The actor Papaleo: a friend wrote to me secretly in theater school
Think about Rocco Papaleo and you see him co-conductor of Gianni Morandi at Sanremo 2012 while the standing Ariston does the dance of the Seal and sings with him «tu-tuf tu-tuf». Or think about the Basilicata Coast to Coast
which was his first director and which won two David di Donatello. See again the bewildered and spirited gaze, the same one he has while speaking to me and which is the trademark of unforgettable characters, such as Athos, Giovanni Veronesi’s musketeer or the Cat of Pinocchio by Matteo Garrone. «I would not concentrate on the look», he tells me, «mine is more a search for musicality. I act and sing at the same time without making me notice it ».
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What’s it like to sing without noticing?
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“It is like a jazz of expression, very hidden, which however has its own trend, with pauses, squiggles, scales of notes that come and go.”
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The most musical character?
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«The Black Deer of Great Spirit by Sergio Rubini, a candid visionary with a fabulous and dreamlike vision of life and with special gifts. It had a beautiful sound. It was one of the rare times that I acted in a trance. I seem spontaneous, but I’m a very rational actor ».
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Does that music take you home at night?
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“The character and I are an open couple. If he wants to be together, he might even go to bed with me, but sometimes I don’t meet him for whole days and it happens that I act and he doesn’t show up ».
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“Well, I suck. Then many do not notice it because they like me, but I know it ».
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A blob of his best moments?
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«Athos in All for 1, 1 for all, when the other two have deserted and he returns to a gallop: I had never gone at a gallop, it’s scary, but I got off and I looked like a rider of great agility. And then with Anna Foglietta in the latest film by Carlo Verdone, when I seduce her into believing I’m sick and then I kiss her. Backwards, a meeting in Of lost love by Michele Placido: I did well because I remembered the ones I saw in the town. And some scenes from the Sunday lunch by Carlo Vanzina: I am sorry that for some he is not a noble director ».
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What is the highlight of youth?
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«When I chose the Scientifico only because it was in Lagonegro, 19 kilometers from Lauria. I had to get up an hour earlier, but it gave me the idea of traveling, having freedom. I could smoke on the street: I had started the summer after middle school, with my mother, secretly from my father ».
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Smoking, at 13 with his mom?
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“We took the package, opened it from underneath, took out a cigarette and put it back together so that he wouldn’t notice. It was a game, a reckless intimacy. With my mother I had a relationship of great confidence, at least as long as the problems were accessible to both me and her, who was not an intellectual and was religious bordering on the bigot. However, she was very nice ».
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«Happy, the only child in a family of the ’60s, with a father who was a tax employee, relatives on holidays. I had everything I wanted or maybe I didn’t have excessive desires. ‘
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Did you already sense the comic streak?
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«I was lively, Aunt Teresa remembers that I was jumping from the table to the sofa. I liked to joke, but it wasn’t like a life as an artist was in the offing ».
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«I wrote beautiful homework in Italian. Once I wrote one about Corradino di Svevia and the teacher canceled it: it was so beautiful that he thought I had copied it ».
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However, at university, he chose Mathematics.
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“Especially to go to Rome. It was 1976, all the boys from the provinces dreamed of the city thinking they would find Eden there. In part it was true, it was all more fascinating, even too much, so much so that I did not conclude anything: I was just giving one exam a year to postpone the military ».
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What was he doing the rest of the time?
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«I played the guitar, I went to the cinema, but I didn’t think of being an actor, at least a songwriter. But I was considered a nice guy: the Physics 2 teacher, if he felt his attention waning, he asked me a question and I said something that made everyone laugh. In short, a friend enrolled me in an acting school without my knowledge ».
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From there, a lot of theater and, in 1989, the first part in the cinema with Mario Monicelli.
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«Dark Evil appears in the biography out of habit: I was in the stairwell and the scene took place in the house. I didn’t even see Monicelli ».
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But he saw Bruno Corbucci.
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“I had spent years cleaning up the diction and he chose me to speak the Lucanian dialect in the series Iron class, on conscripts of all regions. The episode I was starring in aired a few hours before my father died. He was sick for some time, mom and I decide to watch TV with dad over there. It was a strange emotion, as if he were sitting with us ».
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Then, a short film in which he was the protagonist and in which he recited in dialect, Antonello De Leo’s «Senza parole», was nominated for an Oscar.
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“I didn’t want to go to Hollywood and that night I unplugged the phone, even out of a kind of modesty or healthy realism.”
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Does the turning point come with Leonardo Pieraccioni?
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«It was the first leading role, I made six films with him, but the turning point came when Giovanni Veronesi introduced me to Pieraccioni: he had seen me playing the guitar at a party. With him, then, I made four films and we also live nearby ».
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On Instagram, on the set of the three musketeers, you unleash songs and dances with Valerio Mastandrea and Pierfrancesco Favino.
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“You don’t know what a privilege it is to work with my favorite actors and even think they’re friends.”
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Three films as a director, a fourth on the way. How long have you been hatching projects as a director?
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«It all started by chance: I had an appointment with Rita Rusic, the wife of Vittorio Cecchi Gori at the time. As I go to their house, I experience a metropolitan odyssey that becomes an anecdote that I tell at dinners. Enrico Lucherini said: you have to make a short about it and, at an awards ceremony, he invites Cecchi Gori, who knew nothing about it, on the stage, saying that he will produce my first short. I turned it around and so I bit the tarantula of being a director ».
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What happened on the way between the two houses?
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«I lived in the Pantheon and I had to go to Viale Platone. I decide to take a taxi, I try to withdraw but the ATM was out of date. So, I borrow a bike, but the altitudes were not marked on the road, the climb was heavy, the stop. I reach the top and the road ends at a gate. Passers-by tell me to take a different ride, it was all uphill, I gasp, I sweat. I had ten thousand lire in my pocket, I stop a taxi, take me up, the road is closed, go back down, the money runs out, I find myself where I was before: I climb over the gate and fall into a jungle, I make my way through the branches, I fall on a kind of cliff, I landed in the avenue of the Cecchi Gori house in pitiful conditions and late. Rita, however, was later than me ».
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From there, «Basilicata Coast to coast» arrives.
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«It allowed me to deepen the bond with my land, I only knew the villages close to home. I was first in New York than in Matera. I discovered a common DNA with my people: a somewhat modest, discreet way of life, in which we try not to bother others “.
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Did you like the David for best new director or best musician?
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«The answer is given by the preserved statue: best musician, I gave the other to the producers. Music remains my main vein ».
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He also tried Sanremo but they didn’t take it.
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«Morandi told me they didn’t want any actors in the competition. The following year they called me to join him and I said: I’m coming, but I want to sing the song you didn’t get me last year ».
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A memorable moment of the Festival?
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«Let’s start from the fact that Morandi was my idol. I arrive in Bologna to go to Sanremo with him, I get off the train and he was there waiting for me. I am thrilled, I think: but how, Morandi is here like a normal one. Then he tells me: we have to go to Adriano Celentano’s house. My other idol. I enter a world: Celentano’s world, with him showing us his recording studio and the one where he fixes the clocks. And it strikes me for how sweet it is: I didn’t expect it from such an extravagant one. If there is one thing that I have not given up is the fascination for the stars as I looked at them as a young man. I have never felt like a colleague ».
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Do you recognize in the monologue on the ideal woman that she is “the ugly one you like and he likes you”?
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“Beauty is a suggestion that I suffer, but the main thing is that a woman must want to listen to it”.
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In an interview, he said that the highlight of his love life had been with his ex-wife. Is that the high moment left?
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“Yes, because we had a son who is my sentimental center. I also continued to carry the faith. But on the right. It is a symbol: if it had not been for the son, I would not have brought it, but it is there, and this makes us a trio ».
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Doesn’t faith discourage new girlfriends?
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“I guess so, so much so that I’m not with anyone, but if I fell in love again I’d take it off.”
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What is «Scordato», your next direction?
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«I can say little, I’m still mounting. It is about a piano tuner who is not in tune with the context, there is a reason and the film is a life out of tune. It seems to me my best film ».
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How did you come up with the idea of having the singer Giorgia act?
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«Because I am in love with her platonically. I always thought it had a great deal of humanity. I saw in her potential as an actress for the smile she has. I was right”.
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Are you currently tuned or out of tune?
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«Not very good. I struggle in this confusing historical phase. In fact, I’m touring with Peachum, a reinterpretation ofThreepenny opera of Brecht, now that capitalism seems to be the main reason for our society ».
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On social media, I often post poems. A verse to close this interview?
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“One from Pleasures by Brecht: a long list in which I find myself. It ends like this: writing, planting, traveling, singing, being kind ».
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December 14, 2021 (change December 14, 2021 | 21:56)
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