Original subtitles

Drink it.

All of it.

Let me see if I can trust you.

I've always known that I couldn't trust you.

You can see it in your eyes.

Because I knew, Gennarino, that you're no good.

I should kill you too.

Have you forgotten what I did for you?

We are brothers!

We are not brothers. I am Pietro's son, not you.

I can guarantee you one thing...

We'll take back everything that is ours.

A STORY CALLED GOMORRAH THE SERIES

FIRST EPISODE TWO TYPEWRITTEN PAGES

When I lived in the Quartieri Spagnoli,

I was afraid they would steal it, because it was so beautiful.

I took care of it so it would always run smoothly.

I've been denied the freedom to ride around Naples on my Vespa.

This is just one of the consequences that Gomorrah had on my life.

The light that the book shone on some of the country's dark mechanisms

has forced me to live in the shadows.

But I've never hidden.

This is how the book project began.

During the Scampia feud,

I used to ride my Vespa from one ambush location to another.

There were up to seven ambushes in one day.

This is how I started to tell the story of what I saw.

A lot of time has passed since those first pages.

Gomorrah became a play, a film and then a series.

And this is its story.

Is this it, Gennaro?

This is it, Patrizia.

It's very complicated to be able to find a synthesis of...

Of what Gomorrah was.

I remember that, when the film was being created,

which won the Grand Prix at Cannes,

and when the book was being written,

I felt the need to multiply...

the possibilities for presenting these stories.

What the fuck has he to write about?

He's writing about his own fucking business!

-But is everyone watching it? -Those are all his friends.

I'll get rid of his computer. Then we'll see if he stops.

The challenge was to tell the story of a world,

by simply using the characters who live in it.

That is, well-rounded human beings, who make choices,

but without ever judging them.

We loved and nurtured all the characters in Gomorrah.

In reality, Gomorrah is a story about the Camorra over ten years,

in all its variations.

The key was that, delving deeper into that reality,

we had focused our attention on two chapters in Saviano's book,

which pertained to the Secondigliano feud.

I liked the idea of telling the story...

which we ended up telling, of a clan that loses its balance.

But, initially, we thought of setting it in the world of the Casalesi clan.

What changed our minds was a trip,

a location inspection with Stefano Sollima and Paki Meduri, the set designer,

where we reviewed all the locations

and when we came to Scampia, we said, "No, no, this is it."

I mean... "It has to take place here, obviously."

"Scampia" is a word that in Neapolitan meant the open land,

an area with weeds, a place for an outing in the country.

That was "Scampia."

Starting in the '60s, the Vele were built here.

Years of political promises that weren't kept,

of unemployment, isolation.

They turned this neighborhood in northern Naples

into the largest drug supermarket in Europe.

Huge illegal earnings that unleashed a bloody power struggle.

We asked for this meeting just because we are a bit worried.

Without your father...

and with you in Rome...

Secondigliano and Scampia are like a time bomb.

They can go off at any moment.

No one really believed that it was possible to do a series.

And when I went to meet Riccardo Tozzi, I came with two typewritten pages.

I didn't call the series "Gomorrah," but "The Princes of Gomorrah,"

because it wasn't connected to the film project.

"Princes of Gomorrah" was very evocative.

It's in the spirit of the story.

Even if the duel is really between...

an aspiring prince, who is an upstart,

because he is a total orphan, someone who comes from nothing.

The other one is a real prince.

Mom...

Gennaro.

What did you do last night in Casavatore?

This quality of theirs will mark their relationship from beginning to end.

Thanks, Gennaro.

-Ciro? -Yeah?

The next time you have a barbecue at Conte's house, call me.

Understand?

Relax. There will be plenty of opportunities.

Bye.

And he ends the meeting saying:

"No, we're doing it. No need to wait. Let's do it."

From that moment on, it was...

a Sisyphean task.

-You know! -What do you want?

-We need the money! -15% a month.

-You won't breathe. -Killed everyone!

-What the fuck did you do? -I'll start.

-I screwed up. -Don't worry.

-I didn't tell my dad. -Betray my brother?

-Never do it again! -They'll regret it.

Get out of here.

Stefano Bises called me to tell me it was possible

to do an adaptation of the book Gomorrah.

The adaptation included a character, like in the book,

of a young guy who rode around on a Vespa.

This first adaptation which most closely followed the book,

was not completely satisfactory.

We thought that eliminating the middleman would make the story come to life.

We would be inside that world.

There was a first draft, where there was a journalist

who went to investigate, and infiltrated the Camorra's territory.

We lost that completely,

because it wouldn't have had the epic quality of a Shakespearian tale

which we later found.

There's only one thing left for you to do, Ciro.

We wrote very short treatments,

all told in the first person.

One was Salvatore Conte, one was the story of Pietro Savastano,

the day of his missed birthday.

Fuck off!

There were no good people.

If you don't stop now, someone else will stop us.

There were no positive characters.

And there was a family.

Pietro, Imma, the son Gennaro

and this sort of rival godson, Ciro.

No way!

Rude!

And around August, Sollima arrived.

He said, "Yes, I really like the family."

"Father, mother, Ciro, everything you've written about them

and especially, we're adhering to reality as much as possible."

Get out!

Very often, in a cinematographic story,

there's a tendency to tell a story, even if it's not true,

because it's interesting.

If you never give me the chance, what can I do?

Gennaro, you're my son.

You don't need chances.

And here, instead, we made a continuous effort

to bring the story back to the reality.

Whatever we wrote, we examined it closely

to see if it was true, if it made sense,

if it truly belonged to those places and those people.

Ciro.

Don't bullshit me.

I know what they think.

That he's no good.

To do this, you have to try many things and trash many treatments.

You need to take the time and not get discouraged and keep digging,

until you find the form...

where it's immediately clear that you're on the right path.

They're screwing me.

You want to wait for the police to come?

What should I do?

Kill them all, one by one?

The heart of Gomorrah is the truth.

We had the privilege of having Roberto's support.

Roberto is someone I respect very highly,

because he's one of those people who take on huge responsibilities,

he lays himself open...

He takes risks, and I know how much he risks personally, every day.

So, we also confronted this work with the unconscious incentive

to be at Roberto's level, from this point of view.

I'm talking about credibility, commitment and never shying away.

I didn't want to tell the world about Naples, that never interested me.

I wanted to talk about the world through Naples.

Therefore, the suburbs and the Savastanos have universal significance.

Gomorrah - The Series is a narrative, not a news account,

but its story is so universal and powerful because it never breaks from the reality.

Where is Daniele?

The mechanisms it exposes, the characters it talks about,

are a transfiguration of the truth.

Maybe you didn't understand what I asked you.

-Where is Daniele? -I don't know.

You do know. You do.

You want to go home, or not? Where the fuck is he?

The girl who, in the first season, is a victim of Ciro's violence,

evokes the tragic story of Gelsomina Verde and the brutality of her murder.

Piece of shit!

Don't you fucking dare!

In the same way, to construct the main characters,

we were inspired by figures who really existed.

Don Pietro contains Di Lauro, Misso, Raffaele Cutolo.

Genny has qualities that resemble,

on one hand, the craziness of Cosimo di Lauro.

What should we do? Huh?

On the other, a young Francesco Schiavone, "Sandokan".

Just for the time you're making me waste, I should shoot you in the mouth.

The DNA of these characters...

is drawn from different lives,

shaken up and assembled according to the stages.

But with one characteristic.

What the characters do, must have happened in some way.

Maybe it didn't happen in Naples, maybe not with those dynamics,

maybe it didn't happen at that time, but it has to have happened.

"Drink it, let me see if I can trust you," is a personal story.

I heard about that scene in a courtroom.

Paolo di Lauro urinates into a paper cup...

and passes that cup to...

Gennaro "McKay"...

telling him, "I know that you are trafficking on the side,

but I allow it, because everything I give you,

you sell, so it's part of the deal.

But you must not think...

that you can do it behind my back.

Everything you do, all of you, I allow you to do."

Well done, Ciro.

The way we depicted the reality in Gomorrah,

is a "unicum."

Some very valuable tools were...

the documents confirmed by the judge for the preliminary investigations...

What's this?

Go on, Savastano, your lawyer is waiting for you.

...that talk about the investigations, step by step,

so there is the alleged crime, the report on the stakeouts...

The call you made last night was tapped.

And I can't do anything now.

...all the phone taps done with ambient microphones.

So, it's like a huge novel

that tells you what crime was done, who did it, who testified.

Those few words you said on the phone, when you ordered what you know...

...are more than enough.

To talk about real things, you have to know real things.

And that world is not so easy to penetrate.

We simply went there and...

Many times, we stayed there for a while,

trying to establish relationships that allowed us...

to enter those worlds,

to get to know someone who would show us...

a drug market.

This is the place, Donna Imma. You see all those cellars?

-Yes. -They're empty.

They've been declared unusable. We're taking all of them.

We just need to put one guard there.

Some between the balconies, some on the rooftops,

and the police won't be able to arrest anyone.

Faster, Rosario.

We're in a fortress, Donna Imma.

-Hey, all good! -All good!

All good!

At one point they gave me an appointment,

so I'm waiting there for this appointment,

and a car arrives with three people inside

and they say, "It's them. Get in."

All good!

And after a bit, they say, "Ok, but... tell us the truth, what do you want?"

"The truth? Nothing, I'm writing this story,

I want to know more about the Secondigliano feud."

Speaking in pure Neapolitan and with a hand in front of their mouth,

so no one could read their lips if they were being photographed.

From then on, they introduced me to many people

who had a history because they'd been in jail,

because they ran a drug market,

because they'd been in jail because they were a guard for a boss.

I met people everywhere.

I remember one time at the cemetery in Secondigliano.

He was walking and he said to me, "This is Ninetto, who died in '72,

we did our first robbery together.

And this is Giovannetto, they shot him in '94."

Our friends are all here.

Nicola...

The Sassos killed him in 2006.

Bombolone!

What a character!

If they'd wanted to get rid of me, it would have taken one second.

The end of the day is here.

It's here.

This exploration into that territory, which was done in all the seasons,

continues to provide all the narrative material,

because that is a place with millions of stories.

And it's like a war zone.

Go!

To strengthen the authenticity of these stories,

their truth,

they needed to be filmed there.

It may have been simpler from a production standpoint,

to reconstruct some locations elsewhere, perhaps in the studio.

I wanted the actors to breathe in those places,

and the viewer to be able to see and understand.

The other aspect of authenticity

is that we had to be very accurate about everything,

from the language to the customs and places.

The language, to give you an example, is not Neapolitan. It's Scampian.

You stay put and don't move.

Hey, kid. You shouldn't do this, understand?

You and all your shark bait friends

need to learn to respect people who are older and have more experience. Got it?

-It's you who doesn't get it. -Put that thing away.

Formally speaking, this may have been the most challenging job,

which then led to another

because it's a language that is hard to understand.

We are a father and a son.

We wondered...

A son who tried to screw his father...

...and Sky also wondered...

...and a father who screwed his son.

"Will they understand?"

We are the first ones with something to lose. Is that clear?

Yes?

Yes. We have to understand everything.

A gold mine are the orders of protective custody,

because three quarters of the pages

are made up of tapped conversations.

Fucking cops.

The bugs...

They should put the bugs up their asses.

And so, the people in the tapped conversations,

speak like they speak in reality.

Everyone has certainly heard more than once, over the seasons,

"l'amm' accapputtà."

"Cappottare," no one would ever imagine,

is the idea of making a "cappotto" or coat, out of wood, which is a coffin.

You know why they call Ciro "The Immortal"?

Because in three wars no one's been able to put him in a box.

Or, another expression that is used often is:

"We have to put their last name on the ground."

What the fuck are you doing?

Out of my way, or I'll put your last name on the ground!

A last name is essentially...

what identifies a family.

So, "putting a last name on the ground" means making a clean sweep of the family.

I'm with you.

But we're not leaving their last name on the ground.

They are Savastanos.

They are Savastanos.

All of this complexity brought strength, authenticity.

Truthfulness to every single passage.

God only knows how this story will end.

These miracles rarely occur.

It's rare to be able to create an alchemy

where writing, acting and territory together,

reach such a deep level of understanding.

Come here.

Come here! Come and be forgiven.

Come here.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, watching Gomorrah,

can feel that it is a story of truth.

Where did you bury the poison?

There?

I did what everyone did.

I needed money.

There were just a few containers.

They recognize a truth because they recognize universal dynamics,

that they see in their life, in their suburbs,

that they see in their time.

Roberto uses this comparison which I find very appropriate:

if I enter a dark room and there's a dead body on the ground,

I turn on the light and discover the body and they accuse me of killing that person,

this is a fundamental mistake,

because I have to turn on the light and discover the body,

then it's up to civil society to figure out who the killer is.

You can't not turn on that light.

You must. It's an enormous responsibility.

But you must do it, because it's the only way to grow in a country.

It's the only way civic awareness grows.

Now, it is only in my imagination that I can keep riding that Vespa.

Many things have changed, many other things still need to change.

I haven't touched it in 15 years. And I miss it greatly.

It's a life that is gone.