← Intelligence Squared
Intelligence Squared
Olivia Laing on Passion and Heartbreak in the Golden Age of New Italian Cinema
00:29:48
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
Indeed Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of hiring is just working out where to start. Indeed makes it clear, simple and quick to reach the right talent. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute I've been talking to you. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com intelligencesquared just go to indeed.com intelligencesquared right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need welcome.
- [01:45]
Mia Sorrenti
To Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, internationally acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Lange discusses their new novel the Silver Book. Lange is the author of eight books, including the Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times bestseller the Garden Against Time. Their first novel, Crudo, won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, and in 2018 they were awarded the Wyndham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. Lange's new book, the Silver Book, is at once a a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of Italian cinema. Weaving a fictional account from the creation of Federico Fellini's flamboyant biopic Casanova and Pasolini's notoriously shocking Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, Lange explores the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, and love and power. Let's join our host, Maitha Lee Rao, now with more.
- [02:49]
Maitha Lee Rao
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. Our guest today is Olivia Lange. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Olivia.
- [02:57]
Olivia Lange
Hey, really nice to be here, Olivia.
- [03:01]
Maitha Lee Rao
This is a book about the lives and dreams and dramas that go into making a film, and about both the creative geniuses as well as the forgotten underlings whose life and labor go into these very big projects. In the book, many of the men are queer, and I say men because there are women in the story, but it's primarily a story about men. But this is this, the. This part of their identity, their queerness is foundational to how they do their work. There's a great line at one point a character says, we're not perverts, we're laborers in the dream factory. What pulled you into this world?
- [03:38]
Olivia Lange
I think the crucial thing to say is it's not just cinema, it's Italian cinema. So this is Italian cinema in the mid-1970s. And it's two films. It's a film by Fellini called Casanova and it's Pasolini's last film, Sallow, his dark masterpiece about fascism. And it was those films that really got me interested in the first place. I'm a huge fan of Fellini and especially Pasolini. And I'd been watching a lot of their films during lockdown. And I got more and more interested in this kind of handmade, very scrappy, very immediate world. You know, we're entering a realm of creativity in the 21st century that's about AI, that's about machine making and machine creativity. And I really sort of felt very drawn to this world that was very much about the handmade. And that was set in a time of intense political upheaval and political danger, which again has parallels to our own period.
- [04:37]
Maitha Lee Rao
I think the story of Casanova is one that, whether or not people have seen the film, they probably have a gist of what that story is about. Can you explain what Salo is about, this film that Pasolini made, that was his last film and plays such an important role in this book?
- [04:54]
Olivia Lange
Yeah, absolutely. Pasolini's Scandalous Sallow. So what it is is an adaptation of the Marchi de Sad's 120 Days of Sodom. But Pasolini has transposed it to Italy and he set it very deliber in the final days of the Second World War, the final days of the Republic of Salo. And what that is is the basically German run ruling of especially northern Italy, with Mussolini as its nominal head. The Mussolini is actually at this point a prisoner of the Germans. And it was a period of really unparalleled cruelty and horror in Italy. And this is where both Pasolini and Donati grew up. They were both teenagers and young men in this period, in this place. So Pasolini tells this story in a very enclosed and fairytaleish way. There are the four libertines There are the courtesans who tell stories and there are these young people who are basically rounded up in fascist roundups. Exactly what would have happened on Country Lane after Country Lane in that period, at that time. And these children, teenagers are taken to a chateau, a house, it's not actually a chateau, it's a sort of literal palazzo and basically subjected to horrors until everybody in the film bar two guards are killed. It's unbelievably grotesque. It's beyond the outer limits of any horror film ever made. But I think that's because it's not just about disgusting things happening. It has this sort of anguish, moral intent, which is really to examine through a very clear lens the spirit of fascism, the desire of fascism to destroy, to take control over the bodies of others. But also, and far more uncomfortably for us now, I think about compliance and complicity, about the people who want to help out and the victims who cannot find a way to resist. It really, I think is the most powerful invitation ever made to think that you must resist when fascism comes to war.
- [07:18]
Maitha Lee Rao
It's very tactile. The things you describe in the book, the filmmaking process. One of the main characters is a set maker and costume designer, Danilo Donati. How many times I have to ask, did you watch Casanova and Salo while writing this book?
- [07:35]
Olivia Lange
Yeah, I watched them a lot. But the other thing I watched, which was so useful, you know, I've never even been on a film set, but I immersed myself in this world. I read a lot of books, but in particular I was watching documentaries set at Cine Chitta, the Roman film studio in the 70s. So I found documentaries about the making of Casanova, the making of Salo. There's a film called Inter Vista Warehouse. Fellini, basically in the 1980s, goes back and thinks about how he used to make films. And I would really watch the people at the back of the screen. I'd watch the people walking back and forward, carrying clothes over their arms. I'd watch the people who were putting on the makeup, you know, at the back of a screen where action's happening at the front, to just try and reconstitute this very fascinating closed universe. You know, a novelist is always drawn to a closed universe. And Chinny Chittar at that period was really a world of total complexity. It's like there's a cafeteria, there's a bar, there's a shop where you can buy all the things you need. There's people making, you know, recreating the Roman Empire. It is absolutely self imposed. And Full of riches. So it was fascinating to explore it.
- [08:45]
Maitha Lee Rao
And you do really bring that world to life. In some ways, it's a workplace story. Cause this is kind of the workplace for these great directors, but also for all the underlings and all the day laborers and the craftspeople and the extras. But one thing that struck me is again, even though the Silver Book is about great art and great cinema, films that are studied and celebrated to this day, where the book really sets its sights on are these small, kind of brightly lit moments, interpersonal moments between two characters, Danilo Donati and his apprentice Nicholas. And this is really kind of where your lens as a writer zooms in on their daily life. The meals they cook, the jokes they share, their intimacy. And it makes them the stars of the story. Why did you want to turn your focus in that way onto this one relationship in particular?
- [09:49]
Olivia Lange
Yeah, that's true. I think, you know, on a technical level, Nico, who is English, is my eyes into that world. I wouldn't be able to explain that world without having somebody who's unfamiliar to it coming to it. But this book really came out of. I had a desire for a long time to write a thriller. And I couldn't work out where to set it. And I was thinking about all of the Italian stuff. And I suddenly realized that that was the perfect backdrop. And I was in Venice. I'd been working in Venice and I was leaving the city. I knew about Danilo Donati. And I had this vision of him, very clear, strong vision of him coming to Venice in a fury with Fellini while he's trying to make things for Casanova. This sort of very angry, very proud man coming up to 50 and an artist in his own right, but also a servant to artists. And I imagined him meeting this English boy literally on the steps of the church in Santo Stefano. And this coup de feudre happening between them, this sort of attack of love that would pull them into each other's lives and bring chaos in its wake. And I imagined the Nicholas character in the beginning as really a Ripley sort of person, as somebody quite sinister, as somebody dangerous. And then as I wrote the book, which I did mostly in Rome very fast, I began to see that he was a very different sort of character. That he was extremely young. He's 21 when the book starts, 22 when it ends, and that he was somebody wide eyed and totally out of his depth in the world that he finds himself in. And really, crucially, somebody who this is the. The mid-1970s is damaged by homophobia. I Think that's such an ongoing thread through the book, this sense of what homophobia means and what it means to try and build up these cultures of resistance, how powerful they can be, but also how fragile they can be.
- [11:55]
Maitha Lee Rao
Well, let's talk a little more about Nicholas, because I thought he was such an interesting character. He makes some morally questionable decisions that really propel the plot and come to haunt him. But he isn't a villain really. He's someone who I felt you wrote as just sort of a hapless character. Someone who's sort of hapless to his own fate, hapless to events larger than him.
- [12:21]
Olivia Lange
Is he a coward? I think he's a coward in the sense that we're all a coward. And I think that that's very important at the end. The sense of the fear of physical violence, the of fear that makes most people. Or loss of physical capacities that makes most people compliant. That's a really important question in the book, and that's a question I hope the reader takes away. But he became somebody that I felt very tender towards. And it was funny, as I was giving it to friends early on to read, they kept coming back going, I'm Nicholas. Or I was Nicholas. Oh, my God, I was such a Nicholas. Because I think it's really. It's about being young as well. It's about having that sort of sense that you're the person who understands everything, you're the person who grasps everything. You have power and you suddenly realize that you're absolutely the pawn of circumstance and not the master of it. And I think it's about that. I think it's about being caught up inside difficult times. But, yeah, I found him a very, in the end, a very endearing character.
- [13:19]
Maitha Lee Rao
To write in terms of those difficult times. This is all taking place in the backdrop of Italian politics in the 1970s. What other kind of research did you do that wasn't the sort of film centric one, but the political history kind of reading that informed how you thought about this world and these times?
- [13:41]
Olivia Lange
Yeah. So this is the Anni di Piombi, which is the age of the years of lead and so called because it was such a violent period in Italian history. And what's happening is really, you're having a lot of terrorism attacks on the far left. Left, but particularly on the far right. And Pasolini was extremely vocal during this period. He was a filmmaker who was also a public, but politicized and intellectual in a way that I think we don't really have parallels these days. He was writing a lot of columns denouncing the right, but especially saying that there were links between government and far right fascists in ways that then turned out to be true. And, yeah, I absolutely immersed myself in reading about the period and had to keep discarding fascinating lines about all of those little terror groups and terror cells that were happening, you know, contemporaneously, because I wanted to keep it a very tight focus on this story. But the idea is that you feel, you know, there are side references to bombings, there are side references to train stations being blown up. So you have this sense that it's a very turbulent period in history. And here's Pasolini at the center of it, sounding these warnings about something that I think is really coming to pass in our own time. I think he's the person that really foresaw that fascism and the far right would return to power in a way that has been proved conclusively true.
- [15:11]
Maitha Lee Rao
And the question kind of hanging over his story that really takes central focus later in the book is how artists share their political convictions and the price they pay for sharing those convictions when they're defying power, when they are criticizing power. And it obviously, as you said, is something of relevance today. And the events in the book are very tragic. Do you see, see this book as sounding a warning about the times we live in, or these are just the themes you're just obsessed with? Yes.
- [15:45]
Olivia Lange
Yeah. And I mean, this is something that I've been writing about in book after book after book, and I think I wanted to have a go at looking at it through a fictional lens. But, yeah, it's as Danilo says at one point, it's about now. It's all about now. And this is very much a book about now. I think Pasolini had this sort of eerie rear view mirror where he saw something approaching. And I think that's. That's why he was killed. And I think the warnings that he was making are something that we need to heed. And really, the story of Saller, you know, it's this sort of most fairy tale fable of fascism. And what he is warning about is not just the horror of fascism, he's warning about the lethal danger of compliance and complicity. That's what that film is about. And I think the way that he was killed, the man manner of his assassination, was really designed to muddy that message, to make it seem that perhaps that was a film about perversion by a pervert and to call into question its real political lucidity. So I really wanted to just Lift that back out and get a new generation to think about it, to heed that warning that feels to me so crucial right now.
- [17:01]
Maitha Lee Rao
The other director whose work is in the story is Fellini. And there's the through line of Danilo Donati, whose work is kind of a creative common thread in both of them, but they take very distinct approaches to cinema. Did you want to talk about that contrast a little bit and why that interested you?
- [17:22]
Olivia Lange
Yeah, I'm just laughing with delight because it was such a pleasure to write Fellini as a character. You know, he's a very dramatic person. He's making Casanova, which is pretty much the most expensive film, certainly in Italian film history. And he's a huge diva. He's a person who's just constantly having enormous fights with people. Very theatrical, very, you know, why am I trapped in this prison of my own making? And his relationship with Donati was extremely complicated. Donati talked about being his prisoner, and they fought an awful lot. So that was very enjoyable to write. And then to set that against Pasolini, especially Pasolini, at this late moment in his career where he's incredibly focused. You have this sort of recurring scene of him with his arrow flex, the little camera on his shoulder just held lightly, running from shot to shot. He's in a hurry. He's somebody who, you know, he's not unkind to the people he works with. He's very gentle, but he's super focused about making this film fast. It's not that he prophesied his own death, but he certainly was somebody who had a sense that there was a clock ticking and his work had to be made. So I think they were friends. They were two men who really liked each other a lot. They worked together on some of Fellini's films before Pasolini became independent. But they're also very different personalities.
- [18:47]
Maitha Lee Rao
And then Danilo Donati, the. The set designer and costume designer and kind of creative mastermind behind the kind of physicality of these two films. Reading the book, your admiration for his work kind of comes through is the care that goes into some of these sort of outrageous sets or additional. Yeah, set pieces on the film. What do you admire about his work?
- [19:21]
Olivia Lange
It's funny. Danilo is almost like the moral center of this book, and it's because he understands something. All three of those men, Fellini, Pasolini and Donati, they all grew up under fascism. They were all boys and young men under fascism. Pasolini and Donati were both gay men under fascism, which is a very, very dangerous thing to be. And I think what Donati embodies is this sense of. Of work as refuge, artistic creation as refuge, communal creation as refuge. He was an extraordinarily talented costume designer, probably one of the best costume designers, along with Piero Tuzzi who's ever lived. But he's somebody who also takes delight in working with others. He's not the auteur who sort of separate the great individualist. He really is working in a workshop, he's collaborating. And the clothes he made especially for Pasolini's films are visionary and extraordinary. They're more like art than conventional historical costumes. But he's also somebody who can solve problems. He's very phlegmatic and funny. I think a lot of my love of Italian character has gone into that Persona. He's very earthy, he's very rooted. He's a brilliant cook, he's sexual. So he felt like an immensely attractive presence inside the book.
- [20:45]
Maitha Lee Rao
And to your point earlier about. As we enter a world where AI enables filmmaking and someone can just sit in a room and sort of imagine these sets, whether they have the same effect on the screen is another question. But you can do it without hiring someone, without building something, without that tactile aspect of the film, which would not only employ someone like Danilo, but also maybe 10 people under him. And it seems like a real. A dramatic change in loss to where we. Where cinema goes and what it means to make. What it means to make a movie or be part of a. A filmmaker, to be part of, like, a filmmaking project.
- [21:36]
Olivia Lange
And I think it was a real. You know, it's a love letter about the handmade, the. The cinema of scissors and glue that Fellini talks about. But, you know, those things are only lost if people decide that they don't want to do them anymore. You know, it's still. It's still available as a process, not just about cinema, but about all art making, about the book, about the painting, all these things that. That people have spent centuries or decades invested in. I think it's a reminder of the delights of human co making at a moment where we're starting to move towards something different.
- [22:20]
Progressive Sponsor
You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [22:56]
Maitha Lee Rao
You mentioned that you wrote this book in Rome, and I seen in other interviews you've done that. You kind of wrote it in almost a fugue state. How different was the actual writing process from other books you've done?
- [23:09]
Olivia Lange
Oh, my God. I mean, I've written seven books. And all of the nonfiction, they take years. They're incredibly slow. They're, you know, they're bound by a factual reality, which means they're bound by archives. They're enormously painstaking to construct. And I often say, oh, I don't really like writing. You know, I like the ideas and I like the architectural process. But day to day, it's not always that much fun. This was a very strange experience because I'd had the idea and I had to wait a year before I could start writing it because I was. I had the Garden against time out. I was touring a lot. So I got to Rome, I went to the British School at Rome, and I sat down and the book just poured out. But it was stranger than that because it was almost like I could. It was almost like taking dictation. It was a very, very exciting experience. It got faster and faster and more intense. And I was aware as it was happening, this isn't what it's normally like. It will never be like this again. This is an eerie experience. And enjoy it while it's happening. It was like surfing a fabulous wave. And now I'm in deep mourning that it's over and it will never come back.
- [24:24]
Maitha Lee Rao
You mentioned a little bit of the kind of through line of your work. I mean, each book, on the surface of it, seems quite different from the last. Your most recent book, like you said, was about gardening. How do you describe the through line of your work or kind of what it is that keeps your interest or kind of connects one book you've written to another?
- [24:47]
Olivia Lange
Yeah, I've never wanted to repeat myself or write the same book again, but I think each book ends with a question. You know, I wrote a book about writers and drinking, and that really opened up a question of loneliness, which really propelled the Lonely City. I ended the Lonely City with this thing of. This book's really about people and their bodies and their relationships to their bodies. And that's what led into writing every book. And then everybody ended with this question about utopia and a better world. And that's really the underlying question of the Garden Against Time is what would a better world look like? What would a utopia look like? What would a shared paradise look like? And I think the other thing that they share, apart from a preoccupation with artists lives, is that they have all been thinking about fascism and resistance and the role of art in that. In book after book. Funny Weather, my essay collection, is about that. Crudo, my first novel is about that is very much the informing question of everybody, which is about freedom struggles. So it feels like there's a sort of political motivation and there's an MO that is kind of shared from book to book. But then each one picks up very different material. They have very different stylistic sort of shapes. So yeah, this one I know this one feels like it's completely different. And yet I think the preoccupations sort of run back routes into basically almost every book I've written.
- [26:12]
Maitha Lee Rao
Has writing this book changed the way you watch films from this era?
- [26:16]
Olivia Lange
Oh, I mean, I suppose it's deepened my appreciation and I hope that's true of anyone who reads it. Because, you know, like Nicholas, I was kind of an innocent viewer. I always think when I'm watching a film that it's basically real, that they've made everything. And the idea that, you know, snow is bed sheets or the sense that when you're watching something bloody and violent, of how somebody's created that to look so fantastically real is. It's added a great layer of excitement. Actually. I found watching, watching 70s films a lot more pleasurable to have this sort of backstory in my mind of how it was made and who was making it. The dramas inside the set, sort of.
- [26:57]
Maitha Lee Rao
Two layers in which you're watching it now. The story, the final decisions, the final. And then you're thinking about what were all the moments that went into this? The bullying on set or the, you know, how are different performances elicited? When did pieces of the set malfunction need to be?
- [27:18]
Olivia Lange
All these wonderful moments that are lost. And I think I always loved watching films about the making of films, you know, fictional films about the making of films. So I always liked that sense of the nested story inside the story.
- [27:31]
Maitha Lee Rao
What are you working on next? It's a question I often like to conclude with.
- [27:36]
Olivia Lange
I'm not sure what's coming next. I've got a sense of a prequel to this book that's set in London in the early 70s, but also the whole idea with the Crudeau project, which I wrote now eight and a half years ago, was that there was going to be. It was Quartet and one was going to be written each decade. So there's another one of those coming around as well. And that feels quite exciting because the whole idea of that book was that every 10 years it would try and capture personal smashing into political, political smashing interpersonal, and bear witness to that process. And obviously the political has only got more horrifically dramatic in the past eight and a half years.
- [28:14]
Maitha Lee Rao
Olivia, thank you.
- [28:16]
Olivia Lange
Thank you so much. Pleasure to talk to you.
- [28:18]
Maitha Lee Rao
That was Olivia Lange, author of the Silver Book, available as of November 6th online and in stores. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [28:29]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, you can head to intelligence squared.com attend to see our full live events program.