Director, says who?
- Carlo Facente
- Feb 25
- 7 min read
Excel, Spritz, and Miracles
“No one understands a damn thing.”
That’s the line you hear most often—over the past couple of years—among filmmakers, producers, and crews in Italian cinema. In the many-layered sprawl of the audiovisual industry, the air is thick with anger and dissatisfaction, envy and discouragement. In this economic, identity, and social disorientation, young directors thrash around between bureaucracy, precarity, artistic ambition, and production mirages. The consequences are obvious: if instability is the only certainty left, frustration and unhappiness start to wear you down—and, above all, anger turns into a ritual.
And yet it’s in this suspended atmosphere—made of incredible opportunities and equally incredible contradictions—that the audiovisual supply chain somehow stays standing. The rules keep changing, funds swing up and down, international players come in and out of the country like Erasmus kids drifting in and out of Bar Callisto, and the ones who pay the price are mostly those just starting out. While Mel Gibson strolls around the Imperial Fora in Crocs, young auteurs have to learn to be a little visionary, a little entrepreneur, a little accountant, a little magician, a little dandy, a little graphic designer. Picture mini Baudelaires who, while puffing on Terea sticks, invest in crypto and subscribe to Canva Pro.
A set of qualities and skills that, up close, are almost incompatible with one another—yet the system now seems to demand them, or at least to have made them sprout.
So you start wondering: could this role-schizophrenia be what’s driving the identity crisis of Italian cinema?
Sure, directors have always had to find ways and channels to express themselves; every author has always had to chase funding, convince a production company, knock on the right doors, invent paths, compromises, and chances. That has never changed and never will.
But today the point is different. Today, young directors aren’t just trying to make a film anymore: they’re becoming something else. A new species, increasingly molded by a system that asks for everything and its opposite. And it’s probably from this forced metamorphosis—still not fully complete—that people start, clumsily and in a rush, to look for culprits and survival strategies.
The ways they adapt are the most varied—and, above all, the most entertaining.
The project-manager directors
EXT. NIGHT – BAR DEL FICO, ROME
So… what even is the Tax Credit?
Oh Fra, I don’t know, but basically… they’re not putting out the cash anymore.
Forget shot/reverse shot. No point knowing what a dolly is, or a jump cut. Today’s directors are project managers—or rather, line producers.
They spend their nights studying Ministry of Culture (MiC) calls, trying to get comfortable compiling financial plans. Selective grants and automatic grants. Development selective and production selective. Film Commissions, Eurimages, co-productions, associated productions, the differences between co-productions and associated productions, below-the-line and above-the-line costs, eligible and non-eligible expenses.
They call up the family cousin they’ve always hated—Giovanni, 28, tall, dark-haired, who made the holy, truly holy choice to graduate in “Economics and Something in English” at Bocconi—so he can teach them how not to die inside the claustrophobic cells of Excel.
If producers once stormed the authors’ ivory tower to drag them down to earth, these new directors don’t even climb the tower in the first place—because they’re painfully aware of what’s hiding behind every page of a screenplay. They want to get ahead of the producer, dodge that terrible, final “No,” and to do it they’ll try anything.
INT. DAY – PRODUCTION COMPANY “FAVILLE”
Trust me—let’s try the Calabria Film Commission call. Those guys have money.
Yeah, but the whole script is written in Roman dialect.
So what? I’ll change it. Two minutes.
These are directors who treat their film like a start-up: a project where the “authorial” part (plot, synopsis, blah blah blah) matters far less than showcasing the product’s distribution potential and its financial conditions.
Directors obsessed with producers, convinced the only thing producers really care about is one question: “Yeah, but how much does it cost?”
Directors who, most likely, could answer that question without being too far off.
INT. DAY – PRODUCTION COMPANY “FAVILLE”
Yeah but in the script there’s a villa—renting a villa costs…I’ve got the family villa in Fregene.
Yeah but in the project dossier you’ve got Giallini—do you even know how much that guy asks…?
Giallini lives on my landing. He told me he’s in.
And then, at the end, the sentence that shuts every door—the one you can’t reply to, and don’t.
Yeah, it’s one of those periods. Right now my hands are tied. Everything’s frozen with these funds. No one understands a damn thing.
The drink directors
There are those who believe in the Elevator Rule—the theory that authors must be ready (in the most militarized sense possible) to present their story as if they had to sell it to a producer during a thirty-second ride.
Outside Cinema Troisi—the arcadia of today’s Roman Nouvelle Vague—there are those who show off their Letterboxd library and compare it to someone else’s: a form of addiction, simmering, and social hypnosis that isn’t far from the ceremonial sacredness with which, back in elementary school, you’d flaunt your Yu-Gi-Oh card deck.
There are those firmly convinced that “paying your dues” includes dropping two thousand euros to spend four days in Venice during the Festival and bumping into a Procacci, a Nicola Giuliano who—victims of one spritz too many—decide to invest one and a half million euros in an idea they heard while the party’s soundtrack was blasting.
Stop.
Stop.
Don’t judge.
You never know: they say it’s an investment. Like a Soho House membership. Like those three-thousand-euro workshops where Muccino teaches you how to direct an actor while putting cereal away in the kitchen cupboard.
You never know. Don’t let it weird you out.
Try imagining it as a university tuition fee.
Better?
Actually—at Sapienza they don’t even have a SPA.
EXT. NIGHT – PALAZZINA GRASSI, VENICE
(the chorus is thundering; the bass is eating the room)
Yes, Mr. Procacci, I was saying—it’s the story of this guy, Achille, from the very bottom of the Roman outskirts, and he’ll do anything to break away from his family…
(another hook drops; nobody can hear anyone)
Achille especially wants to break away from his father—violent, ignorant, who spends his days listening to Paolo Meneguzzi on the couch. Achille finally wants to fulfill his dream: to create a community of parrots who communicate using Neapolitan dialect and the melodic lines of Nancy Coppola and Rosario Miraggio… because, in his view, a true cultural revolution can only come from a strategic alliance between human beings and neo-melodic music…
Look, forgive me. The music’s too loud. No one understands a damn thing.
The San Lorenzo director
Not everyone is like this, of course. There are radical filmmakers—purists—deliberately and stubbornly far from the production-and-finance machinery of cinema, which, they say, only risks distracting the creative and poetic spark of their soul.
They studied at DAMS, or they didn’t study at all. They come out of Tibur saying Maresco is courageous, Woody Allen is overrated, Sorrentino is overrated, Daniele Ciprì is their brother, and that cinema today should only be shot handheld.
And then more. Weird stuff.
They say Alice Rohrwacher is more Pasolini than Pasolini, that Vinterberg would be Dostoevsky and Ibsen’s favorite director, that Garrone deconstructed neorealism by renovating it, that Coppola lost his mind, that Pietro Castellitto is Italian cinema’s biggest illegal building project.
Then they confuse me—I hear them keep going, gin and tonic in hand—and when they say “sharp but lovable,” I no longer know whether they’re talking about Hendrick’s or Poor Things.
They’re filmmakers who, more often than not, quote Carmelo Bene quoting Lacan, Flaiano, and Bataille. They loop an old Costanzo Show episode while doing their first climbing lesson.
And so: these filmmakers believe producers are the evil of cinema—Masonic conspirators who raised us on Christian De Sica, on the objectified image of women, stooping to small-bourgeois mass culture and feeding the historical-cultural clichés of our peninsula.
In reality, if you talk to them, you’ll witness a strange short circuit: on the one hand, their eyes light up when you mention “productions” (I wish you could see their faces when someone says the word CATTLEYA).
On the other hand, they’re so hopeful and ferociously attached to the idea that a production company might be interested in their logline scribbled while drunk on a Todis receipt. And yet… at the same time they reject producers, because producers, somehow, make up what they usually call “the system”: a conclave of rich businessmen—loud, clueless, megalomaniac—who run the whole thing as if it were a company in any other sector. Italian cinema as a chocolate factory where, instead of Oompa Loompas, you have a bunch of mini Aurelio De Laurentiis yelling about DAZN and singing in chorus in honor of Pocho Lavezzi.
And so these filmmakers continue—audaciously—funded by their love for the seventh art, making short films: they call their DOP friend, they kneel before rental houses for lens discounts, they go into debt to shoot on film, they ask their uncle if he can lend his Peugeot for a scene.
The process is always the same: it starts with “I’ve got an idea,” and shortly after becomes “let’s do it.” They’re convinced and gorgeous, they dress badly, and they talk far more about cinema than they make—or even watch.
They criticize and would criticize anything. Past films don’t interest them. Netflix is evil. Italian cinema too, and big American productions even more. Fantasy isn’t worth watching. Sci-fi? Don’t even bring it up. The Lord of the Rings is nerd stuff. For a while they were obsessed with Lanthimos, but Kinds of Kindness already cooled them off. Now they cling to Bird by Andrea Arnold—for now it holds—and to Bozzelli, whom they consider a Messiah dropped from heaven into NABA for our sake.
You can’t tell what they truly like. Worse: you can’t tell whether there exists a film—or a director—that convinces them all the way. They seem to hate cinema with the same intensity they claim to love it.
EXT. NIGHT – SAN LORENZO, ROME
Yeah, but forget the screenplay. If you read the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey it’s garbage, right? But then you go see what Stanley pulled off. The point isn’t what you tell—it’s how you tell it.
Five minutes later.
For me the most important thing is: no rhetoric. There’s no good and evil in cinema, like Ni-ce says: “beyond good and evil.” That’s my mantra.
Four minutes later.
And enough with these structures: the hero’s journey…and the transformation arc…and the want and the need…and the inciting incident…and the stakes. Come on. Let’s tell things however we want. Is reality orderly? Does life go the way you want? Have you ever seen a structure in real life—ever? Never. Who’s ever seen a structure? What does a structure look like? And if Fellini followed structure, he wouldn’t have made 8½. So why should I believe what some damn American—McKee or whatever his name is—who’s never written a film wants to teach me? Structure is like God: an invention. It’s there, but it doesn’t exist. And us, deep down… what do we care about God?
Three minutes later.
Look, I’ll tell you the truth. I tried… to follow you. But I can’t make head or tail of it.
Director, says who?
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