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VENICE 2021 Out of Competition

Leonardo Di Costanzo • Director of The Inner Cage

“Just like a documentary, at a certain point my research began to turn into a dramaturgy”

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- VENICE 2021: The Italian director speaks to us about his latest film, which is imbued with a suspenseful atmosphere and theatrical tones, and is led by Toni Servillo and Silvio Orlando

Leonardo Di Costanzo  • Director of The Inner Cage
(© La Biennale di Venezia - Foto ASAC/A. Avezzù)

Cineuropa interviewed Leonardo Di Costanzo, the director of The Inner Cage [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Leonardo Di Costanzo
film profile
]
which was presented out of competition in this year’s Venice International Film Festival. Imbued with a suspenseful atmosphere and theatrical tones, the film calls into question the differences between prisoners and guards by way of brilliant writing and a high-calibre cast.

Cineuropa: Could you tell us about the research phase which led to the writing of The Inner Cage?
Leonardo Di Costanzo: There was a long gestation period. [..] I gathered together a wide array of ideas on the usefulness of prison. Those I met told me that prison doesn’t work and that it’s actually detrimental. I didn’t find many people who defended it. That part of the work was really interesting. I found that the directors were just like the ones we see in the film. I come from the documentary world, and I used those same methods in my work and research on this film. Just like with a documentary, at a certain point, my research began to turn into a dramaturgy. I came across stories and wrote post-It notes. Ultimately, developing a dramaturgy and finding a guiding thread for these many stories was a lot like editing a film.

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How did you decide upon the film’s location?
We needed to find a prison in that particular form. I was looking for a bit of a battered building to justify the fact that it needed to close shortly afterwards. For a long time, we thought about filming in Le Nuove, a former prison in Turin. But there were various issues and we ended up in Sassari. Usually, the central section, the “panopticon”, isn’t used to hold prisoners. You find offices, lawyers and the guardroom in the rotunda, and we reconstructed and designed a set for that area, including the prison cells. The idea of the Fortezza Bastiani was always a benchmark for me. We needed to create a separate world which would allow these unusual relationships to emerge.

How did you go about choosing Toni Servillo [the higher-grade prison officer] and Silvio Orlando [Don Carmine, a mafia boss] for the two lead roles? How did you help develop their relationship on set?
I thought of them because we’re all from Naples and we’re of the same generation. I needed actors with significant theatrical experience, because this particular dramaturgy required research similar to that carried out for theatre works. We had to find the “diapason” which would ensure the perfect performance. I said to myself: these two actors have never worked together, and they’ve never met on set … We all know that there’s always a bit of competition in these environments. Each of them has had a different journey to get to where they are. To a certain extent, this echoes the story of the film’s two characters: they come from the same place, but they’ve chosen two different paths. Perhaps, when it came to shooting the film, I thought that this extra-filmic aspect would play its part. In reality, they loved each other from the off. After two days, they were the best of friends. The real problem was working with these two cinema icons, given that I’d always made films with non-professionals. In my mind, actors are like blank pages to be filled in for audiences, but actors of this calibre always bring their full, cinematographic history with them. The biggest worry, for those who have the good fortune of directing them, is that they might destroy what was already there and impose their own vision. I asked myself: “what am I going to do? They’ll eat me alive!” To begin with, I meant to cast them in the reverse roles. But I could already see how Orlando might play the police officer and it was too much in keeping with his journey to date. The same went for Toni in the role of the mafia boss. So I said: “Let’s swap parts. I’m making a film with actors, which is something I’ve never done before. Now, you two create characters outside of your comfort zones”. They accepted the challenge with a great deal of humility and enthusiasm.

With regard to the scene where they eat dinner in the dark, as a viewer, I felt that the dark was a means of eliminating identities in order to reconstruct them and put all of them on the same level for an instant...
It was exactly that. That’s the most important moment in the process. Slowly, the two groups begin to distance themselves from their given roles. In fact, when they decided to open the kitchen, they were already starting to reverse their separation.

What was Pasquale Scialò’s artistic contribution to the film score?
To begin with, I wanted musique concrète and jazz. What Scialò brought to the film – and his intuition was right – was the introduction of Christological citations. The initial singing, for example, celebrates the Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion procession.

Will you be bringing The Inner Cage to schools and prisons?
Yes, on 9 September we’re showing the film to a prison in Venice. It’s going down really well. A large number of prison directors, criminal defence lawyers and educators all took part in the 5 September screening, and, in some sense, they said they’d felt “represented”.

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(Translated from Italian)

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