Matteo Garrone on his phantasmagorical feature film, Tale of Tales
Italian director Matteo Garrone discusses his passion for reinventing fairy tales with a contemporary twist
Tale of Tales features Salma Hayek devouring a bloody heart and Toby Jones nurturing a monstrous pet flea – probably not images you expect to see in a new fantasy film. But Tale of Tales isn’t your average Hollywood fairy tale.
It’s directed by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, who came to UK audiences’ attention with his thrilling Neapolitan crime drama Gomorrah. His next feature, Reality, a satirical take on the Italian version of Big Brother, took a different direction, exploring a man’s obsession with obtaining fame at all costs – it won Garrone the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2012. Tale of Tales, which marks Garrone’s English-language debut, shows the director’s versatility going in yet another new direction, presenting a fantastical, interwoven trio of grotesque, often humorous fairy tales.
Garonne's source material is a relatively unknown fairy tale collection written by 17th-century Neapolitan aristo Giambattista Basile. The tales are a weird and wonderful blend of lesser-known and famous fables that have been passed down through the years and include versions of classics like Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel – beating the Brothers Grimm to the punch by 150 years. “The stories were so full of action and perfect for cinematic adaptation,” begins Garrone, who is talking to The Skinny over the phone from his home in Rome. “I was surprised, when I read Basile’s book, by the power of the stories and the visual possibilities.”
Basile's stories were introduced to Garrone by an artist friend and he felt that they were perfect for his next feature. The challenge was whittling down the 150-plus stories into a cohesive narrative.
“We started developing the script with six or seven and then we decided to choose the point of view of women who are at different ages [in life].” The women that Garrone is referring to are played by a stellar cast of actors from around the world including Salma Hayek, Shirley Henderson, Hayley Carmichael and newcomer Bebe Cave. The script being in the English language afforded the director a greater pool of talent to pick from, and also would allow him to get his work seen by a wider audience. He also managed to snag a worthy male cast, which includes the eclectic talents of Vincent Cassel (appropriately cast as a lothario king with dubious morals), Toby Jones (flea exit stage left) and John C. Reilly.
The film may be set in a magical kingdom far, far away, but the stories chime with many contemporary issues. Gender politics abound, as does a critique of society's ongoing obsession with youth, stretching farther afield to universal themes of loss, longing and fear. For Garrone, this is where the appeal lay: he was able to explore contemporary problems within a fantastical setting but also hold on to the reality that made them relatable to modern audiences.
More from Film
Eva Husson explores teen sex parties with Bang Gang
Meet Scotland's stars of short film
“What I like about these stories,” says Garrone, “is that the moral is sometimes utterly unpredictable. You never know how it’s going to end.” Garrone, like Basile, wanted to showcase the full range of human experiences, balancing the comic and tragic. “For me, it is how Basile mixed the grotesque aspects [of his stories] and, at the same time, manages to show the humanity of his characters.”
Tale of Tales isn’t for the faint of heart and is as far from the family-friendly fare of Disney’s Frozen or Tangled as you can get. Garrone has retained the grisly nature of the original material because it inherently captures the broad reality of life, albeit presented in an extreme version. “Basile took tales that were popular in the medieval period, which explains why they are so dark because it was a violent world.” Actions in this world have horrible consequences, and human fallibility is everywhere. It is a world where princes are far from charming and old crones will stab their sister in the back for the chance of bedding a king.
Garrone’s approach to the material wasn't all that different from how he tackled Gomorrah and Reality, although he admits that viewers may not see the link so easily. “People often ask, ‘How is it possible for you to make a movie so different from your other films?’” he chuckles down the line. “I used to start from the observation of reality and then bring this reality into a fantastical dimension. For instance, Gomorrah was a type of dark fairy tale that talks about violence against kids. Reality starts like a fairy tale with a carriage that goes into a castle. In this movie, I began with fantastic and magical tales and tried to bring them a dimension of reality.”
In other words, Garrone is wrestling with the same themes he has always wrestled with. “Human problems and human conflict are universal and modern themes. When I made this movie, the setting was the 17th century but, for me, the themes are now. I shot it like it was a movie talking about me, and the people I know.” For Garrone, he's more interested in the psychological journey that his characters are on, not their historical context.
Basile wasn’t Garrone’s only source of inspiration. Within this collection of stories, he knew the potential of their inherent theatricality, and references how Italian author Italo Calvino saw Basile as the 'Neapolitan Shakespeare.' “As a writer of the 17th century, Basile is connected, in a way, to Shakespeare. The stories are very theatrical; you can feel the theatre behind it.”
This sense of theatre was as important to Garonne as the inner journey of his characters. “We wanted to show audiences that what they are seeing is believable, but also, at the same time, is a type of theatrical, artificial representation.”
While the dramatic element was key, Garrone is a visual director and he turned to his other passion, fine art, for inspiration. “If I had to name one inspiration it would be Goya,” he says. “The drawings of Los Caprichos were always in front of me in preparation for this movie, because I found in these pictures the soul of the tales of Basile – the supernatural dimension and its link to realism.”
After discussing the various directions his work has gone in, we finish on where his next project will take him. “I would like to make another movie in this direction, but at the same time doing something different, keeping it connected to this experience.” Garrone is a director who always keeps us guessing. We look forward to seeing where his next flight of fancy takes us.
Tale of Tales is released 17 Jun by Curzon/Artificial Eye