Sacchetti turns out to be an important source of knowledge, touching on Italian cinema in all its aspects (emblamatic is his relationship with Lenzi and the detective story)...
In this part, much richer in details, we will have a chance to delve into important details about the origin of the Italian "splatter" (born with Chain Reaction) and we will have a chance to discover some of the background behind a screenplay mystery about "Dèmoni 3″ later converted into The Church....
D: Chain Reaction is one of my favorite films, not only because it represents a Bava at the highest level, but because, indeed, in the Italian panorama it was the first SPLATTER film that was going to the tail end of hits like H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast (1963), but with a far superior script and plot...
At the script stage, how did the idea of depicting such gruesome and violent scenes for the time come about? And why are all the characters in the film negative, perpetrators and victims at the same time?
The concluding idea of the "children," far from innocent, which also returns in the screenplay for Fulci's film Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981), is a constant of yours: from what does this underlying pessimism stem?
Bags:
"Chain reaction (1971)is the film I am most fond of. Because, after the Cat-o'-nine-tails, it was the first work. Because I was able to express my poetics (in many of my films we talk about children, strange houses, everyday, secular horror... ). Because I met a fantastic man, a true genius with great creativity: Mario Bava. To look at him, Mario, he seemed banal, he had nothing charismatic, in fact he was shy, he hid, he did not put himself in the limelight, but little by little, on the job, you discovered his personality, above all his world, his visionary nature, his FEAR; because Mario had fear, he felt it as a real thing and represented it. The grim scenes were born for fun, for paradox, to create surprise and anguish in the viewer, so they were carefully studied. The two making love and bowing to death together is an idea Mario had for some time. The old woman hanging herself in the wheelchair is all mine, the ending with the bad children is all mine (the original title should have been: That's how they learn to be bad guys). The octopus from under the cloth touches the shoulder is Mario's. The film is very compact because it has a soul, simple, but it has a soul. In my screenwriting lessons (a few I will give to you as well) I never tire of repeating that first you have to find the soul of the film. A film without a soul is like a Golem without the Aleph on its forehead. It does not live.
The soul of Chain reaction lies in the total dystonia between feelings and morality: parents for the sake of their children, to ensure their children's peaceful future, do not hesitate to kill, but children do not understand this because they want something else, so they kill in turn....
It is a black, dark, hopeless film (there are no good guys, not even children nor happy endings, that is only there in Pretty Woman) but with large doses of irony to dilute the bitterness, hence the splatter--it is the first film to use splatter to relieve the viewer.
D: Shock (1977), by Mario Bava, has you involved in the making of the subject. It is said in connection with this film that much of the work can be attributed to Lamberto--do you know any other details about it?
Bags:
"This is the second film I wrote for Mario. It was written in '71 right after Chain Reaction. While he was shooting Chain reaction, Mario told me that he would like to make a film about a house, where objects were the main characters (Mario never liked actors very much and for him photographing things and situations was the best, he could experiment). I have always been fascinated by houses, both because I had the privilege of being born in a magical house and because I have read so many stories about houses and seen so many movies about houses. Houses are always full of mysteries. Just scratch the walls. If you really go wrong, you find a baby tooth, the kind you save and then lose. What happens to the baby teeth? and then are we sure they fell out on their own?
So I wrote the subject, then the screenplay together with a friend of mine Franco Barberi. Lamberto was not there. At that time Lamberto, a recent father and a very young spouse, had other things to think about.
But the film was not made right away because the producer went bankrupt. The script ended up in bankruptcy and was bought in '76 by another producer. On that occasion my "friend" Lamberto was careful not to tell me that they were going to make the film. Montefiori, a true friend, told me so. Then, I found to my surprise that on the credits Lamberto had not only put himself in the script, but also put himself as the first name and twice as big as the others."
D: The best Fulci is the one who, close to the 1980s, made the famous "quadrilogy" of zombies...
One of the films appreciated by even the most hostile critics (The Afterlife) bears many similarities to domestic and international horror classics (Suspiria, Inferno, The Shining)... How much is due to chance, and how much is to be ascribed to imitation (albeit original and successful)?
Bags:
"It's true, the 1980s were the years when Fulci was at his best. The curious thing is that Lucio did not know that he was a great horror author. Even when we worked together, he only wished to return to the "good living room" of Italian cinema. So much so that he made Manhattan baby (one of the works defined by Fulci, "alimentary," n.d.a.) with his left hand as he already had the contract in his pocket to make Conquest, a film in which he believed a lot. Lucio realized he was a great horror director only later, when the magic moment had passed. His problem was his fragility. Lucio was aggressive with everyone, he had a bad temper, but in reality it was a mask behind which he hid insecurity and shyness. He didn't have Dario's personality, so he got "managed" by the producer who was cutting budgets. My clashes with him stemmed from the fact that I was pushing modern horror, while he wanted to anchor himself in nineteenth-century classics (like Lovecraft) but also from the fact that he did not defend the scripts from the producer. If he had had a more decisive personality instead of being confined to the ghetto of a small production, he might also have tried a more ambitious card, perhaps with the Americans. He suffered a crisis of jealousy toward me when I went to work in America in 80 (I had been called by Dino, for whom I had written Ogre from my original subject together with Colin Wilson the one from Space vampires, to script Man wolf and Ghost rider). Our relations broke down and he, out of spite, called in a comedy writer who merely did some damage.
Beyond-I wrote it in '79 before I saw The Shining, which I did not see in America until the following year. I had, however, obviously read the novel, which I continue to like more than the overly shifted film about madness. Suspiria is a film I love along with Profondo rosso, a true masterpiece from my point of view and a forerunner of films about houses with mysteries. Sure there are similarities (the house, the hotel, etc...not only, death, Hell...) but it is like saying that Red Shadows and many other westerns are similar because there are Indians, horses, death valley, ranch or besieged fort. Afterlife which is a little more bare bones, no frills of story, deliberately without plot because it was meant to be a nightmare of emotions and that's all, would have deserved a better budget. It originally had a different ending, without zombies (it's a lie that the Germans wanted it, that ending was inserted by Fulci, and the producer, as a guarantee of sales in certain markets) the real ending was a strange place, a kind of dead zone, all white, similar to the one, all red, hypothesized by David Linch on Twin Peaks.
Fulci's films then were very much boycotted. There was no leniency towards him. One worked almost clandestinely, with much suffering and little money. Even now there are people who do not greet me because I wrote those films. The petty bourgeois well-wishers don't like anyone finding out about their horrors. Too bad. Those years were incredibly creative. Fulci and I could have given something more."
D: I take a step back, and ask you for more details about the various
versions of the screenplay for Dèmoni 3 (later The Church, not to be confused with Dèmoni 3 directed by Umberto Lenzi). I remember that in 1987, on the TV program Giallo, Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava talked about a plane and a volcano...
Was that one of the first treatments you worked on?
Bags:
"Yes. Demons 3 originally was set on an airplane that, due to a disturbance, ended up in a strange universe, where in one of the various scenarios faced there was also a volcano. The idea was to end up in a kind of strange hell. The airplane was considered because we were looking for an enclosed, isolated place, in a totally adverse situation with danger inside as well. Let's say a kind of Alien, with the plane instead of the spaceship and demons instead of the evil ant. We wrote a couple of subjects and also treatments (I still keep some of them somewhere). It wasn't a bad story, but it didn't spin well. It had a setting error. Plus Dario, who at first was enthusiastic about the idea, fell out of love with it, so we put it aside. We quickly found the alternative in the Church, which seemed a winner. We went straight to the script from a rather simple subject. I participated in two drafts of the Church script, until the almost final one. Then Soavi replaced Lamberto who was beginning his career as a producer with eight TV films for the High Tension series like the Gioko, Master of Terror, etc. (of which we will elaborate more, since the best screenplays are really by Sacchetti, ed.). Michele changed the beginning by introducing the scene of the Knights Templar as a prologue, especially he changed the narrative style. Michele is more "modern" than Lamberto, he uses more cold tones, blues, he has a more essential and at the same time more engaging way of narration."
D: Ruggero Deodato is, in my opinion, another great director who is very adept at representing on the screen what the audience wants. His name is, usually, associated with Cannibal Holocaust...
In 1985, a decidedly strange and curious fact because by then the "cannibal" genre had waned, the following was released in theaters Inferno Live: a very raw and violent splatter that closes
ideally the cycle started with The land of wild sex...
What do you think about these kinds of films and how did the script for the film originate?
Bags:
"Ruggerino. Great technique. Theoretically he's the best of all, it rubs him the wrong way that he's cold, aloof. He does not involve himself in the stories he tells. He is more of a documentary filmmaker and, in fact, his best films are the ones narrated as if they were real documentaries (see Cannibal holocaust, ed.). There he has been at his best. He is the only real "cannibal" director, much imitated. Ruggero in life is a lovely person, at work he is strange. For Dario, just to give an example, work is hard work, it is necessarily long, and one must never be satisfied with the first solution, doubt is the beacon that illuminates the writing of a script that can last for months and then be changed by a sudden crisis. For Ruggero it is the opposite. The work doesn't have to be laborious, it doesn't have to take too long, it has to be simple so much that he'll take care of it by shooting it. But horror films, thrillers, need atmospheres, plots, situations, and directors who focus only on technique and don't put their heart and belly into it often make anemic, arronzatious films."
D: Earlier you mentioned your relationship with Umberto Lenzi (in relation to the detective film Rome at gunpoint). Lenzi, in the horror field, also made real "gems"... Can you tell us more details about the figure of Lenzi and to your collaborations with him?
Bags:
"With Umberto I had a very good relationship. He is the director with whom, from the point of view of the working relationship, I got along best. He was on an equal footing, he was complicit and rolled up his sleeves writing script pieces like a true co-writer, ready to acknowledge merits and ideas. He made several films with him. Man in the Street Does Justice, Rome with Armed Hands, Cynic the Infamous and the Violent, Trucido and the Cop, Band of the Hunchback., Iron War. Even a play: Excuse me, are you normal? undertaking into which he dragged me at all costs, because Umberto is an enthusiast, not at all a calculator. He likes to work and do everything. He has also made musical films a true scorridor of film genres. Curiously, with him I have never made either a giallo or a horror. The gialli he did before we met, the horror films he started doing when I was doing them with Fulci. I did some good detective stories with him, at least two that are little masterpieces: Roma a mano armata and Il Trucido e lo sbirro, films where I gave birth to Monnezza. I consider Umberto one of the best crime directors who could have given a lot more and at higher levels if he had had some attention to his career."
