The Italian filmmaker spoke with me on the eve of her film kicking off the 15th anniversary edition of the Cinecittà: Cinema Made In Italy showcase in London.
Known for films like the 2001 title Le parole di mio padre which was screened in Un Certain Regard in Cannes, and Un Giorno Speciale, which world premiered in Venice in 2012, but also for directing the Neapolitan Mafia series Gomorrah, based on Roberto Saviano’s life changing book by the same name, Francesca Comencini has been getting to the heart of the matter with her cinematic work.
Yet, for a filmmaker who has delved deeply into the personal, her latest film, The Time It Takes is where she sheds all, unveiling a “nakedness” that is at once powerful, vulnerable and courageous. Many define courage as the ability to do something heroic despite one’s fears and Comencini is the perfect example of that. Several times during our interview, she pointed to her lacking “the courage to make this film.” But ultimately, she made it.
Comencini’s latest, which kicked off this year’s Cinecittà: Cinema Made in Italy in London, is as much an ode to her famous father Luigi Comencini as it is a revelation of herself — as a filmmaker, a woman and, perhaps most importantly, as a daughter.
When The Time it Takes world premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, it was one of only a few titles that truly captured my imagination, perhaps because as a child, I watched the series Pinocchio, which her famous father directed, on TV. It’s the first thing I remember watching and craving, holding my breath, figuratively of course, while I awaited for the next episode to air. The story focuses on the dynamics between Comencini father and daughter, from her childhood and his Pinocchio years, to young adulthood.
Months later after viewing it, in a whole new year, her Venice 2024 title is still with me. I see images from it in my mind of Fabrizio Gifuni, who plays her father Luigi, and Romana Maggiora Vergano who plays the adult Francesca, playing opposite each other and when I finally get the chance to speak to Comencini over Zoom, I’m surprised it’s not Vergano instead. The film felt that real to me.
The way The Time it Takes is made, Comencini focuses on the father-daughter relationship in a groundbreaking way. As Bernardo Bertolucci once told Miral writer Rula Jebreal, and she relayed to me, for a story to work it has to focus on two characters, never more. And Comencini has done just that, eliminating all the “supporting characters” of her life.
It’s an interesting ploy, because in our own memories, we are often the leading ladies, and men of the story, the interpreters. And this is a film that shows that very well. In a profound way. It is also a very generous film, which gifts us, the audience, with this beautiful story about someone we believe we know, making a film of which we think we know the story of, but we soon realize, we know nothing about.
I caught up with Comencini via Zoom and loved talking to her about being a child of the Pinocchio era, the legacy of being her father’s daughter as well as what is needed now, to make the world right again. Or a little bit more livable, at least.
I loved your film because I’m one of those children who watched Pinocchio as a child. Watching that moment in time, explained, and from a different point of view felt very moving to me. I wanted to know if at any moment you were on the fence about making the film, since it’s so personal and you’re so “naked” in it?
Yes, absolutely yes. For most of my life, for many years, I thought I wanted to make this film and I never made it. It was a thought that accompanied me, at times not in a conscious way. It was something that I held deep inside, which was the root of my being, as a human being and as a filmmaker but never had the courage to make. However, from the moment I made the decision to make this film and started writing it, I felt like I’d walked across the fire and I couldn’t turn back. That’s when a kind of coolness took over and I felt convinced that I wanted to bring this project to light.
After shooting the film, did you feel during the editing process that you wanted to leave some things out or were you OK with showing all of yourself, and of your father, in the film?
The editing process was complicated and very interesting because I left out many scenes I’d shot, not for the reason you say, but because every scene, even minor, which didn’t focus on the father and daughter didn’t work. Everything that would go outside their relationship didn’t work in the film. I had a first editing which I didn’t feel was working and we went back to it with the two editors of the film and we tightened the focus on the two of them [father and daughter]. But I didn’t take anything out for fear of exposing myself because, in some ways, the film could not contain this doubt, or it wouldn’t have been made.
While I am in the film, it is really an homage to someone else. Yes, it featured me and the events in my life, but always in relation to the figure of my father.
Many fathers would have loved a child — a daughter — who would do for them what you’ve done for your dad. It’s truly moving.
Thank you!
This takes me into the next question. In the film, there is no mother present, no sisters, which of course was not the case in your life. There is only a story of a father and a daughter. Was it always like this or did it become more focused in the editing?
It was born this way, and was built like that also from a visual POV, with the lights and the way it was shot. This film was written as a collection of memories. It was a work that focused more on memory than on reality.
As we were talking before, I had this idea in mind for a long time. And the final push for making this film was when I realized that something like this, something so important for me, could go lost. It was memories I had lived with all my life, I took them for granted almost, and then, as time went on I realized they could go lost. That’s when I started to write, and lined up all the memories I had about my relationship with my father. And that’s when I started to understand that memory acts like a mise en scène, like a theater curtain, in that it shines the light on some things and does away with all the others. All these scenes came to mind filtered by my memory, not in a realistic way — I have three sisters, I had a mother and a house that was always filled with people and noisy. As a set, I even built a house that is the shell of a house, the memory of a childhood home, with a corridor, a child’s room and her father’s study.
At Cinema Made in Italy they are screening your film and your father’s film Bread, Love and Dreams (Pane, Amore e Fantasia). Do you like this kind of bookending, of showing both of your works?
As you may have understood from watching the film, it’s clear that for me one of the themes of my life is not feeling quite up to him — by comparison. It’s an important theme for Italy too, because I’ve personally had this feeling but the whole of Italy has had a generation of filmmakers who taught cinema to the world, almost, and anyway for a time they told the story of our country with incredible power — and I don’t feel quite up to par with that. For me, what you’re saying makes me shy.
For the audience, it’s a natural thing perhaps. Even more so, for an audience that may not have known your father’s films when they first came out, and now sees one, paired with your story about him. I find it very a great thing.
Let’s say it’s almost a fairy tale for me. I remember a verse from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, since we are in England, that says “Tis strange this tale…More strange than true.” It’s strange this dream, but it’s very coherent.
The last question is a bit of a wildcard, but I’d love to ask you. If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would you like to spend the evening with?
I think now, as much as it might be awful, I would like to invite those who govern, govern the US and other countries around the world, and try to make it through an entire evening. To talk, and to try to understand and try to relay, what I even tried to relay with my film. And that is that what we’ve been, and everything that the past generations have fought for, all that we take for granted now, and how could they think of jeopardizing it.
Maybe I’d like to dine with the Italian Prime Minister [Giorgia Meloni] — yeah, with her specifically — and try to reason about what is happening in the world. I firmly believe in diplomacy but it’s not used anymore. I’m someone who makes cinema but I think as filmmakers we can give another point of view and so I’d like an exchange between two women who occupy such different positions and have opinions that are so different. Because what is happening worries me.