"With experience, I want to renew the language, experiment with new technologies. It happened to me now with my new film about Caravaggio. It is a story set in the 1600s, but we used the latest innovations to reconstruct historic Rome. And then then you come up with other ideas, new serials. On the other hand - smiles Michele Placido - Verdi wrote his most beautiful arias at the age of 70.
Eastwood at 80 signs masterpieces. Here, I feel a bit like the Italian Clint Eastwood: I still don't see the finish line where to stop ".
On the contrary, with a touch of pride, he announces to ANSA that his Michelangelo Merisi with the eyes of Riccardo Scamarcio will be "in Cannes or Venice. The French co-producers would like it from them. I would also hold in Venice, because it is an important festival," in which an Italian story like Caravaggio's would figure very well ".
Actor, director, more than 50 years spent on stage and set, new president of the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara, among the authors of the collective documentary on the pandemic "Europe C-19" (which involved five countries and as many directors as Michael Winterbottom for the Great Britain, Julia von Heinz for Germany, Fernando León de Aranoa for Spain, Jaco Van Dormael for Belgium), for one day Placido now also measures himself with TV, drawing the program schedule of Rai Storia (channel 54) for the new "Domenica Con", the program of Enrico Salvatori and Giovanni Paolo Fontana, broadcast tomorrow, Sunday 28 February, from 2 to 24. A whole afternoon to retrace the themes of his career among films, shows and historical films.
"I was the director of the network? They never asked me - he admits - But I would gladly put my experience at the disposal of Rai, I would be a good adviser".
We therefore start from 1968, when, as a young policeman, he found himself in the scenario of the Valle Giulia protest and in the meantime he was studying at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Art.
Among his first acting performances, Il Picciotto by Alberto Negrin in '73.
"Those years - says Placido - I lived on both 'fronts'. On the one hand there was the desire to rebel against social injustices, on the other the conscience of the man of order. Actor and policeman, are two souls that I have remained on and that I found wearing the uniform of Cattani for the octopus. Today the commissioners on TV are many, they are fine and I'm happy. We should not forget the lesson of Francesco Rosi or Leonardo Sciascia, who used "the commissioners to tell serious things, scandals, the connections between politics and the underworld, the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. We
need stories like this. I'd like to see a series on mafia infiltrations, of which I have read, in the vaccine trade or on medical malpractice at the time of Covid. Nothing of the kind is seen yet, why? ".
We then move on to Placido director, with the documentary Rosarno Blues and Pummarò, his first time behind the camera and, in the early evening, A journey called love, the story of the poet Dino Campana and the writer Sibilla Aleramo.
"After having worked with many great masters, such as Bellocchio, Damiani, Rosi, Monicelli - he remembers - at a certain point the desire to tell you, to have your say on the country's malaise, even as a citizen, arrives. They tell me that today the best is I give behind the camera. Perhaps because I have matured. In Italy, except for a couple of directors like Paolo Sorrentino or Nanni Moretti, there is not enough money for cinema. The shadow of Caravaggio is a 12 million-dollar film. euro. This also tells of my certain ambition that came with age ", he smiles.
The man with the flower in the mouth from Pirandello, in the short film by Marco Bellocchio, instead brings us back to the theater.
At the Comunale di Ferrara, he anticipates, "we are working on the staging of Mario Luzi's Passion of Christ, on April 3, outside the theater. We are ready for streaming, but if we have permission we would like to take it to the streets with the public. . And finally the theater will breathe again ".
