I report the screenwriter's first interesting thoughts, about his passion, how it came about and why it led him down the roads of "thrill"....
D: First, if you wish, tell us about yourself and your passion related to cinema....
Bags:
"I inherited it from my parents. They went to the movies two, three times a week and took me with them because in those days there were no babysitters. I have a historical memory of a movie I saw when I was three years old, it was the BIG KNIFE With a terrifying Jack Palance. I always went to the cinema, and from the age of seven eight I would go alone. I lived in a strategic point in Rome, via Cola di Rienzo, so I had within two hundred meters three cinemas: Eden, Smeraldo and Cola di Rienzo. A little farther on was the Palestrina, owned by the Stivaletti family (effectors and directors of M.D.C. and The Three Faces of Fear - ed. note)as I would find out as an adult, and still farther on was a "pidocchietto" or priests' cinema, In this cinema one day, I was about ten years old, I stayed from two in the afternoon until midnight reviewing "Assault on the land" the giant ant movie, a movie that has remained in my DNA. It is a film where genres are mixed: at the beginning it looks like a detective story, then it gradually turns into science fiction, catastrophism, etc. I, too, later mixed genres (Zombie Flesh Eaters is an example).
However, something happened that afternoon. I got into the habit of watching movies two three times in a row, I wanted to understand them, to own them, but most of all I liked to lose myself in those stories that I experienced as parallel worlds, I would let the images take me to an area where my imagination would light up because, in the darkness of the theater, my imagination would begin to interact with the images, with the characters, with the story, with the movie. I remember going home and reviewing the film in my mind, replaying it, deconstructing and reconstructing it. I saw To the last breath Godard's 31 times, Vivre sa vie 33. I have seen Morgan mad as hell at least 15 times and only at the end did I realize it was a black-and-white film; I always saw it in color, but maybe besides the regular pack of marlboros I had smoked something else. I have loved movies viscerally and naively for years without ever thinking of making movies. For me to sit in a theater and see the screen light up was like setting off not just for a dream but for a more real and more fun option of life."
D.: What were the circumstances that brought you into the world of filmmaking and how did you approach your first "screenplay"?
Bags:
"I knew some people who were trying to make films. They were friends. We would go to the movies, then eat pizza and talk for hours sometimes all night. In this way I realized that I was a kind of living memory. I knew almost every movie that came out, I had seen them at least three or four times, I remembered the casts, the plots, the twists, the details advantaged by a mighty visual memory (my brain reasons in images) and an ability to pick up details, even the most insignificant ones. My friends used to use me for information and I liked that a hobby of mine could be useful, then one day Luigi Collo (Cozzi? n.d.a), a guy from Turin with whom I had become very close in the '68 era in college, took me with him to meet Dario Argento who was finishing editing The bird with crystal feathers. It was about the fall of 69. Luigi wanted to make films. Dario asked him to write a subject. Luigi couldn't do it. He asked me to give him a hand. I've always liked writing, I've done good studies and read a lot of books, I currently own a library of 14,000 volumes, but above all I had an avid mystery reader mother, so I've read everything published in Italy on the subject of detective stories since I was a child. In ten minutes I wrote the subject of the Cat-o-nine-tails. It was seven eight little pages. Dario liked them, turned them into 45 pages of treatment, got the okay from Lombardo (the producer, ed.) and my first subject became a film. Then there was a misunderstanding with Dario and a quarrel between him and me, one of many, but we always made up. The quarrel ended up in the newspapers and I was called by a producer, Zaccariello, who was to make a film with Mario Bava. So I wrote my second subject and my first screenplay with much difficulty. It was Chain reaction, also known as The Antecedent or The Bay of Blood. An epoch-making film that won an award at Sitges in Spain, was screened for seven years in a row in a Los Angeles film club, was copied by Sean Cunningham who was inspired for the Friday the 13th series (particular even similar sequences can be found in the 2nd installment directed by Steve Miner: The killer sits next to you '81 - ed.). Later I was called by Dino De Laurentiis and offered me an exclusive contract for three years, but he left for the United States and I to go into the military, lancer assaulter first and guastrator later. while I was under arms I reviewed without signing two films: Those strange drops of blood on Jennifer's body. and Seven red-stained orchids, plus, again without signing, I collaborated with Luigi Montefiori (better known by the pseudonym George Eastman, and famous anthropophagous monster in Joe D'Amato's film Anthropophagus - ed. note)on the westerm Friend stay away from me at least a palm, then came Flying squad. So I started."
D: How did you come to writing horror subjects and films?
Bags:
"Like everyone, I have a dark side. I like to look into it, rummage through it, but in addition I had a grandmother. My grandmother, who was widowed at a very young age, three times at night, with the complicity of the gravy train (the gravedigger) dug up her husband. The last time, the fourth time, I was there. The old cemetery had been shaken up by an earthquake, and we spent a maddening amount of time rummaging through dozens and dozens of rotting old boxes until Grandma recognized a sock she had embroidered with all that was left of Grandpa inside:a few bones from his right foot. In addition, there was a room in the house with a presence, where no one had entered for over 40 years and often those who slept there had strange dreams, etc... When I was fourteen I loved Poe and Lovecraft, went to see horror films (Dracula, Bava, Freda, etc...) plus I am not afraid, unlike Dario, Lamberto and Mario Bava who are people who are afraid, I am not afraid so I like to put myself at risk, face extreme, borderline situations. It was a coincidence that I did cinema, that Luigi took me to Dario's house, that the fight with him introduced me to Mario Bava. But when I met Mario Bava I felt like I had finally found an older brother to teach me how to move into my dark side. He used the weapon of irony a lot, which I also have but it is not my favorite pick to penetrate the dark worlds of mystery, I prefer Propp but from that moment I knew that horror was my home. Too bad I never met a director like Mario again. The only one with a different pace and in direct contact with fear, living in the real.
Horror then, in addition to being a black tale, I really like to use it as a metaphor for reading reality, human behavior, provoking the respectability of the system, rejecting Morettian good manners (one who does not understand the poetry of Henry rain of blood doesn't deserve to be in cinema) and kicking, because people who do horror kick everything and everyone. It's alternative, but in a dreamlike way that then is the best way to deal with the aliens around us."
Thanks to the courtesy of Dardanus, who opened up in this first talk, revealing curious details worthy of further investigation, such as his contribution made to Carmineo's film (Why those strange drops of blood on Jennifer's body.) or Lenzi's (7 red-stained orchids) that definitely deserves to be deepened and dissected...
