Nanni Moretti interview

Geoff Andrew meets the director of Italian satire 'The Caiman'.

Apr  4 2007

Shortly after the release of his Palme-d'Or-winning 'The Son's Room', Nanni Moretti abandoned his plans for a documentary about Silvio Berlusconi to help set up a grass-roots anti-Berlusconi movement called the Girotondi. For the best part of 2002, he devoted himself to political activism, attacking the then-prime minister's questionable use of the Italian legal system in order to protect both himself and his business interests from investigation and prosecution. But making speeches to rallies of half-a-million protesters wasn't enough for Moretti; after all, the medium in which he has proved so successful is a powerful tool for communication.

'When I was considering making a documentary, I wasn't sure what kind of tone to adopt,' says the writer-director-actor-producer. 'And by the time I got around to making a film, the two characters who came to mind were a producer and a young female director; I wanted her to be politically committed, and the producer not at all, so that there'd be a clash.'

'The Caiman' tells of Bruno (Silvio Orlando), a washed-up producer of Z-grade trash like 'Maciste vs Freud' and 'Lady Cop in Stilettos' who's going through a divorce, and Teresa (Jasmina Trinca), who manages to persuade Bruno he should make a film of her script. Not having read it, he thinks it's just another thriller, until Teresa tells him that it's an exposé of Berlusconi. Thus begins a creative partnership made in hell… and a movie that boasts not one incarnation of the media-magnate politician but four. One of them is Berlusconi himself, seen in a news report as he likens a German politician to a concentration-camp guard. The other versions are all played by actors; but why three?

'There's one for each of the three phases of Teresa's work on her film. The screenplay is seen through Bruno's eyes as he's reading it; for that I wanted to use an actor who looked like Berlusconi simply because I wanted the audience to realise before even Bruno who was the protagonist of Teresa's project. Then, for the preparation of her film, I liked the idea of having Bruno and Teresa – both quite powerless – meet up with comparatively well-known faces: first myself, then the actor-director Michele Placido. In the film, I say no to their suggestion that I play Berlusconi, pretending that I've read the script when I haven't, and making tired excuses.

'Then finally, for Teresa's film as it's being shot, by which time Placido has walked off the project, you see me playing Berlusconi after all. But for that I didn't impersonate or parody him; I just played it straight, to remind the audience of the seriousness of what Berlusconi had been saying. Unfortunately, in Italy, the violence of his politics no longer made a real impression, because they were so used to seeing him. Even many of those on the left – both the politicians and the voters – just focus on what's ridiculous and buffoonishly funny about him; that was of no interest to me. I wanted the sheer weight of the kinds of things he was saying to be felt again – so it was important to have them said by someone very distant and different from him.'

With its films-within-a-film structure, 'The Caiman' serves not only as an anti-Berlusconi polemic, but as a broad satire on the failings of the Italian film industry, an affecting, serious drama about the break-up of a marriage, and a partly metaphorical fable about the collapse of Italian democracy: crisis, in other words, on three fronts. Unsurprisingly, however, most of the attention paid to the movie has focused on its status as political weapon; released in Italy just a fortnight before last April's general election, it enjoyed huge success in terms of domestic box-office, having made it on to most of the national dailies' front pages and two of the TV channels on its first day; the rest, mostly owned by Mr Mediaset himself, acted as if the film simply didn't exist.

'Actually,' laughs Moretti, 'I'd decided one and a half years beforehand that I wanted the film released in March 2006; at that time I didn't even know when the elections would be. Why make it? It would've been strange to have lived through 12 years of this experience and not express through my work what it was like; though I already suspected when I was making the film that Berlusconi's time in office was nearing its end, I wanted to show how dangerous it had been, and its consequences. But you have to remember: when a director decides to make a film with the specific intent of changing the viewers' minds, or awakening them, most of the time he just ends up making a bad movie. So it's important not just to make propaganda.'
And how did the now ex-prime minister himself react to the film when it was released? 'In his last debate against Romano Prodi, he referred to "that horrible movie" – even though he'd also said that he wouldn't be going to see it.'

'The Caiman' opens on Friday.

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