An Interview with Nanni Moretti

It’s always reassuring to know that high flyers suffer from self-doubt. Today – despite his reputation as the finest Italian director of his generation, along with a Palme d’Or and countless native awards as proof – Nanni Moretti is admitting to entertaining doubts about his own abilities.

‘Let’s just say that 30 years ago, when I started making films, I felt much more secure than I do now,’ he smiles, ruefully. ‘When I started out, I made fewer problems for myself. Today, though, I have mini crises every day. Not big ones that make me think I don’t want to do this film anymore, but I question my ability every day – more so now than three decades ago.’

There’s little reason for him to feel this way, of course. His appearance at the Times BFI London Film Festival, where we meet, is a triumphant one – he’s presenting his film Il Caimano, an anti-Berlusconi polemic interwoven with a fictional story about the break-up of a family. The movie – released in the run-up to the general election in Italy in 2006 – was the first mainstream film that dared tackle the subject of the cavaliere and his past, and it caused such a stir that Moretti was even credited with swinging the election those few precious inches in Prodi’s favour.

Stranger than Fiction?

But today, rather than jubilant, Moretti seems worn out. ‘Memory isn’t our strong point,’ he says, when asked whether it was difficult for his public to have played back to them the behaviour of the man they chose to elect. ‘It’s not the principle ingredient for us Italians.’

What they did find difficult, he says, is being able to distinguish the truth from the fiction in the film. The behaviour of Il Caimano’s eponymous character seems so extreme that you wonder whether his words are exaggerated. At the end of the film, having been found guilty of corruption and condemned to prison by a judge, he storms out of court declaring that he will only be tried by the public who elected him. This may sound like a stupid question, but is this invention or did it really happen?

‘It’s not stupid at all,’ he laughs. ‘Even an Italian would ask that, and they should actually know the answer. Berlusconi has never been found guilty, but that speech is taken word for word from an invective he made on video three years ago against the judiciary. He sent it to the TV stations and they transmitted it in its entirety.’ Throughout the film, he intersperses archive footage of Berlusconi with the cinematic rendition to drive his point home even more.

Funding the Project

Il Caimano’s protagonist, Bruno, is terrified about making a film about Berlusconi, but Moretti claims that he was never afraid: ‘Not because I’m particularly brave, but because it was a story I wanted to tell.’ Funding, however, wasn’t so straightforward – ‘It would have been impossible for a first-time director,’ he admits. Having never accepted any money from Berlusconi’s Mediaset and eschewing money from RAI, the Italian broadcasting network, (‘I would have felt embarrassed’), he turned to France, which came up with the goods.