adminNonostante sia uno dei pochissimi registi passati indenni attraverso le forche caudine dell’“happy ending” degli abbronzatissimi anni ’80, quando anche principi delle tenebre come William Friedkin e Brian De Palma sono stati corrotti da un moralismo accecante, Abel Ferrara è una persona molto dolce.
Una persona molto dolce che si tocca un mucchio la faccia, you know.
“Il film di stasera (Bad Lieutenant), sarà doppiato?”
Abel Ferrara: “Sicuramente, usanza Italiana…”
Lo incalzo con un iceberg di vergogna: “Introdotta da Mussolini. Voleva eliminare gli accenti nei film, per mantenere una lingua pura”
AF: “Non lo sapevo! Fuck him then. I hope they screen it with subtitles! Harvey’s voice warms your heart, you know.”
Abel Ferrara è seduto al bancone del bar nell’enorme hall di un albergo alla periferia di Jesi. E’ abbagliante nel suo completo di lino bianco che fa pendant con i suoi capelli spettinati. Assomiglia all’ultimissimo Marlon Brando dopo una dieta molto aggressiva.
Con la sua faccia scavata dagli eccessi spaventa un po’, specialmente se ti fissa coi suoi piccoli occhi che hanno vissuto la Grande Mela, quand’era marcia.
E’ irrequieto perché la sua amata marca di acqua frizzante non arriva:
AF: “This fucking place, you know, it looks like the Overlook hotel!”
“Did it scare you?”
AF: “What?”
“Shining!”
AF: “More than that… It fucking traumatised me, you know. I went to see it with my mom. I wanted to take her to the cinema to lift her spirit after my abusive alcoholic father left her, right? And the movie is just about that subject, and then some, you know what I mean? I was expecting just a healthy horror flick…”
Mi avventuro in un’opinione che non manca mai di scandalizzare i miei interlocutori: “I always thought that Jack Nicholson’s casting was a big mistake”
AF: “Are you fucking crazy?!?”
“Well…is character is supposed to flip once he starts living in the Hotel… but he looks insane since the first frame…”
Abel: “Cause he’s always been evil, you know!”
“Then his wife is dumb since she only realizes it halfway through the movie… when she finds the pages with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (criminalmente tradotto in italiano con “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca” NDR)”
AF: “Forget about it, you know. You didn’t get it man!”
“When did you start “getting into” cinema?”
AF: “I don’t know bro! The first movie I went to see was Bambi, you know. A soundly devastating experience! I was scared shitless. The opening sequence alone influenced my work so much, you know…
But I don’t know why I fucking love cinema. Why do you?”
“For me it’s a full-on experience. 360 degrees, like being kidnapped by the director. If the movie is good I’m never the same person I was when I began watching it. I especially enjoy getting in when it’s daylight outside and coming out when it’s dark”
AF: “That happened to me when I watched Salò (l’ultimo film di Pier Paolo Pasolini. NDR) you know. I didn’t know where I was once I stepped out of the cinema, right? We were 15 people inside when the movie started, and only 7 once the film was over, you know. We didn’t know each other, but we bonded through that experience. We are friends to this day. At least the ones still alive, you know…
Pasolini has always been a huge inspiration, you know: His movies, his books, his poetry, his commitment, his style, the way he dressed…everything man! The more specific he was to politics the more general he was to the state of humanity, you know what I mean? He embodied freedom, intellectual and physical. He lived his life full throttle, right, with a proper punk attitude. And he never backed down! You Dig?!
In 1968 he came to NY for a retrospective the MOMA dedicated to him, which is a big fucking deal bro, you know what I mean? He stayed 15 minutes… after he rushed off to the roughest block in Harlem, a part of the city I didn’t even have the balls to go to, at the time… he went there to find some boys, you know.
He was definitely a junky, like me… I had crack, he had sex, you know”
Stiamo mangiando in un ristorante in una piazzetta nascosta di Jesi, dove Abel continua a chiedere litrate della sua amatissima, frizzantissima acqua, mentre addenta una croccante guancia di maiale. Un cameriere distratto sta per versare del Verdicchio nel bicchiere del maestro, che lo fulmina con lo sguardo.
AF: “I met Pelosi (il presunto assassino di PPP. NDR) and I immediately understood he couldn’t have been the guy that killed him, right?
Pierpaolo was a tough guy, an alpha dog, he played football 3 times a week, he would have crushed that teenage boy, you know what I mean?
There were definitely more people involved. But I don’t buy into the CIA theory (secondo la quale PPP è stato ucciso perché durante le ricerche per scrivere il libro “Petrolio” aveva scoperto verità scomode riguardo l’omicidio Mattei N.D.R.). Those motherfuckers were way too busy overthrowing governments around the world, you know.
Pasolini was killed because he was living the life at full speed, you know. He liked getting into extreme gangbang situations. That day things went out of hand pretty bad, right
Do you think it was easy being gay in Rome fifty years ago? He paid it with his fucking life, you know”
Sto rimpiangendo l’afa milanese mentre ci sciogliamo verso Palazzo Pianetti, dove Abel reciterà una poesia di Gabriele Tinti davanti alla magnifica deposizione di Lotto, un pittore veneto rifugiatosi nelle Marche per poter produrre qualcosa, essendo costretto a scappare da Venezia, dove le commissioni finivano tutte nei pennelli del ben più abile PR Tiziano.
Le parole di Tinti calzano su Abel come un guanto di velluto:
“I made my coffin ready, in the thud of evening.
I was mirrored in it, I found my way back.
I’m through with that, I want only to lose myself
in the noise of the city, in the light that confounds,
in the pain that digs”
Se chiudiamo gli occhi più che sul monte Sinai ci sentiamo tra le strade decadenti del Bronx anni 70
“At any cost
to suffer.
It is an invitation
to rise up.
Try to forget
this obscure demon,
the nails in the arms,
the hurrah of pain.”
Dopo aver incontrato un po’ di fan, Abel si gira bruscamente verso il capolavoro di Lotto. Lo sguardo verso l’espressione contorta di Cristo:
AF: “These guys were great but I wonder what would they have done without a commission? What would they have painted just with their ideas, you know what I mean?”
Uno dei presenti gli chiede:
“How did you end up living in this country?”
AF: “I came to Italy on the 18th of July 2013. I was a degenerate drug addict, and I have been like that since I was 16, I needed a clean start, you know what I mean?
I left NY for the land of my ancestors, nearby Caserta, you know, there I found a clinic that cured me. I decided that Italy would be my new home.
While I was shooting “Pasolini” I met a girl that lived in Rome, and I moved there, you know.
Trastevere first, Piazza Vittorio now. I love my neighbourhood, it’s still somehow bouncing off tourists, you know.
Can’t leave. It’s impossible to find an ugly town. It’s sick! Overwhelming you know what I mean?”
“What about NY?”
AF: “I don’t go back to that fucking sanitised place that much, it bores and saddens me, you know. Plus it would drive me crazy paying 6 bucks for a fucking cup of coffee, you know.”
Ci spostiamo in macchina verso la proiezione di “Bad Lieutenant”, in una zona periferica, vicino ad un centro sociale impregnato di canne, teenager e ricoperto da striscioni “Free Palestine” che Abel fotografa insistentemente.
AF: “I started rehearsals with Cristopher Walken as the lead. I just worked with him on “King Of New York”, right. After a few days he took me aside and confessed he couldn’t give me what I wanted. Which is a fine thing to say, you know… unless it’s three fucking weeks from when you’re supposed to start shooting!
When I gave Keitel the script the first time, he read about five pages, you know, and threw it in the garbage. “There’s no way I’m gonna make this movie”.
So I called his dearest friend, Victor Argo, whom I worked with several times, to try to convince him.
Harvey understood why I wanted to make “Bad Lieutenant” when he read the scene of the nun in the confessional. A piece of art written by the amazing Zoe Lund, she plays the “kitchen sink junky” in the film, right. We didn’t even end up using it though… something works magically on paper but it doesn’t on film, you know. Bless Zoe, I still miss her to this day.”
“She was incredible on Ms. 45 (“L’Angelo della Vendetta” NDR)
AF: “Unfortunately she loved heroin, and she was killed by heroin, you know. She was one of these people who thought heroin was the greatest thing in the world, and she did until the day she died, you know. Heroin was the elixir of life for her.”
Abel assomiglia ad una rockstar che ha passato troppo tempo al CBGB. Anzi sembra che se lo sia succhiato tutto, quando stringe le labbra mentre riflette.
“Not Fade Away” di Buddy Holly scivola fuori da un vecchio bar anni ‘90. Abel si ferma, chiude gli occhi e muove la testa, mentre un leggero sorriso si fa largo tra le rughe
“I play guitar! And sometimes they pay me too, you know!
I started with Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, The Stones… cause I wanted to bang chicks, you know.
Eventually music stole my soul. Actually I would have sold it by the crossroad like Robert Johnson.
But the hard truth is that I didn’t have enough talent… you know what I mean?”
