What is the tone of “Favolacce”? 

It’s a profound film that tells a difficult story. It talks about a neighborhood, but it’s also a cross-section of our society. It is a painful and harsh story that I tried to tell with a very sweet, almost romantic look, in which the characters are seen with love. This was my goal and to achieve it I needed sensitive tools from an expressive as well as technical point of view. I took advantage of natural light, as I have often done in recent years. Using the naturalness of light as a basis does not mean, however, that you have to accept what you find organically. Instead you can employ this naturalness as a creative element and adapt it to your project. 

What tools did you choose to work with? 

This is the second film I made with the D'Innocenzo brothers, and in both cases I used ALEXA. We searched together for simplicity, agility, and lightness. I shot everything with the ALEXA Mini because I needed a small camera that I could easily put on my shoulder. I also used vintage optics; lenses that have optical aberrations. I wanted to have defects in the image and I was looking for an old texture and great simplicity. Since I knew that I would venture into a terrain with many surprises, I decided to reassure myself and use a sensor that I knew very well. I would have liked to shoot in spring instead of summer, because in the Roman suburbs the light is very harsh in the summer, but due to production needs, we started shooting in late June and ended in late August. However, the sensor held up the contrast very well, much better than I thought. The vintage optics and cameras for this film come from D-Vision Movie People.