Adagio

After spending a long time abroad, I am finally back to telling my city. Rome has changed, andso have I.

I looked at it with fresh eyes, back to the scene of the crime on a different beat. An “adagio”.

Stefano Bises is not only a brilliant writer but also a friend. We wrote the story and started showing it around, but we didn’t take long to find someone interested. Lorenzo Mieli was our first choice as a producer, and he jumped on board with rare tenacity and passion. Without him, this film just wouldn’t have happened.

Vision and Sky offered to finance the project, and from then on, it all moved to another level, and the rhythm became faster, almost frantic. An “andante” to “allegro.”

We moved on to pre-production with a great team of longtime partners such as Director ofCinematography Paolo Carnera, Set Designer Paki Meduri, Stunt Coordinator Alessandro Borgese, Maricetta Lombardo at the Sound Department, Luca Ricci at Special Effects, and with artists at our first collaboration like Costume Designer Mariano Tufano. What we didn’t have was a full script.

A bizarre way to start a movie, to say the least, imposed by the clashing schedules of the crew and the excellent cast that this story needed. Besides, we felt it was crucial to start shooting in the summer to best portray the scorching Roman heat.

The blackout scenes were another reason to choose to film when the city was less crowded, as we needed to turn off every lamp. We fenced wide portions of the city, patrolled by the traffic police, and the only source of light came from our cars, to simulate a regular flow.

These scenes are central to the plot: not only are they narrative crossroads but also represent some sort of visual punctuation within the story.

Despite the unusual speed, forced onto an extremely complex movie, and thanks to the reciprocal trust stemming from a ten-year-long collaboration, our crew worked peacefully and at top level. We were still writing the script, but none of us ever doubted we would hit the bullseye in the end.

I wonder whether this would have been possible in a different country. Writing, producing, and filming such an ambitious picture in such a short time. In the international cinema industry, asItalians we sometimes believe to be behind, but we are wrong. We are quick, skilled, and nimble, and we can keep up with the rest of the world, no problem.

“Adagio” was my third chance to work with Pierfrancesco Favino. He is an amazing actor who can rightfully stand next to the best in the world. His physical transformation required hours of prosthetic makeup by Lorenzo Tamburini, and Pierfrancesco’s meticulous attention to detail did the rest. A strenuous research to find the perfect posture and the right intonation for his character raised the level of the performance by more that just a notch.

5crediti non contrattualiIt was my first collaboration with Toni Servillo. I would do it again and again. He is fully committed to the work, graceful, and kind. His character has few grotesque notes, more so than many others I’ve written in the past, yet Toni gave him an astonishingly natural mannerism and made him profoundly human, even though it was his first time acting in a strong Roman accent.

It was a first with Valerio Mastandrea, too. He played a complex role, particularly because of a disability related to the age of his character. While we were filming, he succeeded in the difficult feat of breaking my heart with his tenderness in helping the son of an old friend.In “Adagio,” Adriano Giannini played a very unusual role and showed a brand new side to him.

He is the ultimate fiend, a shark after his prey, a feral and vicious character who is capable of unexpected love for his children.Pure and protective love, which is my cue to introducing a key theme in this movie: the father/children relationship, the only trigger that seems capable of firing up our characters while pushing them on a path to redemption.

Gianmarco Franchini is one of these children, and he’s at his first experience as an actor. This is a whole new world for him, so much so, in fact, that his audition for “Adagio” was a first for him. Not only is he an extremely intuitive actor who has innate human qualities that go well beyond the role, but he impressed me for his cool, a trait that usually belongs to experienced actors. He is very curious about art in general, and of course acting in particular, and he would come on set even when he didn’t have to. He would also stay after shooting his scenes to see us work and would wear us out with questions about the entire production process.

Adagio follows the unstoppable and poignant decline of three old crime legends of Rome, who seek redemption in a more cynical, chaotic, and ferocious world than the one they remember from back in the day. A world that crushes any relationship, whether it’s family, friendship, or brotherhood, sparing no ties except for money.A city ruled by chaos, corruption, and cynicism, suffocated by torrid heat, devastated by fire, and wrapped in the darkness of the endless blackouts, with just one glimmer of light.

The next generation.

Stefano Sollima