Dante Ferretti: “My dreams born in the sacristy”

When you ask him about his life, his encounters, he responds by telling you stories; it’s a little theater with questions and answers, with dialogues that take you back to his childhood and his youth, to when he worked with Pasolini and Fellini, and it doesn’t matter if his memories of him mix reality and fantasy. After so many years, it is perhaps impossible to separate them: and so entering Dante Ferretti’s mind is a bit like visiting the fantastic and visionary universe of the Baron of Münchhausen, not surprisingly one of his extraordinary work. For me, listening to him while he tells is a party every time, a real honor: his stories are always surprising – he imitates the voice of his travel companions – sometimes tinged with nostalgia and affection, always tempered by an irresistible sense of humor.

Dante Ferretti between cinema and reality

At 17 he left his native Macerata. What do you remember about his childhood?
I remember everything, in the sense that Fellini made me remember everything. He lived in Via Frattina in Rome and I in Via del Babuino, we were at Canova’s in Piazza del Popolo. “Then let’s go in the car together,” he would tell me. And he always asked questions: “Dantino, what did you dream about tonight?” The first time I made fun of myself and said: «Well nothing, I don’t remember well»… He insisted, like this: «I dreamed of when I was in Macerata, as a child, and my mother would take me to the seamstress; I was a curious child and what did I do? I was lying on the floor looking at all these ladies who were there, and I peeked up to see the asses and panties of all of them. ‘ “Ha ha” he laughed … Clearly some of these things were true, others I invented them, I invented many things for him when I was in Macerata.

And what do you remember of your adolescence?
I was fine in Macerata, but the only thing I really liked was going to the cinema. I stole money from my father’s pocket while he slept and went to the movies in the afternoons after school. “What are you doing now?” my father asked me. “I’m going to study with friends,” but it wasn’t true. It was my father who took me to the cinema for the first time, before I started stealing his money, to see The Boys from Paal Street. You see, Macerata is a small city, but it is incredible: there were already five cinemas, plus there were the parish ones; some days I would see two or three films in a row.

And his father never found out his lies?
Oh yes, my father understood very well that I was not going to study with friends. So one day I said to him: «Listen, I’m going to the cinema because it’s something I’d like to do, I’d like to go to Rome, to the Academy of Fine Arts and study scenography».

Ferretti, set designer already at the age of 13

Did you already plan to be a set designer then?
Yes, I decided it when I was 13, but I didn’t know what the scenography was.

So? Explain to us.
I was dating a sculptor friend of my father, Alberto Peschi, a futurist sculptor: «Dantino, what are you doing? I heard you go to the cinema often, “he asked me one day. “Yes, I’d like to work in the cinema, but I don’t know what to do.” “You could be a set designer.” “And what does the set designer do?” “That’s what makes the scenes in the movies, all that’s behind it …”. “Here I want to do just that!” I told my father, but since I was always postponed to October in 5 or 6 subjects – I took 6 right in gymnastics – my father told me: «I don’t think about it, let’s see after the final exam».

She sure knew how to draw well.
Yes, I was good at art, but only at that, everything else was a mess. However, at a certain point, in the last year I started studying a lot in view of the exams. I lived near the Art Institute, 300 meters away, and when I went to see the results on the billboards I saw some boys looking at me curiously, the janitor was also looking at me and there was also the secretary who was looking at me. I checked the grades with my heart beating: 10, 10, 10, 10, all ten, 9, 8, 10, 10 and 6 in gymnastics. But are you sure it’s me? Nobody could believe it. Then my father the math teacher who was a friend of him came and told him that I had passed all the exams. At that point he was very happy and so I went to Rome to the Academy of Fine Arts.

The first movie

How did you get to the set of your first film?
After a year, I began to practice technical drawing with an architect from Macerata, Aldo Tomassini Barbarossa (who worked with Pietro Germi, René Clair, Blasetti, ed), who had moved to Rome. One day he says to me: «I know you want to be a set designer, they called me to work on two films by Domenico Paolella at the same time, they shoot them in Ancona. Would you like to do it? But look at the fact that I only come to the set two days a week ». And I: «Maybe!».

He was not yet twenty.
I was 17 or 18, I went to school at 5. So I go to Ancona to make the film and he leaves me alone there were the interior designer, the producer, the production manager and they said: “But look, I’m a kid who makes two Paolella films and does everything by himself, do you realize?”. But they had a crush on me, they joked. Who will I meet you on set one day? Luigi Scaccianoce, the set designer of Risi, Lizzani, Rossellini, and they recommend me so that he can take me for help. So I made Pietrangeli’s La parmigiana. And history repeated itself: even Scaccianoce almost never came to the set because he made two or three films at the same time.

How is a Dante Ferretti scenography born?

I would like to understand her creative process: for example where do you come from to visualize and create the worlds that the directors ask of her?
I try to explain it to him. Something came to mind when I was a kid and I used to go to see the films that were shown in the sacristy of the church. At night in the summer in a large square with many chairs they projected the films on the wall. As it happens, the wall where they projected was that of the Academy of Fine Arts where I went, but since I didn’t have the money to pay the ticket, I didn’t see the film from the square, but from the street, next to it, and I only saw a quarter of it ; then at a certain point they put a traffic light, every now and then a truck passed and if the traffic light was red the truck stopped and covered the images on the wall. Of many films I have only seen a quarter, having to imagine the part below… What was it useful to me when I started working on my scenes?

Those images of your sketches that turn into often fantastic scenarios come more from the heart or the brain?
They are born there, at the moment. If I have to draw the sketches for a film I obviously read the scenes I have to do, I make the sketch about the environment, but very often I sketch things that I invent myself… I have done hundreds and hundreds of them. Do you call them sketches? Bozzoni! Immense, even two meters by one meter, all very large stuff.

In recent years he has devoted a lot to theater and opera, he has worked at the Metropolitan in New York, at the Colòn in Buenos Aires, at Covent Garden in London, at La Scala in Milan. What does the stage offer you compared to working in the cinema?
You read, listen to the work and you invent the environment that many times is not as it is described, but rather as you interpret it. Della Bohème in Tokyo I will take care of sets, costumes and also the direction. Then I’m working for the Carlo Felice Theater in Genoa on an opera that will later go to St. Petersburg. A few days ago they called me to propose another film – I think it’s Russian! And for a new production of Aida. But after that, that’s enough, because otherwise … And what are you doing: do you know how much a plate of spaghetti costs? (and he says it very seriously).

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