HRIFF | Letter

FROM FRANCO NERO

OPEN LETTER TO MY FRIEND TINTO BRASS

you already know, but I always love to repeat it: you're one of the freest and most gifted directors I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

We first met - if memory serves - at a projection of “L’urlo”, but I had already seen other films of yours, such as “Chi lavora è perduto”, and “Yankee”, and having appreciated your rather anarchic vision of cinema, I was delighted to work with you. And that's why, when Carlo Ponti was unable to produce our project “Drop-ou”t, you, Vanessa and I decided to self-produce it. What a marvelous time we had: a small crew roaming around London, with the pleasure of being together, sharing meals, inventing the scenes day by day, using the script merely as a guideline. The result was a rather anomalous and crazy film, reflecting how only you and your wife Tinta, your true muse, knew how to be.

We had so much fun that after only a few months we were together again on the set of “La Vacanza”, which inversely repeated the mechanism of Dropout: in the first, a madman who has escaped an asylum takes an English Lady hostage, in the second instead, a madwoman on leave from her clinic encounters an ornithologist. I sorely I miss those years when filmmakers like you were able to elaborate stories so lush with humanity, satire and audacity, not caring a whit about the commercial mechanisms.

And it is for this reason that I'm simply delighted about the recognition that Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival has decided to give you, all the more so because you are one of those filmmakers who have had little official celebration. But in this you are in excellent company: consider for example Orson Welles, or Elio Petri, or the many other "subversives" of cinema who only received belated recognition, having always been courageous and ahead of their times, even when their films earned little at the box office: for the real artist is the one who pushes the culture forward and breaks out of the mold, sometimes successfully, other times less so. The courageous captain is the one who explores uncharted territory and opens the way for others.