Director Matteo Garrone shares some insights to Tale of Tales…
The choice of Basile:
I chose to tackle the universe of Basile because in his tales, I found that blend between the real and fantastic which has always characterised my artistic endeavours. The stories recounted in Tale of Tales cover all of life’s opposites: the ordinary and the extraordinary, the magical and the everyday, the regal and the obscene, the straightforward and the artificial, the sublime and the filthy, the terrible and the tender, scraps of mythology and torrents of popular wisdom. The tales recount human feelings pushed to the extreme.
The approach to the tales – the real and the fantastical:
From the first reading of the 50 tales which make up the book, myself and my fellow screenwriters faced numerous choices in choosing the stories that we liked most and then making them credible, concrete, as if we were seeing them take place before our eyes. Our approach was to search for something powerful, physical, shared and authentic, even in the stories in which the imagination was the most fired-up. In Basile’s work, there’s a great pleasure in the narrative, and that should also be a prerogative of cinema.
My previous films have been based on true stories, which I transformed to the limits of an almost fantasy dimension. Here, we did the journey in the opposite direction. We were inspired by fabulous situations that were brought on to a realistic basis through a process of subtraction, so the spectator can at each moment feel involved in the story, and become immersed in the adventures of our characters.
Modernity of the tales:
This process of subtraction had no effect whatsoever on the themes and the fundamental sentiments in the book, which still show all their surprising modernity. We were the first to be amazed by this. The horror, for example, is all there in Basile’s work; we really didn’t add anything. At the end of a long selection process, once we had chosen and created the connections between the tales, we realised to our great surprise that we had followed an invisible but very strong thread that linked them. Actually, it involved three stories about women, each at a different age in life. But what struck us even more was the capacity of these tales to capture some contemporary obsessions: the powerful desire for youth and beauty (which Basile even describes in a hyper-realistic manner, offering a satire on today’s cosmetic surgery, four centuries ahead of his time), the obsession of a mother who would do anything to have a son, the conflict between the generations, and the violence that a girl must deal with to become adult.
The language of the film:
We chose English, beyond mere production reasons (given that it’s a film with an international cast), but because that language is the way to make Tale of Tales, this book on which some of the most famous fairytales in the world are based, accessible to the widest possible audience. The imagination of these tales goes beyond any limit, and in that respect Basile is a universal author. What’s more, the use of English means you don’t immediately identify the landscapes which form the backdrop of our story, and that avoids fixing the characters in a particular dialectal tone.
Faithfulness and betrayal:
Using English was not the only “betrayal”; we took some other liberties. But the rest is in the very nature of the fairytale, which is continually translated and reinterpreted. We found so many versions of the same stories. You can never be faithful to a tale: each time you tell it to a child so they go off to sleep, something changes. What we absolutely didn’t want to betray, what we tried to keep intact, was the spirit, that evocative power of the tales, which has fed the universal imagination through the centuries, influencing writers like Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.
The special effects:
Like all the artistic decisions, whether the cinematography, sets or costumes, the special effects were designed to give the film as much verisimilitude as possible, to lend it physical and emotional credibility. In particular, the work on the special effects was characterised by a purely artisan creative path. We physically tried to create the fantastical creatures like the dragon and the giant flea, and to keep the digital intervention solely for touch-ups. It’s a way of working that allowed the actors to perform in close contact with these fantastic creatures and to get fully inside the skin of the character during takes.
Painting and cinema:
From a visual point of view, some of the film’s major inspirations come from Los Caprichos, the series of engravings by Francisco Goya. His marvelous illustrations really capture the soul which bursts forth from Basile’s work, and the atmosphere of the film: they provide a representation of grotesque humanity, at once realistic and fantastic, spiced up with many comic and macabre elements.
As far as cinema is concerned, among the key references, I’d cite Black Sunday by Mario Bava,Comencini’s Pinocchio, Fellini’s Casanova and Brancaleone’s Army by Monicelli.
I would define Tale of Tales as a fantasy book with some touches of horror. In an indirect yet palpable way, these two genres – fantasy and horror – come through and can already be felt in my previous work: in The Embalmer and in First Love, the horror notes can already be clearly heard; in Reality, the fairytale mood inspires the stories as much as the style; and even in Gomorrah, beyond the realism of the situations, the tone of some episodes is that of a genuine dark fable. When you think about it, The Embalmer – which also has some grotesque and poignant aspects – actually resemble one of Basile’s tales: “Once upon a time there was a dwarf who stuffed big animals and who fell in love with a beautiful young man.”
The filming locations:
Our aim was to seek out real places that could nonetheless look like they were recreated in the studio. As such, we discovered some genuine natural locations that turned out to be perfectly adapted to the multiple reconstructions presented in the film. These are buildings and panoramas which appear to be the fruit of the most fervent imagination, but which really exist, and bear within them the signs of the period and the weirdness of those who designed them, or else the unpredictable work of nature with its materials, rocks, water, plants. Besides some wonderful chateaus, I’m thinking of the Alcantara gorge, the Vie Cave, and the Bosco del Sasseto, which looks like a pre-Raphaelite set.
The costumes:
Regarding the costumes, the film is inspired by the first Baroque period, when Basile wrote the book, but since this is not a film of historical reconstruction. We felt free to reinvent a fantasy world, while at the same time being careful not to appear “extravagant”. If we allowed ourselves some license, it’s because the Baroque is a varied and sumptuous style, which allows a lot of liberties and in itself sums up the previous periods, including the Gothic, the style with which the fairytale genre has always been associated.
Tale of Tales continues on our screens. Watch the trailer and book tickets here.
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