so it’s been rewarding for the work that we have done and I was very happy to discover when we had this response of the audience here in the States [at our AFI Fest premiere] that everybody is connected with the migrants, and this desire of change their life or look for another opportunity, so everybody can relate it and it can create an empathy with these characters and [allow one to] live the emotion of their journey, so I’m very, very happy to see that also it’s a movie that can touch the hearts of the American audience.

“Io Capitano” will open on February 23rd in select theaters. A full list of cities and dates is here.