Nanni Moretti, the director of the movie, A Brighter Tomorrow, is famous for not liking to do interviews and while he is being a good sport, it’s clear he’s not too crazy about having to do this one.
Moretti is, of course, used to press attention, since he is one of Italy’s top filmmakers, and his 2001 film about the sudden death of a young man, The Son’s Room, won the top prize at Cannes. He almost always acts in his acclaimed movies, often playing characters who seem to be his alter egos, in everything from comedy to drama.
In A Brighter Tomorrow, showing throughout Israel, he plays a contemporary director making a period movie about the Italian Communist Party in the 1950s at a moment when it broke with Stalin over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. While the background of his film-within-a-film is obviously political, he focuses on the human side of the story. The director-protagonist can be gentle and funny, but he also gets exasperated over all kinds of details and can’t listen to any input or advice, and doesn’t even notice that his wife (Margherita Buy, a frequent Moretti collaborator), is thinking of leaving him.
Italy's Woody Allen
Early in his career, Moretti was sometimes called the Italian Woody Allen and although he isn’t Jewish, there is something in his shaggy, self-deprecating screen presence and outlook that has made his movies popular in Israel. A Brighter Tomorrow premiered in Israel at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and his 2015 movie, Mia Madre, the story of a dying Latin teacher and her daughter, who is a director making a movie about a trade union starring John Turturro, opened the festival that year.
For this interview, I was in Jerusalem and spoke to Moretti, who lives and works in Rome, via Zoom, with a translator in Tel Aviv translating my questions into Italian and his answers into Hebrew. Given Moretti’s affable grump persona – that may sound like an oxymoron, but if you have seen his movies, you’re familiar with this type – the proceedings took on the vibe of a Marx Brothers movie in slow motion. In this type of interview, the answers and questions don’t always quite match, but a lot gets said, eventually.
A key subplot in the film is about an emotional actress, Vera (Barbora Bobulova), who wants to turn the movie into a romance and dial down the politics, much to the consternation of the director protagonist – at first. When I asked about whether the film is really autobiographical, he said, “I can say that I know this character very well. With everything connected to improvisation, 40 years ago, I used to be tougher with actors. Now I’m more patient with actors who change the dialogue from what is written in the script.”
In these turbulent political times, both in Italy and in Israel, I wondered why he chose this relatively forgotten moment from the 1950s to be the focus of his movie-within-a-movie, a time when Italian Communists were caught between their loyalty to Russian Communism and their sympathy for the young Hungarians’s yearning for freedom, personified by a Hungarian circus troupe that happens to be visiting Rome just as the Russian tanks roll into Budapest.
His answers are just like his movie line readings, with a slow deliberate emphasis on every syllable. “I saw the year 1956 as a key turning point when the European Left could turn away from the Soviet hegemony,” he said. “But there’s no connection to the Italian political reality of today.” It wasn’t a historical moment he knew much about until recently, but through research, he decided it would make a good story.
In several scenes, he is critical of filmmakers who make violent but shallow films, but he emphasized that he had nothing against movies that show violence, and certainly not talented directors like Martin Scorsese, who made Taxi Driver, or Brian De Palma, the director of the murder mystery, Dressed to Kill. “These are violent films and I think they’re great films. I am against violence when it is used superficially. There are directors who use violence and don’t think about the effect is has.”
There is a long tradition of movies about directors whose lives are falling apart – perhaps the most famous is Fellini’s 8 ½ – and I asked if any of these movies had inspired him.
He cited a number of such films, among them 8 ½ and Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, which had influenced him, and noted, “I’m connected as a viewer and as a director to the cinema of the 60s. The British cinema, the French cinema, and of course, Italian cinema. Why am I so connected to the cinema of this decade? Because the films that these filmmakers made in that era were concerned with the issue of a new cinema in a new society.” They looked at society and found something new, he said, “which they described in a new way in cinema.”
Moretti mentioned how happy he was to be working for the fifth time in a row with actress Margherita Buy, and with Silvio Orlando, and who has appeared in many of his previous films, too. “I’m lucky to be working with such wonderful actors,” he said.
Asked whether they would he in his next movie, he said he wasn’t sure, because right now he is busy directing a play by the Italian-Jewish writer, Natalia Ginzburg, in his first time as a theater director. He said, however, that he was first and foremost a movie director.
In one of the comic high points of A Brighter Tomorrow, the director he plays has a meeting with young Netflix executives who seem to miss the point of his work, to put it mildly. But Moretti said that while he uses a scene set at Netflix, it’s not only Netflix that is problematic. “It’s not just Netflix. It could be about Disney or about Amazon. I, on principle, make movies to be shown in movie theaters. As long there are movie theaters, I’ll make movies to be shown in them.”