From 18 to 22 May, at Lingotto Fair in Turinmany were the guests who crossed the mirror at International Book Fair 2023. Among these, Valerio Mastandrea And Alessandro Borgowhich in the Sala Azzurra in Pavilion 3, moderated by Frances Serafinimet the audience to talk about Claudius Caligariin a beautiful tribute to the master and al way of making movies. For the occasion, the two actors retraced some salient stages of their careers, offering anecdotes and touching moments. Of the director, who died of an illness in 2015, Valerio Mastandrea remember now The smell of the night from 1998, a film that is part of a trilogy that opened with Toxic love and ended with Do not be naughtyCaligari’s last work before his death.

The first to speak, with his irony, is Mastandrea who in The smell of the night plays Remo, the protagonist: “I did Remo only at the end“, start, “I had been called to play one of the protagonist’s companions, a completely different character, and I met Claudio on that occasion. I had never seen him in full, so when I met him I thought he was someone from Ostia and instead I found myself in front of a man from Arona. And I said: Oh man! It was the second time it happened to me because I had seen another film, Another life, by another great master, Carlo Mazzacurati, set in a Rome that only a Roman could know, and when I discovered that it was from Padua, I was blown away .“

“Yet on these occasions I understood one important thing: how cinema could be a tool for getting to know things, tell them even if you weren’t born there inside.” continues theactor, “This is a great teaching: you have to immerse yourself a lot before you can tell anything. Going back to Caligari’s film, twenty days after shooting I was called back and examined, and in the end he wanted to ask me if I wanted to play Remo, the protagonist. I wanted to think about it because the proposal excited me. In the end I accepted and from then on a partnership was born with Claudio like friendships between peers are born, that you don’t know when you met, because it seems to you that in your life you have always walked together. And in my opinion those are the friends you can walk with in the present.”

Claudio Caligari, his cinema with Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli

Mastandrea, who with Claudius Caligari he established a friendship, he was then the producer of his latest work, Do not be naughty, which has become a cult. Just as Serafini recalls, Caligari greatly appreciated Alessandro Borgo And Luca Marinelli, who play Vittorio and Cesare respectively in the film. And it’s just the first to remember his teacher with emotion, who, as confirmed by Borghi himself, was among those who taught him the cinematographic subject the most. “I was very overwhelmed by having met Claudio Caligari. He gave me so many teachings without even realizing it, and this is a very beautiful thing. It was always a constant exchange of something to do with the storywith the great passion of telling a story.”

“The first thing I learned was the need to tell stories, regardless of everything, outside the dynamics of commerce, money, tax credit. I had ten years of bad television and it didn’t make me happy. I did things that when I looked at them I was ashamed and didn’t make me feel good. Then at a certain point Stefano Sollima arrived first and made me do Suburra and immediately after the film by Claudio Caligari, Non essere male, a turning point. Whenever I have a new project, I always think about what he taught me and apply it. I have a before and after Claudio“, as “there is a before and an after Christ”, echoes the colleague next door.

Mastandrea also recalls the words of Fabrizio Gifuni ai Donatello’s David 2023in memory of Caligari and his knowledge “stay inside the stories”: “For him everything had to be believable. He had to filter it first, check its credibility.” Immediately afterwards, to reinforce the words of his colleague Borghi, a video greeting by Luca Marinelli was shown, who paid homage to the director with an amusing but profound anecdote: “One day, in a scene from Don’t be bad, I went to Claudio, overcome by a doubt about my character’s attitude (Caesar ed). I came to him explaining the sensations that in my opinion the character felt and all the reasoning he made towards his mother. At one point I look at him, he looks at me and says: if Cesare thought like this he would be an idiot.”

“At first I thought he was referring to me, but then he told me that I should never judge the character I was playing, because he is a planet that is part of a system and he certainly wants to communicate with another planet in orbit (who are the other characters, in this case Cesare’s mother ed). This helped me a lot and was a great lesson in cinema, very direct. And then, if Valerio Mastandrea, Alessandro Borghi and I have become a big family, it is thanks to Claudio.”

From Don’t Be Bad to The Eight Mountains

Inevitable, towards the end, the thought a The eight mountainsfilm by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, which took home four awards at the David di Donatello 2023, including Best Film, as well as winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Actually, The eight mountains is indebted to Do not be naughty of Caligari for the friendship that has developed between the two protagonists. “I thought about this a lot while we were making the film (The eight mountains ed.),” Borghi said, “There (in Do not be naughty ed), Luca and I got together, we became brothers, and the thing has remained unchanged over time. But then something very beautiful happened: in those mountains it is as if we had rediscovered our ability to be friends. How far we managed to be alone having a lunch break in the middle of a meadow. We made our friendship available to the characters and it would have been stupid not to. We talked a lot about the fact that Pietro and Bruno are like us, distant, if one considers that I live in Rome and he in Berlin and that, like me and Luca, they see each other once a year and that they have, always like us, two completely different views on life.”

“These enormous differences have brought us together, and I could no longer imagine my life without Luca, professionally and humanly. The other day I had an emblematic photo framed, me, Luca Marinelli and Valerio Mastandrea sitting on a sofa in Los Angeles, to promote Non essere male by Claudio Caligari, and when I look at it it’s incredible how there are three different universes there, and like these three universes manage to be one, bigger, when they are together. And it is the beauty of the union of this work but also of friendship in its essence. To be free to talk openly and tell each other when things are going well or badly and in the application of the work, to take all those elements and be able to mix and match them, to make them available for another story, is a great gift.”