Marco Tullio Giordana on ‘The Life Apart’ and Why So Many Italian Films Explore Family Issues

In 1980, Italian writer and director Marco Tullio Giordana won the Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Film Festival for his feature film debut Maledetti vi amerò. This year, he is back for the 77th edition of the Swiss festival with La vita accanto (The Life Apart). And he is back to collect another honor.

On the occasion of the out-of-competition premiere of his new film in the picturesque Swiss town on Monday afternoon, Marco Tullio Giordana was awarded a special Leopard as “a tribute to his career,” fest organizers said.

“1980s, an Italian art city, a wealthy family,” reads a description of the new film on Locarno’s website. “Rebecca is born with a conspicuous red spot on her face that generates rejection, cruelty, and tormented love in the family. Music will be her refuge.”

Based on the eponymous novel by Maria Pia Veladiano, Giordana wrote the screenplay with Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio and Gloria Malatesta. The cast includes Sonia Bergamasco, Paolo Pierobon, Valentina Bellè, Italian pianist Beatrice Barison in her feature debut, Sara Ciocca, and Michela Cescon.

Check out a clip for the film below.

“Locarno is a festival that is very close to my heart because 44 years ago I got the Golden Leopard for my first film, and ever since, I have gone back many times,” Giordana told THR through an interpreter. “It’s a very friendly festival compared to others which tend to be a whirl of activity, of people coming and going. In Locarno, you get to enjoy films, meet old friends and maybe make new friends as well.”

The filmmaker said that he has always been fascinated by the many different cities and towns in Italy with their different cultures and traditions. “I feel that by making my films that are set in different regions of Italy, I somehow made a journey across my own country, discovering my own country,” he shared.

His new movie’s setting in beautiful Vicenza was one of the things that attracted him to the project. “There was also the intertwined family connection, which is a theme that I’ve dealt with in many of my previous films,” he said. “But here the the setting and the the family environment and background is more restricted, more bourgeois, more exclusive, and it goes to prove that being rich doesn’t necessarily mean being happy and being fulfilled.”

Why is family such a recurring topic in Italian films? “In Italy, family is really a very significant element in our culture,” Giordana told THR. “And with this, I don’t only mean the little happy family but all the degeneration that can occur in family bonds and connections.” Among the shared images is, for example, that of the Italian mother. “Somehow when you talk about family in Italy, you talk about the Italian society. It’s like observing it through a microscope, through a lens.”

Giordana lauded his cast for bringing the new film to life. “I love them. They were all very creative,” he said.

When asked specifically about Barison, he kept gushing: “She is fantastic. I love her.” How did he cast her? “I wanted a real piano player to play Rebecca. I didn’t want what you often see in films which is have an actress and then a pianist for the [close-ups of the] hands on the keyboard. I just wanted to film the live performances. And I looked for a performer in the conservatory in the Veneto region because I wanted the performer to have that real accent [of the region that Vicenza is part of]. When I saw Beatrice from the distance, I prayed that she would be good because as soon as I saw her, I knew that she would be perfect, which she was during the screen test. She did not care about the camera or being filmed. She was just herself.”

But there were some challenges for the cast due to a challenge he himself faced, Giordana mentioned. “My way of working with actors is this. Before giving them instructions on set, I normally ask them to show me the scenes the way they have studied them, and sometimes I welcome their proposals, and I amend things or change them.”

On The Life Apart, there ended up being quite a few changes. “During this shoot, I suffered from insomnia,” the filmmaker shared. “I couldn’t sleep during the whole shoot, and therefore I kept rewriting the lines and the scenes all night. And in the morning, I came in with new lines of dialogue for them to learn during makeup.” While that gave the cast members “very little time to get familiar” with the dialogue tweaks, “that translated into performances that were even more natural – to the point that they said, ‘What’s the point of studying the parts if you change everything?’ And I had to say, ‘We might go back to the original plan’.”

What was it like working with his friend Bellocchio? “I worked with Marco in the writing stage. Of course, when he offered me the film, I felt the need to rewrite part of the screenplay because I had to make it more personal. He gave me advice and different suggestions but without ever interfering,” Giordana told THR. “He never asked me to see the dailies or the footage. He saw a rough cut and at that point offered advice again. And since I ended up wrapping up ahead of schedule and didn’t waste any money – quite the opposite, we saved some – I realized in the editing room that I was missing three or four key scenes. And I asked him for permission to go back to shoot them.”

One example is a scene when Rebecca is 10 years old and rebels against her mother. “That was something that I missed that was absolutely crucial in order to explain the guilt that she feels afterward,” the filmmaker explained. “We needed to see this aggressive side of her toward the mother. Possibly, a more conventional producer concerned with time and money would not have allowed me to do so, but Marco understood my need.”

What’s next for Giordana? “Besides making films, I also work in theater,” he told THR. “So my next project will be a theater show that I am adapting with the actor who plays the protagonist of the show that is based on [the novel] The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello.”

Plus, he has an idea for a new movie as well. “I wrote a film a few years back that I would like to be able to make whose title is Il Rosso & Il Nero,” or The Red & The Black, said Giordana. “And I have other projects or films but possibly some of them are now too old and some too gray to be made into films. But what I would like to do is to keep alternating between theater and cinema.”