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“I Really Like to Self-Analyze Myself”: Giovanni Tortorici On His Luca Guadagnino-Produced Debut Feature, Diciannove
Diciannove Diciannove, the autofictional debut feature of director Giovanni Tortorici, captures one year in the life of a young Italian man, Leonardo, who decamps from a London business school to study literature in Siena, where he soon becomes obsessed with the study of 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli. Wandering amidst the medieval architecture of this small central Italian city when he’s not holed up at home, reading from among his stacks of books, Leonardo mostly eschews social invitations from attractive female students while, with quickly fading bursts of enthusiasms, engaging in a series of anti-social actions, including a revenge campaign against a critical professor and stalking a 15-year-old boy he spies on the internet. But if the discussion of these plot points makes Diciannove seem like some kind of youth suspense film, that would impression would be incorrect. Through its narrative fits and starts, the moody, sometimes impenetrable but assertively charismatic lead performance of Manfredi Marini, and a succession of disarming camera and editorial flourishes, Diciannove is a film uniquely capturing a particular type of late adolescent drift, both personal and intellectual. Moving to its own rhythms and narrative interests, it’s a very promising debut for Palermo-born Tortorici, who has worked as an assistant to director Luca Guadagnino, who is also a producer of this film.
Diciannove (“Nineteen” in Italian) premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, played the Toronto International Film Festival (where the below interview took place), and is now tonight’s closing night selection at MoMI’s First Look festival. (Tickets are still available.) Additionally, the film was just picked up by Oscilloscope for forthcoming U.S. release. Below, I talk with Tortorici about turning adolescent memories into cinema, being inspired by expressive and violent directors, and, for a climactic scene, replacing the Hong Kong director Johnnie To with a Lacan-influenced psychoanalyst.
Filmmaker: When encountering mentions within a film of work that a film journalist is not familiar with, there’s a temptation to feign some knowledge with a quick Wikipedia update. But I’ll just be upfront and say that I do not know anything about the 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli, who your protagonist, Leonardo, in Diciannove is obsessed with. So could you tell me a bit about Bartolli and why he was a significant person to have as this obsessional interest of your lead character?
Tortorici: The film is a little bit — no, not a little bit, it’s autobiographical. I remember when I was 17, I was into literature, but more into Occidental, Western, classical books. And at a certain point I read this book about Italian literature from this pretty famous Italian writer of the 18th century. I was reading like all these names that I never heard of, that I never studied in school. I remember hating a little bit my professor, so I was like, “Okay, I should study these writers [named in the book] because they are unknown. They were so important for their time, and maybe I could learn something very peculiar and specific.” Daniello Bartoli was quoted many times by very big Italian writers like Giacomo Liopardi and Alessandro Manzoni. Nowadays, he’s almost unknown, but at the time, as it’s described in the movie, he was like the Dante of Italian prose. They said he was writing like sculpture, because you see in many, many angles what he was saying. He was writing about these missions of the Jesuits around the world, and it was so graphic and violent — missionaries dying, [being] tortured, blood and terror. I remember loving him for that, and I felt a little bit special knowing so well this unknown writer.
Filmmaker: What was it about you at the age of 17 that made him so appealing?
Tortorici: There was a desperation in the books because it was all about these missionaries giving their lives to God. In a certain way they were carefree about life. They couldn’t care about life in general, so they were happy to give their lives to something higher. That was a period of depression for me — considering life in general as nothing. So, in a certain way it comforted me.
Filmmaker: Tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into the film.
Tortorici: I came from studying literature, and at a certain point I was very doomy. I was very unhappy in Siena, and I hated university. I think that I wanted to give myself a shot in life in general. I was thinking about cinema as a more sociable life — a little bit more colorful. Writing for me was all solitude, and I started to think about expressing the stories that I wanted to tell with cinema, with images. So, I switched and went for a school of cinema. I wanted to study by myself, but my parents were a little bit strict, and they told me, “If you want to do cinema, you must go to a school of cinema.” So, I went to a school of cinema, even if I wasn’t attending lessons.
Filmmaker: Did you make short films?
Tortorici: No, not officially, but I was shooting a lot on my phone with friends, just for fun. It was a very good exercise. I remember trying to do shots that I liked or that I was observing in cinema in general. It was very free as a process because I didn’t have a DP or sound — I had total freedom, and it was super useful.
Filmmaker: And during this period, what sort of films were you watching and being inspired by?
Tortorici: I was in love with Italian B movies like the poliziotteschi, the horror movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, like Bava, Fulci, Castellari, Di Leo. The nouvelle vague, of course, and the New Hollywood. I loved Brian De Palma. I was really attracted by a kind of expressive and violent director.
Filmmaker: As you say, the film is autobiographical, and considered within the coming-of-age genre, it’s quite unpredictable in its plotting. Tell me about writing the screenplay and landing on its structure. Did you have a sense of the whole before you were writing, or were you developing it a bit more scene by scene?
Tortorici: I remember doing a general structure. And, in the first place, taking a lot of notes about some scenes. Maybe I would pick some scenes and try to have a little bit of an organic structure. I actually wasn’t thinking about narrative processes. I wanted to feel free to tell the story without thinking about narrative mechanisms. I was just inspired by my personal experience. I wasn’t looking for anything extraordinary in the narration, or cliched. I just love to put in what I experienced. I really like to self-analyze myself. I was just thinking about that period of my life, and I found it very interesting because it was very unusual as a lifestyle. There was a lot of isolation, not [much of a] social life, a lot of studying, and a lot of obsessions. This strange interest in this kind of literature was very unusual. I thought it was interesting to see all of that as symptoms of a big neurosis, because I think the character is very neurotic.
Filmmaker: How much of the character do you still relate to or feel connected to as a person? Or is it a character who’s now in the past?
Tortorici: I think it’s a lot of the past, but I can feel something that belongs to me a little bit even today. For example, I’m not really into all the literature. And I have opened up to the 20th century, the 21st century. I remember loving this [older] literature for the morals that it was expressing, and I think I was trying to have these morals in order to feel protected from my instincts. As you know, it was a literature very close to the church and morality.
Filmmaker: You use so many editing and camera techniques in the film that function as little exclamation points, or expressive gestures —whip pans, zooms, flash cuts, freeze frames. How many of these were discovered while shooting, or in post, and how many were consciously written into the script or shot list beforehand?
Tortorici: I was visualizing a lot of them during the script while writing. As I told you, I have always loved these kind of expressionist directors. Watching them I feel joy, that there’s this triumph of cinema in general, because, at the end of the day, cinema is the language of images. I remember being obsessed with words while I was studying literature. I was obsessed with vocabularies. I was thinking that all the stories [have been] told, the difference is in the way you tell them. And so, I shifted that [thinking] to cinema. I became a little obsessed with the language of cinema. I love these directors who are very attentive to the [formal aspects of cinema]. I love Takeshi Miike, for example, who is very creative. I deeply love Hong Kong [genre] movies. They are all about this hyper-aesthetic cinema. I try to be very attentive in putting the right form on the content.
Filmmaker: How do you want the audience to take in those gestures?
Tortorici: I think it can help them… maybe the common audience is not very conscious about [them], but I like that, even in an unconscious way, they can feel the cinema with the camera and the montage.
Filmmaker: The boldest one of these gestures was what looked like to me a reel change cigarette burn but over the forehead of your character in the scene with his professor. I don’t know if it is an actual reel change cue, but it looked like one to me.
Tortorici: [Diciannove] was shot on film. I was watching the material with my editor, and at the end of one shot there was the film burning, so there was this black hole. And I was thinking it’s perfect for the scene because [Leonardo] is not understanding why he was wrong. I love it because it’s real – it’s not digital, not VFX. You can feel it is very material.
Filmmaker: I understand that the art collector at the end of the movie is played by a well-known Italian psychoanalyst. He’s asking your character if he’s read Freud or Lacan, and he brings up Freud’s concept of the death drive in his judgement of the character. I found it interesting that at the end of your movie you subject Leonardo to outside analysis from someone from another generation.
Tortorici: The psychoanalyst is Sergio Benvenuto, who actually is not very well known in Italy because he’s not very mainstream. He doesn’t care about the mainstream at all. I remember reading his books and loving him, and at a certain point I [sent] him an email. We met in Rome, and I was looking for this final character. In the first place, it was a scene with a [film] director. We were trying to reach Johnnie To, the Hong Kong director, and he was coming. But at a certain point they shifted the Hong Kong Film Festival to another date while we were shooting [and he couldn’t come]. I was a little upset; there was a scene missing.
Filmmaker: What would the scene have been like if he had been able to come?
Tortorici: Very different. Competely surreal and symbolic. They would have spoken Chinese and at a certain point Johnnie To would have pulled out a gun. But I felt hurried to finish the movie, so I rewrote the scene [for Benvenuto].
Filmmaker: Tell me more about Benvenuto. What is it about him and his thinking that made you think he’d be the right person for the scene?
Tortorici: He comes from the school of Lacan. He attended lessons from him in Paris. He attended lessons by Roland Barthes. So, you know, he’s very ’68 generation – very free. He doesn’t really care about saying what he thinks, or about psychoanalysis being politically correct. So, I thought it was perfect for being the character who was telling the direct truth that [Leonardo] is very neurotic.
Filmmaker: Did you allow him input into the scene, into the words he says describing Leonardo?
Tortorici: No, I just wrote it. His character is a little bit of a straight shooter — very direct, a little bit violent, even, because at the end he says something like “You’re a poor brat.” That’s how they’ve translated it in English. In Italian it’s like, “You’re miserable.” As a psychoanalyst, Sergio would not say that in real life, but I think he was a bit amused by saying these things.
Filmmaker: To go back to an earlier question about screenplay structure and narrative, there are so many moments that seem like they’ll build into storylines but then which don’t. They kind of drift away. At the beginning of the film, with the nosebleeds and his problems drinking, you imagine that maybe Leonardo is ill, has some sort of liver disease, even. There’s the incident of him following the boy he sees on the internet, or starting a revenge campaign against his professor, which he calls off almost immediately.
Tortorici: It’s a conscious strategy to show these beginnings that maybe don’t go forward. For me, those are all symptoms of something that he has. For example, after the nosebleed he’s a bit worried about the need to control his body and his health. And, you know, I was inspired by real life, and in real life it happens that there are some themes that are not at the end resolved into something. But I was thinking about it all as a general illness of himself, and all different symptoms [illustrate] decline in different ways.
Filmmaker: Could you tell us about working with Luca Guadagnino as a producer and the impact he had on the film?
Tortorici: There was a huge influence because he allowed me to be free, 100%. He said to me, “Don’t have compromises because with them you will ruin your film.” For example, there was another producer who was saying, “Oh maybe you’d like to shoot the London scenes in Paris?” And because it was my first feature, I felt like a little bit in debt to my producers because they were allowing me to do this movie, and I hadn’t a [filmmaking] background or something. They put a lot of trust in me, so I was a little undecided. I was talking to Luca, and I said, “Maybe I could [shoot in Paris].” He was like, “No, you have to do what you want. Compromises are the beginning of the end.” So, he was super helpful in terms of making sure that all I wanted was done.
Filmmaker: What was the hardest part of the shoot?
Tortorici: The hardest part was maybe Siena, because it’s a very dark city, very gloomy. It’s medieval, and the gates of the city are very thick and very, very high. You see just small pieces of sky. There was a lot of fog and rain, even in May. And I was shooting in my own apartment, where I [lived when I] was a student in Siena, 10 years before. So, it was a bit spooky.
Filmmaker: You’re working on a new movie?
Tortorici: Yes. I wrote another script, and I will have casting on October. I love genre movies, and I was thinking about making an actual horror movie. But, in the end ,I read this script that I wrote four years ago. It’s a personal story of my 16th year, about this friendship with this girl of a low social class. I was reading all these things about social dynamics – things I have forgotten [now]. I was a little bit anxious about forgetting these things, so I thought, I should do this movie because it’s a very peculiar world that is going out of memory. I’m going to rewrite the script, but I love many things about [the original draft].
Filmmaker: So, another autobiographical movie, this time set three years earlier.
Tortorici: The good thing is that it’s very different because at a certain point I had a big change in myself. When I was 16, there was no literature, no intellectual stuff. It was all about social life, soccer and drugs. And, you know, my city, Palermo, is not well represented [in cinema]. Whenever there are movies about Sicily or Palermo, they are all about crime, the mafia, etc., but it’s like a normal, middle class, average life [there] that’s very interesting, and, I think, worth it to [show].
Filmmaker: In terms of style, will it be similarly expressive in its cinematic gestures?
Tortorici: That’s a good question. I’m thinking about it a lot. I want to get better and do the best that I can for telling the story in the best way, so I don’t know. Because I like to be on set and rehearse with the actors and then after the rehearsing to figure out the shots. So, I think I will be inspired by the situation. I feel like I have a good range of way of expressing things. I feel that I improved a lot after shooting Diciannove, so I think I will be better.
