An interview with Paolo del Fiol, a director from the independent horror scene who has more than a decade of experience in filmmaking. Titles such as Kokeshi and Tomie Again are just a few of his works in which Japanese and Western cultures are intertwined, resulting in extremely interesting and very unique stories.
Del Fiol also tells us about his early work but also about future plans.
L: Who is Paolo del Fiol?
P: Paolo Del Fiol, from Pavia, class of 1976, has always been a movie buff, especially in the horror/fantasy genre. A CTF graduate, he began by writing about cinema in the newspaper L'Opinione and then as editor of Buioinsala magazine. In 2004 his passion for travel led him all the way to faraway Japan where he met Reiko Nagoshi, whom he married in 2005. The union of these two very different cultures also marks his artistic path, leading him to create works that straddle the Japanese horror and Italian genre cinema of the 1970s/80s.
L: When did you get into filmmaking and why?
P: I approached the world of filmmaking in 2002 together with a dear friend, Dominik Flacio, who shared the same passion as me, with whom we decided to set to work on the first of our works (we would later make 4 more together, until 2005). The reason is only one: my lifelong love for this art.
L: You have a long filmography behind you. What can you tell us about your first horror short film?
P: My first short film, entitled. Blindview Was an incredible experience. I shot it together with Dominik Flacio in the courtyards of the University of Pavia in a polar February and in the Faculty of Anatomy. In the latter they allowed us to shoot in the anatomical museum, with rather disturbing results. Although it was a neophyte's work, it still participated in several festivals and was especially liked in Pavia, where there are people who still remember it a good 12 years later.
L: Where am I? (directed together with Dominik Flacio) is the winning short film of the 2005 edition of the Joe d'Amato Horror Festival. What are your memories of this experience?
P: Where am I? was my first work inspired by Japanese works, loosely based on a comic book story by Hiroiko Araki. At the time there was still no translation of said work into an understandable language, so I put my wife and a friend who had come to visit me from Japan to work on it. Then Dominik and I adapted it to our needs, even changing the ending. Because of guests to follow, exclusively night shooting and a damned hurry to fit in the call for entries for the first useful festival (the Joe D'Amato precisely, whose entry was expiring any day now), it is probably the short film I love the least. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun to prepare all at once the diabolical prison tricks our lead actress (a stunning Carla Gil) would stumble into.
On the other hand, as for winning such a large festival (by Italian parameters), it was a fantastic experience that I wish for all my colleagues.
L: By the way, this short was included in the Horror Underground DVD produced by FilmHorror, together with the works of other Italian directors (Alex Visani, Marco Ristori...). What do you think about this project?
P: The FilmHorror guys were among the first to believe in the validity of independent cinema, unfortunately at the time there was a tendency to identify independent with amateur, and the project was not completely understood even by horror fans. Today, fortunately, things are (very) slowly changing, evidenced by projects such as P.O.E. and the new 17 At Midnight that are attracting increasing interest.
L: Also together with Dominik Flacio in 2004 you directed The Bitch, a medium-length film about demonology. What do you think about this work?
P: The Bitch is definitely the film I love the most among those from the first part of my artistic journey. Making it was a real challenge, we were beginners and the scenes were really complex. It took us almost a month, but we were very satisfied with the final result, thanks also to the skill and patience of the actors involved. Inside there is a little bit of everything, splatter, demons, zombies and a very daring dream/erotic scene for the times. The bitch did not circulate much, except for a fleeting appearance at the 2004 Joe D'Amato as a special event, but it boasts such exceptional viewers as many famous Italian genre directors (including the late Bruno Mattei) and the American master Stuart Gordon.
L: When did you decide to merge Eastern and Western cultures in your works?
P: It's not something I decided deliberately, it all stems from a decades-long maturation that led me to look for new styles, indeed to find one that could make my films stand out. A kind of trademark, in short. The perfect match I had with Kokeshi, while the early work hung more to one side or the other.
L: What fascinates you about Eastern cinema so much that you decided to revisit it from an Italian perspective? Which Eastern directors do you most appreciate? What are their films?
P: The thing that fascinates me the most is undoubtedly the poetry of the images, even in the case of extreme films, and the finesse of the themes dealt with. I love both art cinema with its reasoned slowness and the more fractious cinema of the new masters of splatter. Years ago, when I thought I had seen it all, Eastern cinema was a pleasant discovery. My favorite films, ranging from auteur to splatter, include Dolls (Takeshi Kitano), Gogo Second Time Virgin, Rengo Sekigun (both by Koji Wakamatsu), Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura), Ichi The Killer (Takashi Miike), Tetsuo (Shinja Tsukamoto), Suicide Circle (Sion Sono). But it is still a genre of cinema that I generally love very much.
As for me, however, I am not moving toward a reinterpretation or Westernization of Asian cinema, but in creating stories in which elements of both cultures can coexist, without one engulfing the other. To make myself clearer, perhaps the best example is. Kokeshi, in which a pair of serial killers who act as in 1970s torture porn are undermined by the specter of a little Japanese girl who instead moves (or rather makes the story move) according to their own standards. So the film at one point changes shape and shifts abruptly from gothic to oriental.
L: Kikioboe (2006) is your first short film shot in Japan. Can you tell us about it?
P: Kikioboe literally means “story you know because you have heard it before, but don't remember perfectly.” Magic of the Japanese language. How I love this movie. It was perhaps the last year I was able to spend New Year's Eve in Japan and I decided to get to work on a short film, supported from Italy by all the friends on the filmhorror.com forum. I invented an urban legend and built a story from there, involving my wife (in her first experience), a friend and part of the family, including the dog. It tells of two friends who find a figurine of maneki neko (a kind of Japanese spirit in the shape of a cat) in a temple and make a wish each, heedless of the fact that the creature wanted to be paid for its services. Megumi, the sillier of the two, who is perpetually on a diet, chooses to find a cream pastry every morning when she wakes up, while Kyoko, distraught over the loss of her husband, wishes for something far more dangerous...
Unfortunately, the short is marred by poor visual rendering, it was in fact shot on my father-in-law's old (already for the times) VHS-C, however I plan to remake it soon, again in Japan.
L: How did the collaboration with Daniele Misischia for the making of Connections (2013) come about?
P: I fell in love with the feature film. Hate Day, being impressed by Daniele Misischia's mastery in shooting scenes so unusual in the Italian scene. From there I got the idea of making a “grindhouse” following Tarantino's model, a pulp and a horror film to be screened one after the other that had pain as a common theme.
Misischia was also enthusiastic about the idea, and we set to work creating “Connections-The Real Italian Grindhouse”. These are two episodes that are very different in pace and style, but in my opinion complement each other perfectly. Of all of them, I think it is my most successful film, also accomplice to a splendid and close-knit cast.
L: Kokeshi is the medium-length film that complements Hobo by Mix in Connections. Your film is a mix of different genres and offers a well-curated story full of pain. How did you come up with the idea of including elements such as the CIPA disease, the Japanese doll (Kokeshi) and the game Kagome?
P: Kokeshi is the result of a very reasoned script, to which writer Cristiano Fighera made a fundamental contribution. It took two months to put all the pieces in place and characterize the characters well, but in the end it came out great. Grief is the fundamental theme throughout, so serious motivations were needed to justify the heinousness and marginalization of both victims and perpetrators. I will say no more so as not to spoil the viewing, the film being on the festival circuit right now. Let it be known only that on the Kagome, the macabre nursery rhyme repeated throughout the film, at least three more stories could be filmed so vast is its symbolism. The little Kokeshi doll, on the other hand, is part of the “cursed objects” series so beloved in Japan, to which there is even a temple dedicated (and which it is not certain I will not include in future works, perhaps the remake of Kikioboe).
L: Holdouts (side photo by Fabio Riberto) is one of the episodes that are part of the horror anthology 17 at Midnight (2014) by Davide Pesca. Can you tell us about your short film?
P: Holdouts is a four-minute short film decicated to Japanese ghost soldiers (the Japanese holdouts precisely).
A few days after Japan's surrender, a mysterious tank peeps into an American base being dismantled...
A little rape and revenge of which I am proud, despite its brevity, thanks in part to the skill of the actors and the use of real military vehicles.
Two interesting facts: at one point the kokeshi doll, the same one already seen in “Kokeshi,” peeps out, setting up Holdouts as its own little spinoff.
Another edit of this short film, for which only scenes were used
Filmed with an iPhone, it won the FiPiLi horror festival in April in the smart and short movies category.
L: Mochi is the title of your short film in Sangue misto, a collective film conceived by Davide Scovazzo. Can you give us a sneak preview?
Q: Didn't I say earlier that Kokeshi It was supposed to be part of a trilogy entitled Yamato Kaiiki (Chronicles of Strange Japanese Phenomena), the second chapter of which will be Mochi. The original project was a feature film about Yokai, Japanese spirits, edited in the style of Kitano's Dolls, but I decided to break it up due to the costs and time required to produce each episode. However, I am happy that it will be included in Sangue Misto, as it gives me the opportunity to work with what I consider to be the best directors on the Italian scene.
While the main theme of the first book was pain, Mochi's will be love. The protagonist is Mochiko, who moves from Tokyo to foggy Milan to pursue her dream of singing, only to have to face the harsh reality of her body. I won't say any more so as not to spoil the surprise, but I can tell you that you'll see some great things, just like in the first chapter.
L: What do you think of the current independent horror film scene?
P: I'm happy that something is finally starting to happen in Italy too. Few independent films make it to the cinema, but they do exist, which was unthinkable just three years ago. The public has long been tired of carbon-copy comedies, so I prefer to think of a bright future, even if it won't be easy to establish oneself in such a monopolized reality. And it's absurd because it's precisely the new Italian talents who are turning around a now defunct cinema that are being snubbed.
L: What are your future plans in the field of cinema?
P: I have four screenplays in the drawer that I hope to make in the coming years. Apart from Mochi, now in pre-production, there is the third chapter of the Italian-Japanese trilogy, Neko, and two other feature films, this time to be shot entirely in Japan (actually, one starting in the desert...). They will not be strictly horror films and will deal with themes such as ecology and the tsunami.
L: An opinion of your own on this interview?
Q: You've reminded me of things I had buried in my memory. It's strange to think that you haven't achieved anything, then you look back on ten years of your life and realize that the exact opposite is true.
L: Can you leave a message for the DarkVeins community?
P: I would like to thank the entire community for the support and warmth you continually give us. I will mention just one last anecdote from some time ago. After a lunch spent talking about cinema, a dear family friend, Ines Pellegrini, an actress in the 1970s, seeing me overcome with discouragement, confided in me the secret of Americans. She said, ’You must never get down on yourself. Do you know what the secret of Americans is? It's that they never give up.” Every now and then, when I feel like I'm not succeeding and that things are bigger than me, I always think back to those words. And I hit the ground running, perhaps too much... Thanks again, friends!
L: Thank you, Paolo, and have a good day!
