Original subtitles

It was 1972, and Enrico Job phoned me one evening to find out if I wanted

to be his assistant or art director for two films.

I immediately said "no" without knowing what it was,

because I wanted to pursue my profession as an architect; a future profession.

But then, out of curiosity, I asked him, "Enrico, what kind of film is it?"

And he said to me, "Well, they are two films by Paul Morrissey

and are produced by Andy Warhol.

"L'll do it, Enrico. I'll come and do it."

The change was instantaneous.

So we started preparing these two films,

which would have been produced by Andy Warhol,

and they would be shot in 3D.

It was quite unusual back then, because earlier,

people had seen only 3D films shot with red goggles.

I remember I was 'IO when I went to see Fort Ticonderoga.

Also, the idea for making a film produced by Andy Warhol,

with the Trash magician -- I mean, back then, I was young,

27 years old. It was an experience that couldn't be denied.

So, Enrico and I met, and the first thing We did

was an immersion in American trash.

Because before we could speak to or see Paul Morrissey

and Andy Warhol, who would arrive a few months later,

we would have to do a design.

But first of all, Mara Blasetti, who was the general manager

in charge of production, she showed us the films that had been shot.

So, we saw Trash, Flesh and Heat, which I think was last one

he had filmed the year before, or that had just come out.

We did that, in order to tune in

with this Way of making cinema of the American underground.

Simply seeing these three films,

which wasn't possible to see by normal venues,

had been a rather important experience

that We would then take with us, at least me,

in a future activity, which was the Polytechnic and Polytechnic Cinema.

I want to clarify one thing, with respect to my collaboration with Enrico Job.

In Italy, my role would have been that of the assistant set designer

and Enrico Job would have had simply the role of set designer.

But the Way of the American unions

dictates slightly different roles.

So, since Enrico Job had the role of production designer,

I would automatically move up in rank and become

what in Italy is a set designer, meaning the art director.

The art director, actually, is a person who executes ideas and supports ideas

of the production design, but he is not a simple executioner;

meaning, to a large extent,

that usually, he is in charge of a set.

That is, he designs it, he builds it, he has it built,

he has it furnished, according to his own initiative,

but following the dictates of Enrico Job.

So, already back then, I started well, because I started in a way

which was not completely subordinate, as it normally was for the roles

of set designer and assistant set designer in the Italian cinema.

I started in an augmented mode,

in an augmented reality, with respect to the Italian tradition.

So, I was in charge of doing the inspections,

and once I had chosen some places from pictures,

then I would go with Enrico Job

for the final selection, and later we would go

even with production.

Obviously, all this in the absence of the director made us keep pending

some locations choices, the situation of some locations,

because we would have to Wait for confirmation

once Paul Morrissey would arrive in Rome,

because we couldn't completely override the director's final decision.

However, given that, not surprisingly, the first film of the two

that we shot was completely indoors,

in studios, except for a few brief, initial passages,

and therefore, it gave us a way to Wait for the director,

as what we would have made available

for the shooting was the studios, and so there would be plenty of time

to bring the director to the few outdoor locations that the film included.

The funny thing is that building everything in Cinecitta,

Enrico imagined this Frankenstein laboratory

like a fixed scene, a theatrical scene.

In fact, the laboratory was exactly... not a half ellipse,

it was a half oval, because it was poly-centric.

When Kuveiller then saw it, he said, "You know what we'll do?

We'll put 3O meters of trolley on the ground, with a nice crane,

so we never move anything. That is, We put it on the trolley,

we approach, we move away, We turn with the crane and if We can,

we never have machines on the ground," and so it was.

I mean, Paul Morrissey, when he saw the trolley --

he, who had never used this type of heavy equipment

for his Way of making films -- and we said,

"He mounted on the horse and never got down."

Meaning, he mounted on the crane, he sat on the seat

behind the camera, and he never got off again.

Meaning, the crane went up, down, away,

approached, and he was always on top of the crane;

at least, in the scenes involving the laboratory,

because the scenes that concerned the other environments,

the baron's room, the baroness's room,

the children's room with the piranha fish tank,

because the little fish of the children were piranhas.

I expected that they would eat me, bite my fingers

while I went to buy the piranha fish,

because we gotta also do that, and instead they are fish that,

once they've eaten, before eating a second time,

and especially before biting your finger, they think about it abundantly.

Meaning, no one died during the filming from the piranha fish.

The other nice memory is that, in fact, when the baron's room was made,

Enrico Job had the happy idea -- because it is a continuous memory --

to use as decoration a detail of Klimt's kiss,

where you see her hair and his dress.

You can recognize her because of the flowers in her hair,

and therefore, ovals and sinuous lines.

You can recognize him because there are squarer shapes and rectangles,

and instead of putting part of this detail vertically,

he placed it horizontally.

We had 24 meters of them painted and attached them to the walls.

The funny thing is, of every film I have tried

to keep a small memory, and of the film Flesh for Frankenstein,

I have kept a piece of this painting.

Except, initially, it was very big, so in my small house, it covered a wall.

As time went by, moving to other houses,

I needed to adjust it to the size

of the walls that I could make available.

Hence, I would slice off a meter every time I moved in a new house.

When I came to this house, I had to bring it down to length

of two meters and now it's beside my bed,

so I sleep next to a piece of Baron Frankenstein.

So, the table was built specifically for the film;

there is no table of this length, not even with 24 extensions.

The best thing about that scene is not so much the table itself,

but it is always the concept, which, again, is a theatrical concept.

Meaning, Enrico Job has always focused on the theatricality of the staging,

so much so that the backdrop, which is an indistinct backdrop

of various colors, is a theatrical backdrop.

Not only that, but to make it even more fluent and indistinct,

a black gauze and a white gauze are superimposed on the backdrop

that we could alternate, so that the cinematographer could choose,

according to the shots,

the use of black tulle or white tulle.

I don't know if you see this in the film,

but it was quite exciting in the shooting, I must say,

because it forced those who were filming --

both the director and the cinematographer --

to intervene with one's own language over a language

which was quite decisive.

Meaning, it forced them to film a theatrical scene,

which is quite unusual when shooting a movie.

Also, in the furnishing of the other rooms,

what he was always trying to do was use material

as if it were theatrical props,

even though everything was done for the movie.

Meaning, even the paintings were taken by German painters of the time

and obviously copied by the talented painters of Italian cinema,

who, at that time,

all came from the academies.

He was always trying to have this maniacal care, it must be said,

that he somehow left me, because he was a teacher to me.

This attention to detail

remained, it was beautiful.

Meaning, while others did other things,

I walked inside Cinecitta with Andy Warhol,

with Jed and with Paul Morrissey, and with what style.

We wore Beatles-like boots,

a pair of jeans and a double-breasted blue jacket with a vest underneath.

You were part of the world, you were not part of Cinecitta,

and this matters when you are young.

For this, I was teaching at school at that time.

I was teaching and I asked for a leave of absence

before the filming of Flesh for Frankenstein finished.

And so, before the shooting of Blood for Dracula began,

I wrote a letter to my principal saying I would not continue

my teaching activity

because I had found an activity that satisfied me the most.

At that time, there was work, but it wasn't that simple,

having already a place in the school that gave you the certainty

to have a monthly salary every month. To leave it for an activity like cinema,

in which I was a nobody, I wasn't sure to find more work the next day,

or finish the film, but I did.

These are the things you do at that age.

Luckily, there was this opportunity,

and luckily, I never got off my horse, like Paul Morrissey.

He mounted on the crane, to the top, and he didn't come down again

until he finished all the filming of Frankenstein's workshop.

Of course, in the Frankenstein lab,

I did things that I would never do again,

because there was also that crazy props man

to furnish the laboratory.

I still had a lot of acquaintances in the university world,

and I had brought back casts in wax

that came from the Institute of Comparative Anatomy.

But who today goes to an Institute of Comparative Anatomy

to get the German wax casts of the venous implant?

The flayed woman comes from there, from the Comparative Anatomy,

from the basement. Didactic material that was no longer used,

but which is valuable from the point of view of the history of teaching,

because they are all 19th Century casts made in wax

with very fine pen ink nomenclature on.

Years later, I got them back for another movie.

I will never say for what other film, but I had them restored

completely by a good restorer,

because they had become like my children.

I even went to the Institute of Forensic Medicine

and among the various jars on the shelves of the laboratory,

there is the brain of The Monster of Nerola,

which is a famous case, and there is also a spinal cord.

Dissections were done by breaking the bones of the poor corpse.

I had put myself in the spirit of doing the Frankenstein myself.

Paul Morrissey had to do Frankenstein

instead, going to look for these things. I found this spinal cord,

it was done by fracturing the bones without damaging the spinal cord,

and it was in a jar with formalin, so we had the idea

to put real pieces of meat in glass jars in formalin

instead of making everything fake.

Now, doing it was fun, the bad was when we dismantled

the apparatus, because everything related to the University

I had sent back, but everything we had put

in formalin ourselves was disposed of in Cinecitta.

You have no idea after four months...the rot.

It was a hell of a thing.

We did that, too, which I'll never do again.

Put on the set a piece of beef in formalin.

It is not something that it is done, it is immoral,

but this was done when inexperience was outclassed

by the desire to do well enough.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- The funny thing is,

these two films should have been shot in 3D.

But, as mentioned, it wasn't the 3D with the red and green goggles,

it was 3D made by polarization.

It was a system that an American Air Force colonel had invented,

that he was -- he worked at the department --

he was an engineer, I think, who worked in the cartography department,

and he had also worked in that department for General Eisenhower

during WWII.

And he had developed this aerial photogrammetric system

of shooting, through an overlap of prisms,

which divided the image into two parts taken from different angles.

A bit of a polarized re-edition of the old stereography.

I used to play with a stereographic device

that was not was not that of Grandma Duck,

it was a bit more recent, from the 1940s.

My aunt had it, with small plates that came,

I believe, from the Royal House.

The king had them made during the 1908 Messina earthquake.

I have two photographs, I still have them above my bed.

So, with a binocular camera,

you could have two photographs, let's say a right one and a left one,

that if you looked at them at proper distance with your right and left eye,

gave you the idea of depth of three dimensions.

He did this using a single lens, over which --

always of the camera, which was a Mitchell, in this case --

and he had this weird thing of two prisms with tourmalines, I think,

because it was based on the effect of Polaroid, of polarized light,

which gave two overlapping frames like the 2P format.

Two frames would fit in a normal frame,

that instead of being two frames in sync, one after the other,

they were two frames made at the same time,

but one right and one left.

Thus, a left and a right frame were repeated in the film.

Then, over time, a right frame and a left frame, and so on.

Of course, the same contraption invented by the engineer...

I only remember his name, Bob, he was an old person, and he came --

would come over with his wife.

At some point, however, as he was too precise and meticulous

because he was a consultant -- but it was also his life's work,

it was his brain child, he invented it --

he had used it to make the maps for the air force.

They had already shot some films with him as a consultant in the United States,

so it was his child.

But he was of such absurd meticulousness that he had to be removed from the set.

So, I was commissioned by Mara Blasetti, who told me,

"Look, Gianni, since so much work is done in the theater from now

until the end of the film, you have little left to do.

Take Bob by the arm, take him wherever you like.

Take him to the Colosseum, take him around Rome.

Take him away from the set, because Luigi Kuveiller understands

how to use that contraption to put on the camera,

it has become an apparatus that can be operated by camera

operators and the cinematographer,

so you handle Bob. Take him around, show him the Rome

that otherwise he could never see if he always stays inside."

And so, for a long part of the end of the shooting

in the theater of Flesh for Frankenstein, I was with Bob,

who, instead of being a consultant, was a tourist with his wife.

Very happy,

but with the usual mania for perfection and of wanting to do things well,

and to exploit the relationships one had with the University.

We did not limit ourselves to making some lightning, who knows how.

How did we make them?

With a reel of Ruhmkorff that I had taken from the dungeons

of the Faculty of Physics.

That is also seen in the scene, because it's around.

This reel of Ruhmkorff, to be able to do a discharge of 10,000 Volts,

a small lighting like this between two electrodes,

it needed two large crystal glasses for the passage of electric current

that contained sulfuric acid in a certain dilution.

But the beautiful thing, in addition to the danger of staging

such a contraption, this such contraption

had a historical peculiarity of being the Ruhmkorff reel

that Guglielmo had used -- I mean, Guglielmo Marconi, sorry,

I'm confusing things.

Enrico Fermi had used it to carry out the experiments

to be able to split the atom, and to have such powerful voltages,

the only thing that was in the Faculty of Physics back then, via Panisperna,

it was RuhmkorfFs reel with a winding of 40 centimeters in diameter.

It was something. He used it to do his research on the atom.

Nobody knows that in this film, there is a piece used by Fermi

to do his research.

Only I know. Nobody knew. Paul Morrissey didn't know, either,

let alone Andy Warhol.

But the beauty was this.

Because I had to go and slip into a basement

of the Institute of Experimental Physics,

this is its beauty, and it was good for this scene.

But now, I can talk about it, and if there is any cinephile

that has the chance to hear this,

they can also take into account that there are also pieces of the history of physics.

I didn't take those home, I gave those back to the University.

[bell ringing and hooves trotting]

- The Baron's outdoor scenes were few.

I only remember that the castle was the castle of Passerano,

what we pretended to be the castle.

It was the castle of Passerano, a beautiful castle near Zagarolo.

Weird.

It had this Gothic appearance, even though it didn't have

absolutely anything Gothic,

but it looks a bit sinister; it's a fortress.

The role of Margheriti was absolutely fun,

he was an absolutely positive person.

He would put his hands into the real entrails of animals,

which were slaughtered at dawn and taken by the props men

and brought on set, because they had to be handled still hot.

Margheriti had the function --

I don't know if he was the director of the second unit,

if he was the director of those who had to do special effects.

I remember one in particular: a door opened in the counter

of Frankenstein's laboratory and two breathing lungs appeared.

There.

Those two lungs breathed because Margheriti,

with a rubber tube for decanting wine in the cellar,

stuck in what was the trachea of a poor pig slaughtered an hour earlier,

blew with the lungs that were bigger than I don't know what.

He had two bellows instead of lungs,

and he made the poor pig's lungs dilate,

creating this effect of inhalation and exhalation.

And that was Margheriti doing the special effect,

in the sense that it is not that he had advised how to do the effect,

he did it himself. It was him who blew.

Of course, it was the first thing to shoot as soon as we got on the scene,

because as soon as the lungs arrived from the slaughterhouse,

it was necessary to intervene,

because a short time later, they would become harder.

They would become sclerotized and it would no longer be possible

to make them dilate with the appearance of breathing.

It was gruesome enough to open that door

with those two lungs that breathed, but it was needed.

So, I remember that he did everything with great nonchalance, so to speak,

of a person who knows exactly what he has to do

and what it takes to attract the attention of the public,

or to frighten it, as with RambaldFs little bats

that we used, the bats flapping their wings.

There was a small motor that made the Wings move,

but they were hanging from a fishing rod.

I mean, I had one, too, Margheriti had one,

the props man, someone else,

and we made the bats flutter here and there, where it was needed.

But these are the amenities

that surprise you while shooting a movie.

[moody orchestral music]