Daniele Luchetti, director of My Brother Is An Only Child, chats about Italian pop music, the influence of his iPod, and adapting a tale of two brothers with opposing political beliefs for the big screen.
LWLies: Tell us about the book that inspired you to make this film.
Luchetti: It was an autobiographical book by Antonio Pennacchi, who’s actually the main character, Accio. As a teenager he was in a seminary for a couple of years, then he was a neo-Fascist for several years, and after that he got into the Communist Party. The book was very interesting for many reasons. It tells the story of the ‘Year of Revolution’, as we call 1968 in Italy, from the point of view of a guy who is against the revolution. The story of this year is told through one family that symbolises the whole of Italy. And the most important thing that inspired me is that it is not an ideological book. Normally when we talk about that year, Italian cinema and novels try to be ideological; they try to demonstrate something. In the case of this movie, I tried just to show characters and understand their reasons.
LWLies: So you don’t see this as a political film; the human element of the story is most important for you?
Luchetti: At first sight you can consider it a political movie because of the background and because, in that year, politics was the centre of people’s lives. But I think the movie has a deeper heart, which is a story of a young person who feels excluded. He tries to find his identity through politics and he chooses Fascism, not because the idea is more interesting, but because a friend talks to him about it and because his older brother is already Communist, so this place was empty. The psychological attitude of the character is the most important thing – he rebels because he feels alone, he feels excluded.
LWLies: What happened to the real Accio, Antonio Pennacchi?
Luchetti: In real life, he’s around sixty years old now. After twenty or so years working in industry making cables, he decided to try writing. He wrote a couple of books that worked well, and now he’s an opinion-maker. He’s a strange opinion maker as his opinions are full of swear words, but he’s very intelligent, even if he is an extremist in his newspaper articles. He tried to write an apology of Stalin, which is quite difficult, so at the moment that book is still a draft!
LWLies: When he heard you were adapting his book for the cinema, did he want to be involved?
Luchetti: Yes, he did because he imagined that cinema is full of movie, which it isn’t in Italy. I didn’t want to work with him on the script because, in a certain way, the film is the opposite of the book. The book is very interesting but it’s also very cold. It’s comic, but there are absolutely no feelings, no emotion.
LWLies: What has Pennacchi’s reaction been to the film?
Luchetti: Before watching the movie, Pennacchi gave a lot of interviews against the movie, telling everyone it was bad and that they shouldn’t see it, which was very lucky for the movie because people were all very curious to see it! In the end when he did see the movie, he was moved and he said, ‘Ok, you did a terrible job, the script was horrible, the actors were horrible, but the film works because my book was too strong – you weren’t able to destroy it.’
LWLies: You co-wrote the script with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, the writers behind the Italian TV mini-series The Best of Youth.
Luchetti: Yes, I’ve worked on a lot of movies with Sandro and Stefano, and I get along with them because they can tell me ‘no’. Sometimes I’ve tried working with writers younger than me and they have too much respect and they tell me everything I say is ‘genius’. When I’m in a creative meeting I want to be free to say stupid things!
LWLies: Were there any parts of the script you found particularly difficult to write?
Luchetti: The most difficult thing was to remove the political discussions because the first draft of the script was full of them. I saw a lot of documentaries about this period but I realised that most of those discussions are not understandable today because all the cultural coordinates are lost. For example, they would talk about a book that would talk about another book that would talk about a manifesto that would talk about something that happened in the Russian Revolution. So I cut out the political discussions and we tried in the script to pull out the emotion, the comedy, and the characters, and the film worked better.
LWLies: Where did the title come from?
Luchetti: It’s a play on words: two brothers feel themselves to be only children. Accio feels himself an only child because he feels excluded, and he feels his older brother is the only one who is loved. The title of the book is Il Fasciocomunista, ‘The Fascist Communist’, which is a very hard word. So I was in a meeting with the producers and they said, ‘Right, we don’t get out of this office until we have the title.’ I was in a rush, so I pulled out my iPod, pressed shuffle, and the first song that came up was an Italian song, ‘My Brother Is An Only Child’. I said, ‘Do you like this title?’ and they did, so that’s the title!
LWLies: How important was improvisation for you in shooting the movie?
Luchetti: Improvisation is a strange thing to manage because dialogue in a movie is not reality. A dialogue is a synthesis of maybe one hour of real dialogue, so by improvising you risk shooting some boring things. So you use improvisation before shooting and you explore the scene with the actors, and sometimes some lines or gestures come out, and that’s improvisation for me… to leave yourself open to suggestion from the work you do on set before shooting. Actually when we shot the movie I kept the scene hidden from the cameraman, so he saw the scene for the very first time through the camera when he was shooting. So he had to follow the actor with the camera. And the actors felt very free because they weren’t given marks on the floor that they had to go to. So I decided to leave everyone free to do what I wanted, this is the key for me!
LWLies: Vittorio Emanuele Propizio gives an incredibly natural performance as the young Accio. Where did you find him?
Luchetti: He’s not an actor, he’s a student, and he speaks a dialect that seems like the same Italian as in Pasolini’s old movies. Young Accio was the reference for all the actors because he was so real. In fact, he was so real that all the other actors were almost in crisis because they wanted to have the same freshness as he did. The older Accio, Elio Germano [Romanzo Criminale], spent a lot of time with the young Accio trying to imitate him, and sometimes they do the same gestures and movements of the body.
LWLies: Music also plays a crucial part in the film.
Luchetti: Yes, in the 60s we had very good pop music in Italy, very important singers like Bobby Solo and Mina. They’re very evocative for us, because those songs are the mood or spirit of the times. In the movie there aren’t a lot of songs, but I use them at important points in the story and they evoke a mood. There’s also an original score by Franco Piersanti. I told Franco I needed just a couple of themes, one funny theme for the lighter scenes and one that was more emotional. We put his music into the movie, and one day he was out so I changed it all around, so now in the final movie all the funny themes are on the dramatic scenes, and all the dramatic themes are on the funny scenes! But it works because I think it helps the movie to have this balance of tone between comedy and tragedy – the music helps a lot in this kind of chemistry.
