Dreams, Passions and Projects of Ferretti

One of cinema's great art directors the subject of Italian book L'arte della scenografia about his life's work

Italian publishing house Electa has prepared a tribute to Dante Ferretti, recipient of many awards and beloved by major international filmmakers; the art director, author of memorable sets that have become the history of cinema, was nominated seven times for an Oscar.
L'arte della scenografia ("The Art of Scenography") is a voyage through his productions, among souvenirs, memories, notes, and beautiful sketches and images of sets. This exceptional patrimony has been assembled for the first time and is accompanied by a long preface with Gabriele Lucci and new photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin. These show very well the personal poetry and visionary creativity of an artist who managed, with his spectacular reconstructions, to materialize the dreams of directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Terry Gilliam, Jean Jacques Annaud, Anthony Minghella, Franco Zeffirelli, Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese, the great Italian-American master, who in 1993 wanted Ferretti for the sets of The Age of Innocence, writes in the preface, "For that film, I wanted something unique, a special eye that did not only look at aesthetics but also to the weight, the presence, the substance of beautiful, opulent objects. In every film, Dante gave me some priceless gifts, an inner universe possessing intensity, depth, absolute splendour. From Kundun to Gangs of New York, every time I witnessed a miracle that repeated itself again and again. Even my last production, The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Cate Blanchett, made my esteem for Dante and his skill grow further. His complete dedication to his art, his intuition, his acute introspections, his extraordinary sensitivity... I can hardly imagine," concludes Scorsese, "what I would have done without him."
Dante Ferretti (born in Macerata in 1943) tells something about himself in the book. How he began working in Cinecittà at the age of 17 ("It was like living in a dream dimension...," he says), his friendship with people such as Fellini, Pasolini, Scorsese, Gilliam (with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Ferretti obtained his first Oscar nomination), his memories, some anecdotes. "Pasolini was an intellectual, a poet," he remembers. "On the other hand, Fellini was a despot, a jealous and overbearing vampire. I learned a lot from both of them. With Federico, we liked to tell each other our dreams: the most incredible, magical, colourful dreams. After comparing dreams, Federico distilled the visions that permeate his films, after filtering them through his own genial personality."
"Fellini's megalomania knew no limits," jokes Ferretti, "yet his empiric fantasy allowed me a free professional hand in experimenting across the board, far from any inhibition and rational reconstruction."
Working with Pasolini was very different. Dante Ferretti remembers that, for him, "inspiration was historical, literary, philosophical; always based on stylized figures rather than three-dimensional characters. He taught me to go beyond the rules in order to make ambient and atmosphere more credible, like we did for Decameron and The Canterbury Tales."
The precious volume includes film sets but also contributions to theatre and opera. Every work is a marvelous universe, brought back to life by Ferretti as shards of memories. Medea, Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, City of Women, And the Ship Sails On, The Voice of the Moon, Orchestra Rehearsal, Ginger and Fred, Casino, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, The Name of the Rose, That Night in Varennes, Hamlet, Interview with the Vampire, Cold Mountain, and the recent The Aviator, are just a few of Ferretti's works. He also worked on Traviata, Manon Lescaut, Bohème, Cavalleria rusticana, Un ballo in maschera, Werther (directed by Liliana Cavani, conducted by Riccardo Muti, and choreographed by Micha van Hoecke).
Ferretti confesses, "When I'm working I like to immerse myself in the stories and the world I have to describe; I want to live in it, understand it... so that I can give my best in every movie, giving physicality to a director's intuition, emotion, dreams. I don't like mannerist, unoriginal effects. Maybe that's the reason why I prefer real materials like wood, glass, bricks, concrete. On a set, nothing's impossible. That's something Federico Fellini taught me. I also love theatre deeply, even though I've had fewer occasions to work in it. In comparison to cinema, the world of theatre is more protected, more intimate. Work is carried out in one place with well-defined proportions. Theatre has a different time flow, the 'dilation' of cinema is impossible, therefore the general view must be as striking as possible. Perhaps that's why I always refused to use cloth curtains and painted backdrops - which I see as flattening - choosing instead three-dimensional screens."
The book presents many images, ranging from the latest movie, The Aviator (a biopic on Howard Hughes, a man split between cinema and aviation, producer, director, airplane entrepreneur, who lived in the Hollywood of the Thirties and was madly in love with Ava Gardner), to his earliest works, to future projects, Isobar, Defective Detective, Assumption, directed by Roland Emmerich and Terry Gilliam.
"This goes beyond my own imagination!" exclaimed Martin Scorsese after seeing Ferretti's sketches for Gangs of New York. The miracle repeated at every film. Dante Ferretti recalls the 120 sets built for Casino (starring Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone); the 1,800 costumes created for Kundun; the sets in Morocco and the narrow, mazelike houses, decorated with bright colours (like red and gold), reconstructed with the help of the Dalai Lama; the Parisian catacombs of Interview with the Vampire; the labyrinth stairways of The Name of the Rose inspired by drawings of Mario Piranesi; but especially his first meeting with Scorsese for The Age of Innocence. "I wanted to create a live context, something that would breathe with the characters and the narrative...," recalls Ferretti. "Everything had to transmit a sense of absolute perfection. Possibly excessive, unchanging."
The pages describe Ferretti, his smile, his irony. His memories act as a mirror of his character, of his stainless personality, of his constant discussions with the masters of contemporary cinema. "Ginger and Fred," he tells, "was inspired by the TV of the 80s, which Fellini perceived as an invasive, grotesque element of Italian society. Vulgar lights, feathers and sequins: the atmosphere had to give the idea of a fake, hypocritical world. Very far from the Felliniesque opulence of Dress Rehearsal, the metaphor of a hidden power, which cannot be seen but is always present."
Alongside ideological, political, social, disquieting and grotesque movies like Todo Modo, there are some films that Ferretti defines as fantasies and dreams. "Visionary works, extreme in their creativity. First of all, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, directed in 1989 by Terry Gilliam. I can remember the creation of the huge cake like I imagined it when I was a child, or the air balloon made of lingerie."
Dante Ferretti also mentions a curious anecdote from the set of And the Ship Sails On. "I had had the ship mounted on remotely controlled pneumatic mechanisms that reproduced the ship's lurks. The effect was so lifelike that sometimes Federico Fellini became seasick," he writes in the book.
For Ferretti, cinema also means the trips, the discoveries, the endless voyages that led him to India, Iran, Syria, Ethiopia, and Yemen for the shooting of Pasolini's Arabian Nights ("a surprising fairytale film, inspired by the images of Eastern art"), in Turkey for Medea, starring Maria Callas. "Veritable pilgrimages," he says, "with the purpose of locating in each place a tile of a neverending mosaic."
Ferretti does not hide his passion for American cinema of the Thirties and Forties, Art Deco, the city of Ferrara, and the warm and disquieting atmospheres of medieval art. An extraordinary testimony of this are his scenes inspired by Bosch, Giotto, Dürer, Brueghel (Decameron, The Canterbury Tales), Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca (Pasolini's trilogy of life and The Gospel According to St. Matthew), but also Edward Hopper's frescoes (Massenet's Werther directed by Liliana Cavani), Andrè Kertesz's photography (La Bohème as produced by Maggio Musicale Fiorentino).
Are there any more dreams, any more desire for a career already full of extraordinary success? "None... or maybe one," replies Ferretti. "I'd like to work with Steven Spielberg. For him, cinema is a unique, insuperable form of expression."

Publication Date: 2004-11-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4625