Befitting the Italian tradition of grandiose and endearing philosophy, we spoke of History, Truth and the Purpose of Film.

What did you shoot the film on?

I used 16mm film and all post-production was digital, converted to 35 for theatrical print.

Did the film enjoy wide distribution in Italy?

It wasn't widely distributed and it wasn't massively advertised but people did attend and it was a critical success. It also received three Donnatello nominations and won one for Costumes.

The Costumes were beautiful.

The film was based on Enzo Striano's book of the same name. For a long time the novel was only known in Naples but on the 200 year anniversary of the events described in the novel it was published by a much bigger publisher: Oscar Mondadori. With that publication it reached a much wider audience. It was even sold in grocery stores.

My film is very similar to the book in that it was a small production but it didn't want to die, My film has had a small life, per se but I feel it will be a long life, I hope that the film continues to have the same path as did the book. I hope it continues to grow.

The subject seems amenable to that.

Yes. Even though the film is based on historical events it has a very current relevance in that with many of the issues it addresses, and especially issues addressed through the protagonist played by the impressive Maria de Medeiro, are enduring issues. Maria's character Eleanora, represents current issues. Particularly, we can see a relation to the gap that grows between the poor and the rich. The divide keeps growing larger and larger. Though this film really is based on historical events that only take up a few pages in history books these characters themselves are larger than life and really transcend their time. They were able to give themselves up completely and die for their causes because they were working for a kind of Utopia. 

You never come out and call Eleanora eternal but the transitions the sense of time all communicate that about her. How did you come to work with Maria de Medeiros? The way she embodies Eleanora is transcendent of age in so many ways.

I really sought out the truth with all of the characters but especially with Maria de Medeiros because I wanted her to have a real likeness to the character. Maria is Portugese, just as Eleanora was. She is petite but strong and tenacious. I first met Maria when I was in Lugarno. She had an enormous belly because she was expecting her first child. But when we finally shot the film her first child was 5 and her second child, a girl, she named Eleanor.

Inspired by the character she played?

I think that in Eleanor she found a character that she really loved and identified with. She was a very unusual woman for her time, she actually had a legal separation from her husband and she was one of the first journalists. But I don't think she's a feminist, I think she's very feminine. She was a modern woman, ahead of her time but so often people think of feminists as aggressive but this was not true for her. She was both moral and fragile at the same time. Bernardo Bertolucci wrote in The Republic, which is a major Italian Newspaper, that Maria and I joined together to bring out and create a woman that was already inside of us.

That's beautiful. (I got a little weapy.) It's interesting that you bring up the issue of Truth. I understand the novel features a number of fictional characters. How do you think this affects the film as a historical document? Do the fictional characters help you get at some greater truth?

I actually went beyond that. I took out some characters that were not in the book and added some fictional and historical personalities that weren't part of the book. I say this to you to confuse you.

I don't think the cinema has the purpose of telling history exactly as it is. My goal is to move the audience by bringing them closer to these historical characters but I'm not trying to be a history professor. I'm not even concerned with accomplishing, as with television, a certain amount of historical truth. I think my role is to bring an emotional truth to the historical context.

Is that a progressive goal? How does that emotion or feeling compare to the weight that history has in stories?

The Neopolitan revolution wasn't like the French Revolution. It didn't' change any geography. It didn't change anything: hence the title: "The Remains of Nothing". What the film does do is underscore is the need to be political, the need to be like Eleanora who was political working for political progress on a collective level and not on an individual level.

My goal was to bring the audience closer to these characters and represent them as if it were the present tense. I want to move the audience by bringing them closer to the characters and to represent them more as they are, thus operating on a more collective level than on an individual level.

(We have a moment of concern with the translation.)

Have you seen the film by Sophia Coppola?

(There's a pause)

"Lost in Translation?

Yes. (We laugh.)

I never wanted to worry about explaining who these characters were. If a person wants to look up history they can look up history. I didn't worry too much about the dialogue being precise in those terms and that's exactly why I chose 16mm. I wanted to get much closer to the characters and make it more subjective and I could achieve that by shooting as if there was a camera was around Eleanora's neck. I wanted you to feel that close.

It's interesting you bring up the subjectivity of the character. It seemed the entire of the story followed a similar mood and tone but the scenes with Eleanor's husband and child diverged from your established techniques: both in set and style. Was this divergence in style deliberate?

To Eleanora, that larger context was everything to her and her private life was so small. We're talking about special characters here. Naples had a great nobility that was highly educated even though they had no Internet, no phone but they were in touch with France, they were aware of what was going on with the Declaration of Independence. They were much more in touch, just an incredible class of people.

Just as Naples is a part of southern of Italy, as in other parts of the south of the world, there are so many places in which there is a great disparity between the very few who are cultured, aware, sensitive, intellectual, and the larger masses who are very poor. And all throughout the world the essential problem is the communication and language and finding a means of communication between those very few and those large numbers.

How do you feel you deal with that in the formal aspects of the film? Linguistics always seems to play a big part in the communication of a story, in particular in stories that are attached to a specific event. If I can add to that, part of the reason I ask is that you use a number of transitional methods which in many cases appear to be like the same word in different languages.

It's a simple but complicated film.

Iconic, I'd say.

In terms of the spoken language present in the film, Maria is Portugese herself and when she speaks in Italian she has a slight Portugese accent. The film also includes a number of people speaking the Neapolitan dialect and I knew that some would not be able to understand but I intentionally did not include subtitles in the film so as to highlight this issue of communication.

In terms of the cinematographic language, there is, in it's entirety some common elements used. For example, rather than showing soldiers marching in importantly, I used drawings. I wanted to express my feeling that all war is useless. And yes, wars, in terms of iconography can be very useful, though in and of themselves they are useless.

In terms of the drawings and the representations of the drawings, I did not want to she historical events as steps in history. I wanted them to show them as if in the present tense. There is, for example a certain scene where they tear up a treaty that offered a surrender for the revolutionaries. This way they wouldn't be killed at the end of the war. But in another scene we see Queen Carolina and Lady Hamilton bathing together the two of them decide to rip up this agreement. And in fact there is this drawing of this famous moment depicting the bath.

That's so interesting! It's a record of a record...

Yes. It's like those tiny Chinese boxes that you pull apart. People often say that just before dying your life flashes before your eyes but it doesn't flash before your eyes in chronological order, it flashes in an emotional order. And that's why I structured the film in the way that I did. In the book the structure is chronological and her life is shown chronologically from one moment to the next. I think that adapting a book to the screen is difficult if not impossible. I think that I was successful in doing this, and I'm allowing myself to say this because the critics said this and the widow of Striano said so as well. The reason I was successful is because I used a revolutionary method of betraying everything about the book, yet I stayed very true to its spirit.

Please do tell me if I'm wrong, but there seemed to me to be a few scenes that were repeated. I'm thinking particularly of the dancing sequence that seems to be mirrored in a latter part of the film by another dancing sequence.

(Antoinetta gives me a confused look.)

Did you get a different copy?

Perhaps but the repetition seemed to implicate the cyclicality of the plot so it seemed a logical thing to include. The scene, to be specific was a scene in which there is a dance, the music is similar, the characters are the same but we see the scene from a different point of view.

You know it actually could be. In some ways films are like your children. You have them and then you forget about them so it could be that I have not noticed.

Or I have invented it.

But that's the beautiful thing about life. Some people make things and other watch them and in between there is that interaction that gives space to life.

That's just beautiful. Thank you so much for letting me speak with you.

Thank you and thank you for all the hospitality that I've experienced here. San Francisco is similar to Naples in many ways because the relationship between the city of San Francisco and the United States is like the relationship Naples has to Italy. For one you have the relationship of the sea, in both cities you have pubs, bars, meeting places where there is a kind of vitality that expresses a desire for people to communicate and not just take care of business... Enough of this business.