Original subtitles

It's pivotal, the poo scene in this movie.

But what was he eating? Chocolate...

with candied fruit, see?

And I enjoyed it because I am an artist.

At one point you see this girl vomiting in the movie.

She vomited for real.

What's shocking about eating chocolate with candied fruit?

(ACTRESS FROM SALO)

Yeah, the atmosphere was very tense.

It seemed almost real.

It felt real

because it was always very quiet...

(ACTOR FROM sALo) You are a good artist, enjoy the chocolate with candied fruit.

You'll have to enjoy it for the audience.

And the more you enjoy it, the more terrible that scene will be.

I'll tell you more, over the months we were so excited

in those situations

that we almost got into our characters.

I don't know, we may have been drinking something...

but there was something sinister about those characters,

they were very scary.

To me

it was a big game

and, perhaps, Pier Paolo felt the same way.

We were pretty disgusted because of what they made us do

also because there was no script,

where we could read what was next for us.

We were told what to do day by day,

so some scenes were particularly...

Yeah, sometimes we thought they were very controversial.

Take, for instance, the scene with the dogs.

We were not thinking about the after,

but just about what we were doing in that moment.

It is amazing, of course.

That makes me think, and made me think back then,

about the difference between the game in that moment

and in the scene.

He used to delegate. He was always in a corner.

I've never seen Pier Paolo Pasolini talking aloud and explaining things.

He used to delegate. He was really on his own.

I knew him because a few years before I was doing theatre.

I knew his mum as well, Susanna.

I was doing theatre with the writers

and Pasolini was interested in this type of work we were doing in Rome.

I spoke with Pier Paolo's friend

about the fact that he ignored us.

I thought nothing would have happened,

instead he really showed me

he was responsive and helpful.

The following day he invited me to lunch.

He told me, "This scene is awful, read it and tell me what you think."

We spoke about abortion and problems of youth.

He shared his view on this wild youth.

It was 30 years ago, can you imagine?

I must say we became a tight team.

He used to come to me

when he needed someone who had experience in playing.

I have some funny stories to tell about other actors.

There were actors who couldn't say certain words.

When you left the set,

it felt like you were somewhere else, not back to reality, but somewhere else.

Eat and enjoy it and you'll be a great artist.

I've never watched Salo',

even though once I ended up in a cinema by accident

and I found out Salo was on, so I left...

It was like watching something

I had to have nothing to do with.

I decided not to watch it because of this big responsibility

I felt for this movie.

THE END OF SALO It's personal to me.

Back then I suggested to Pier Paolo

to make Salo'...

SCREENWRITER

...because it was a movie we had written for Sergio Citti a long time ago.

I knew he was working on this movie and...

I went many times to the production, PEA. It was in the Eur area.

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

I used to go see Umberto Angelucci, his right-hand man,

to ask him if I could be his assistant.

They always said, "N0 way."

It wasn't possible, the movie was hard

and Pier Paolo didn't want a woman as his assistant.

I don't know why, I was very determined to get this job,

but they always said I couldn't.

In the end, I thought, "Fair enough, I can't work on this movie."

But then, Umberto called me and said, "Pier Paolo wants to see you tomorrow.

"He wants to talk to you in his hotel at 7:30."

I was an executive screenwriter, not a creative one.

I had to check the notes I was taking

during those long meetings

and then there was the work by de Sade

and the one by Baudelaire.

With these three sources

it was very hard to go wrong.

The funny thing is that, that morning

he started to talk about the songs he wanted for the movie...

old songs.

My father had made some movies about that.

S0 I...

I was a lot younger than Pier Paolo,

so I shouldn't have known those songs,

but since everyone at mine used to sing them,

we started to sing and talk about it

and about which one was the best song.

And so...

I ended up working as his assistant.

I remember we used to meet up at his place in Eufrate street

and spend the afternoon together.

There were his mom and his niece,

clearing the table in the room next to us.

S0 I remember these noises and this very familiar talking.

There was a certain continuity between this awful world, this terrifying hell

and the everyday more reassuring things, such as that noise from the kitchen.

At first I didn't know how hard it was,

but I knew some scenes were very tough for the girls.

A bit...

...because Umberto had told me.

Pasolini was sitting there, I was here and Sergio Citti was there.

To be honest, Sergio Citti and I didn't say a word.

That's the absolute truth.

When I didn't understand, I asked questions.

I took notes

and he had done his research.

I mean, he had read the part of the book

he wanted to represent.

S0 he gave me instructions.

I'm not saying it was a dictation.

It was some kind of explanation

of what he expected from me.

I'm saying this because...

when I met Pier Paolo, and during the movie as well,

even if the movie was scary,

he was very cheerful.

It's important to say that I wasn't writing a Pasolini movie.

I was writing a movie with Pasolini for Sergio Citti.

Sergio Citti was supposed to make it.

S0 Sergio Citti was there because he was the intended recipient of this script.

Somehow, starting from it, he was supposed to make his own movie.

The way he looked, the way he acted after shooting a scene

was very cheerful.

In a sense that...

How should I put it?

He softened what we were doing,

the quite distressing things we were doing.

Indeed, they were very distressing.

We shot a scene, but then it was cut from the movie.

I thought it was the final scene.

The crew was dancing.

We were all dancing.

I remember that Pier Paolo really cared about this scene.

In fact, we went to a dance class.

The dance scene was shot.

It was clear that the crew was dancing, including Pier Paolo.

ASSISTANT EDITOR He was dancing with Ernesto Urgello.

The mush was Pinguino Innamorato.

Nananana

When I listen to that song I still get goosebumps

because it reminds me of that great time.

This scene, though, wasn't the final one.

It was shot...

I still remember, it was action 101...

It was shot for the opening credits.

It was a game.

"Let's shoot it and then we'll see."

Then after a long time,

I ended up in this restaurant in Campo dei Fiori (Rome)

with Giovanni Bertolucci, who was my producer at the time.

Next to us there was my friend Laura Betti with Pier Paolo Pasolini.

When I asked him what he was doing, he said... WORK BY BAUDELAIRE

...he was going to make a movie about the life of Saint Paul,

starring M. Brando... PASOLINl'S UNDERLINING

...but an American major started second-guessing the movie.

S0, I don't know why,

I asked him, "Why don't you make Salo?"

And he said, "I don't even have the script."

I said I had it.

S0 I gave him de Sade's book

and I also gave him the 720 Days 0f Sodom...

...script.

That's why you don't see me anywhere.

L was called by a lawyer,

who worked, at Grimaldi's firm and probably still does.

PASOLINl'S ORIGINAL NOTES ON THE MOVIE

He told me they were willing to buy the rights...

...if I accepted to never show up

and I said it was okay with me.

They paid me, so I got paid twice.

I blame my zeal

because I went twice

to Pier Paolo Pasolini's

to bring him the script

and that's probably what persuaded him,

because then he made the movie.

In this movie

there are so many elements

connected to death,

and the movie itself is so gloomy,

with an absolute negativity

and without any hope,

so somehow it was easily connected to Pier Paolo's death,

because his death, as well, was this absolute darkness.

A part of our lives was falling into the darkness

and so was a part of the world.

S0 I kind of felt responsible.

Salo' was completely different from the other movies.

Especially, before that, I worked on Trilogy of Life and Medea

as assistant production designer.

Those images were very symbolic.

We went for an old farmhouse near Mantua.

PRODUCTION DESIGNER

This farmhouse didn't have the deco

and fascist style.

The most important thing was that we wanted to add some painting.

I don't know what to call it, the forbidden painting.

What's the word I'm looking for?

I mean, the painting rejected by the regime.

It was a bit like when they were burning books.

Back then, only one type of culture was allowed.

It was the fascist one.

S0 we looked for some elements

to add to this farmhouse.

Actually, they were two farmhouses near Mantua.

The farmhouse itself had no style,

we gave style to it by adding

some accurate and targeted elements.

For example, mirrors, lamps and carpets.

What I remember about these movies is that...

in life you can get used to anything.

At first

it was weird to see this group of naked boys and girls on set.

And then that farmhouse in Mantua was cold.

I mean, it was quite impressive.

But after a while, we got used to it.

Like, the effects men were making...

How should I say it?

Poo? Shit? To eat.

S0 they were simply saying, "Bring me a can of shit."

I mean, after a while everything seemed normal.

At first everything was a bit too much,

like, "What's that?"

But then you kind of get used to it.

I remember

that the only time

that Citti wasn't just there,

but was actually talking,

it was when he said, "N0, it's a bit too much."

"I think it's a bit too much, Paolo."

And Paolo used to say, "Are you joking? It's the most amazing thing."

He didn't want to be censured by Citti.

I agreed with Citti, but I didn't dare say anything.

I thought everything was a bit too much.

Pasolini was 17 when he attended his first cineforum.

It was in Bologna, with Roberto Longhi's lessons.

He was the greatest art critic of his time in Italy,

with his slide shows of paintings.

PORTRAIT OF R. LONGHI

in that moment cinema - Pasolini explicitly used this word -

started to act within him even as a mere reproduction of pictures.

His shots are based on principles as solid as travertine.

The figure stands out against the background,

as in the typical painting of the 15th century,

but also as in the early glance of humanity.

His shots do nothing but seek the enchantment of looking at something,

the landscape of a face, of an urban prairie, a house,

as if he suddenly found himself at the dawn of men on earth.

Pasolini's movies are composed of sequences of big panels

that run as stanzas of a ballad.

The bodies are the main characters where the shoulders,

the light of the eyes,

the line of the eyebrows, the uneven line of the teeth

and the severe masterpiece of their own symmetry stand out.

When he arrived in Rome, he couldn't believe he found a humanity

who lived for millennia in the shadows of society and history.

It was as sceptical and fatalistic as the urban plebs of its ancestors,

who lived in the same places in the end of the Roman Empire.

People's lives were only based on need of movement

and desires of the body,

shaken up by bursts of euphoria,

cruelty, shyness and fear,

that always precede the immense joys of sex, according to Pasolini.

But what really took his breath away

was resignation, melancholy

and the terrible innocence they lived the gift of owning a body with,

completely unaware of themselves.

If the writer is someone who needs, in order to describe life,

to have a tormented nostalgia

for its intensity, completeness and purity,

according to what Pasolini himself wrote,

cinema in his eyes, multiplied to infinity this miracle.

N0 language,

except the language of images and sounds,

could be as full of reality

as the shot of a movie.

N0 word can secrete so much life

as much as the cinematographic image.

That's Pasolini's cinema.

It is something that has the same grace and light

of a Romanesque church surrounded by equestrian monuments

and giant shopping centres.

First of all I was an actor.

I made a movie called Sierra Maestra.

Here I was playing Emilio, a war photographer.

Here I was playing Emilio, a war photographer. PHOTOGRAPHER

And from the 1970s my life changed.

Ansano Giannarelli gave me the chance to make this movie.

Back then, I'd already done a lot of theatre, cinema and TV in France,

but it was after this movie that my life changed in Italy.

Visconti, who watched this movie,

was the first one to invite me on set to take 2 or 3 pictures.

Back then, I showed those pictures to many press offices.

S0 in one of those offices I met the great Simon...

He sees those pics and says,

"I am the one who will bring Italian cinema to France.

"D0 you want to work with me?"

Simon spoke with Pasolini to make this movie.

He said, "I'll send you a young photographer

"to have a photo shoot on this movie."

Pasolini says no.

That set is absolutely forbidden.

It's closed.

I went to Cinecitta to look for Pasolini.

Of course, he was very busy and couldn't do it.

S0 by chance I met Fellini,

who introduced me to Pasolini. It simply happened. I was lucky.

I was lucky he introduced me

because then Pasolini accepted my offer.

"You can come for your photo shoot.

"Unfortunately, the movie's almost done.

"There are a few scenes left, the wedding party

"and the torture."

"And here, my dear friends, an even stronger certainty is born..."

"...the greatest pleasures come from the most vile source."

"From now on here's the doctrine we'll have to follow..."

"...the more you're looking for pleasure in the profundity of crime,

"the more your crime will have to be terrible."

"Very well. D0 you think is it possible

"to commit such crimes very much like your minds crave?"

"I must admit that my imagination

"has always far exceeded my faculties."

"I lack the means to do what I'd like to.

"L have imagined hundred times more and better than what I actually did in the end

"and I've always complained about the nature that,

"gives us the desire to outrage it, but denies ourselves the means to do so.

"There are only two 0r three great crimes in this world.

"Once you commit them there is nothing else to say.

"Everything else is inferior.

"You stop feeling anything.

"Ah, so many times I crave I could assault the sun

"to expel it from the universe

"and turn everything dark or use that star to burn the universe.

"Oh, that would be a great crime

"and not just a small one

"like those that in a year

"only turn a dozen of creatures into a lump of clay."

I think he felt a big urgency in his heart and soul.

The urgency to point out...

PRESIDENT OF THE AUDITORIUM OF ROME

...a pain not only intellectual, but physical and psychic as well.

His pain towards the Italian society

that he was watching, changing

quickly and for the worse.

Of course, especially in the first black and white movies,

POET

there is a Romania frontality.

Poetry, on the contrary, it has always been said to have a decadent note.

But, in my eyes, it's floral.

There is something, liberty,

and a bit Debussian... of course, there's a bit of D'Annunzi0 too

in this extenuation.

He felt the burden of a society without values

that tends...

to consider anything as a commodity,

that has the ability to change

the Italian physical landscape

and the bodies,

as well as people's souls.

In '59...

In '61 he made Accattone...

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

...and suddenly Pasolini's narrative presents totally original perspectives.

I wrote a poem called Defamations.

Here I tell the popular story of a trial,

one of the many trials that grotesquely affected Pasolini.

It is an impure narrative.

It's a narrative deeply contaminated by cinema.

He uttered a cry of pain against all that

and he simply said

that this so-called welfare society

was actually a society of a fake welfare

that every day builds discomfort, loneliness, oppression

and also inability of effective, sincere and real

human relationships.

The famous trial of a gas man who was threatened

and claimed that there was a gold bullet in the gun.

The poetry tells this crazy story.

S0, image and movement,

peculiarity of film language...

What does Pasolini do once he discovers cinema?

He tried to find a linguistic equivalent

from the literary point of view.

A word in movement.

Defamations to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

He would have threatened a gas man

with the gun loaded with a gold bullet.

Filmmaker and poet.

Goldsmith and ogre.

But which allegation would you contest?

The weapon or the bullet?

Holy Roman Church or the songbird?

In 1972 Pasolini starts working on Petrolio.

He calls it a novel. Yes, it's a novel.

He prophesied something

when other people, even politicians, were a bit more naive

or distracted or even more shallow and saw different things

and a more optimistic landscape

that Pasolini, instead, dismantled piece by piece.

That shot he never fired crosses his work

and gives a double oxymoron to it.

Amazing ghost of violence and mercy,

blood and laurel.

If you look at it,

we are already in the atmosphere of Salo'.

I think that behind this image there is...

the vampire's profile.

It is very raw, straightforward and detailed writing

and, at the same time, it has a powerful vision.

The gold bullet is like the wooden stake.

It is an alien body that wanted to be a stranger.

It's the outcast that won't ever be assimilated.

In fact, it will end up being expelled,

but through a magic ritual.

With the magic necessary to nail, once and for all, the aliens,

the vampires and Pasolini.

His images have the same fragrance of artisan objects,

"whose shape", he himself wrote,

"have the same fundamental traits of precision and mystery."

His movies are made of expressions of disbelief and pure impassiveness,

of animal survival, obtuse joy, greed and unjustifiable goodness.

The hands, among the few signs he focused on,

have a very special bond with sex

and they are often contiguous to it.

They go where the eye fails and the word is powerless.

But his shots are never short on words.

Words as images,

like constant writing, signs and letters attest.

The bodies are already on stage when they are being filmed.

They are that noise of shapes and signs

that breaks into the silent expanse of existence,

like a sudden birth of something.

However, you can't get into his world

if you don't understand that he feels the strongest emotion

when he looks at himself

with the same apprehension his mother would look at him.

Through Susanna's eyes

he looks at himself like a blinded animal in unknown meadows,

he feels like he's in a laager, full of companions in misfortune that hate him.

S0 he is the bull that one day in April

who walks softly towards death, into the hands of a smiling child.

Salo', his latest movie,

talks about how the consumer civilisation massacres the only thing

that doesn't belong to the market,

the body.

It also talks about the fate of the victim

that he always felt written on his own body.

It is one of the mysteries of Salo'.

What is its deepest meaning?

Only those who are really resigned can resist the abusers' violence.

As he himself wrote,

"There is nothing that crosses power as much as resignation does,

"which is the rejection of power in any form."

Has any other movie ever represented with the same insistence

resigned faces and bodies facing the unspeakable rituals

the power uses to celebrate itself in the only possible form?

Anarchy.

That's what makes this movie unique and absurd.

A crystal of powerful and peaceful sadness.

A masterpiece of evil sweetness.

It was a bit dark when I first walked into the farmhouse.

Then the lights turned on and I started to see and understand things around me.

THESE SHOTS ARE NOT PRESENT IN THE FINAL EDITION OF THE FILM

THESE SHOTS ARE NOT PRESENT IN THE FINAL EDITION OF THE FILM There was the DOP

and Pasolini, who'd just arrived and started to direct.

He said "Hi" to me in a very friendly way, but didn't come close to me.

THEY HAVE BEEN LOST FOREVER He said "Hi" to me in a very friendly way, but didn't come close to me.

CEVALLOS' PICTURES ALLOW A HYPOTHETICAL RECONSTRUCTION I started to observe him and everything he was doing.

He was sharp.

He was behind the camera and that's where he directed from.

He said something to the operator and other people.

Sometimes he left the camera to direct the actors,

but I couldn't go with him because he didn't want to be disturbed.

They were filming one of the first violent scenes,

I should have taken a picture of it.

I couldn't do it though,

because they were so real, so violent

that it reminded me of Los Federales' violence in South America.

I am Latino,

so I saw the struggle of the Left in Latin America.

L really felt those tortures.

From that afternoon I had to change the way I took pictures

because I could no longer get close to the subjects,

the way I used to do with any other movie.

When they said, "Action",

it wasn't a movie anymore, it wasn't a fiction anymore

and I was no longer in Cinecitta.

It was a torture chamber.

I always had goosebumps and only took a few shots.

I only used two or three lenses.

I remember I used 105 and 50. I didn't use the flash ring much.

And back then the tripod wasn't very common

because you couldn't really stay still.

S0 I worked freehand for 8-9 days.

Let's say for two weeks.

I didn't go everyday because I couldn't work with all scenes.

After I took those pictures

and I got them developed somewhere in Rome,

I picked the ones I wanted to publish and started telling Pasolini,

"Here are the photos you should see to authorise the publication in France"

and he was like, "Keep going. We have time."

One day then, I was in my car and someone told me,

"D0 you know that Pasolini got killed?"

And everyone started looking for young photographers.

Lots of newspapers called me saying,

"We want to buy your photos, they are Pasolini's latest images."

I refused to sell them.

I thought, one day I could pay tribute to him or make a book or an exhibition.

Occasionally, I see those photos in my file.

Last time I saw them, it was exactly a year ago,

when that awful scandal of the US military in Iraq came out.

Pasolini had already represented them.

It wasn't fiction.

Only once he asked me, "Can you take a picture?"

It's that picture where he just sits and looks at me.

It's the only one.

When he was very upset?

Anyone would bang his head against a wall, swear?

The worse he could say was, "Damn, go to hell!"

That was Pier Paolo's typical expression.

"Damn, go to hell!"

S0 when he said that twice, you knew he was very upset.

He was great.

I can't even think of the words to describe Pier Paolo.

And I don't even like when other people talk about him.

They all want to be Pier Paolo's godchildren, friends, etc...

I have so many names in my head...

And it wasn't just that.

He was doing so many things at the same time.

He was making the movie, writing the book,

Scritti Corsari, playing football...

Some images he gave, such as the one of the palace,

were showed around so many times afterwards...

In the morning he used to give me his articles

and say, "G0 and dictate them to the Corr/ere. ”

And then I realised, "I dictated Scritti Corsari on the phone."

Christian Democracy and neo-capitalism,

the capitalism in the maturity of those years,

affected Italy deeply

and changed it for the worse, more than fascism itself did.

I deeply respect Pasolini,

not just as a colleague...

FILM DIRECTOR

...but as the foundation I built my art on afterwards.

I don't know why, but I felt kind of responsible

and I did everything I could not to watch this movie

or to keep the script at home. In fact, I no longer have it.

That's how the location was. There were lots of litter?

N0, nothing? The painter fixed it.

S0 this was the kind of image you had to represent.

Painting has always been the source of inspiration.

Pasolini is indeed a great Italian

and also a great European.

People I give the tape to usually fall asleep

or tell me, "Ew! How could you do such a thing?"

What's extraordinary and really makes me think,

and only a few people understood,

is that there was this element of sweetness and love in the movie.

L work in a public hospital in Bologna, in a medical department.

D0 they know you were an actress?

N0.

He is one of the few people who kept up the European civilisation.

I'm not just talking about cinema.

I'm talking about the whole civilisation.

I had the feeling he was an extremely sharp, smart person

and at the same time, he was private, even shy, and very kind.

I didn't like Salo'.

I was lucky

to have the opportunity to watch it at the popular premiere in Paris.

The most impressive spiritual vibe

was his discomfort and refusal,

even his fear of violence.

I remember very well the face of the actor next to me,

more than the movie itself,

because I was looking more left than straight ahead.

DIALOGUE FROM A COPY OF THE SCRIPT USED ON SET "And here, my dear friends, an even stronger certainty is born...

"...the greatest pleasures come from the most vile source.

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ENDING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TO THAT OF THE FILM "...the greatest pleasures come from the most vile source.

"From now on here's the doctrine we'll have to follow,

"the more you're looking for pleasure in the profundity of crime,

"the more your crime will have to be terrible."

NO ONE KNOWS IF THIS SCENE HAS EVER BEEN SHOT "Very well. D0 you think it is possible...

END OF THE MOVIE, AFTER THE EXTERMINATION OF THE VICTIMS "...to commit such crimes very much like your minds crave?"

EXECUTIONERS DRAWING THEIR OWN CONCLUSIONS ON THEIR EXPERIENCE "I must admit that my imagination has always far exceeded my faculties.

"L lack the means to do what I'd like to.

"L have imagined hundred times more and better than what I actually did in the end

"and I've always complained about the nature

"that gives us the desire to outrage it,

"but denies ourselves the means to do so."

"There are only two 0r three great crimes in this world.

"Once you commit them there is nothing else to say.

"Everything else is inferior.

"You stop feeling anything.

"Ah, so many times I crave I could assault the sun

"to expel it from the universe and turn everything dark

"or use that star to burn the universe..."

PASOLINl'S NOTES SALO