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| The Italians |
Opening in US cinemas on Friday 11 April, The Italians is a lively family comedy full of big personalities, not least Angelina, the matriarch, who is played by director Michelle Danner. Michelle and I have spoken in the past, about the drama Miranda’s Victim which she made with Abigail Breslin – who also appear in this film – so she was keen to reconnect and tell me what she’s been up to since then.
“After Miranda's Victim, I did The Italians,” she tells me. “And after The Italians, I went to Italy, to Puglia, to do a movie called Under The Stars about romance with Toni Collette, Andy Garcia, Alex Pettyfer, Eva De Dominici and lots of wonderful actors. I'm in post for that. And hopefully I'm preparing for another movie right now that I'm going to shoot in June.”
She always manages to find good actors, I note.
“I do well with them, certainly in the sense that they want to work with me again. Andy Garcia did Miranda's Victim. He came to Italy. Now, this new movie that I'm going to do, it's a romcom about astrology. It's very, very cute about faith. And I have some of the same actors that want to work with me again. Partly, I think, it’s because I like to create an environment on set that is very calm. Everybody notices how calm I am. I think the best creativity comes from that. Because you want to be able to create an atmosphere where actors can take risks, they can try things, they can mess up, whatever. It doesn't matter as long as they play, and that's the fun of it. That's why everybody got into it to begin with, including me – for a chance to play. And so that's the environment that I like to create when I'm on set with everybody. It's a very, very productive environment of letting go and having fun and trying things.”
What's the secret to staying calm like that? Most directors are always frantic about running out of time.
“I know. I'm not like that at all. You know, I have an idea of how I'm going to do it. It has to do with, in your head, a certain vision that you have of what you want to do. For every movie that I've done, I've had a reason why I wanted to do it. So every day, it just comes into me why I wanted to do it in the first place. And I think that when I breathe into the why, it creates a lot of calmness in me.
“I'm a calm person normally. You know, I try. Well, it's not true. I'm known to be tempestuous and I have a stormy side to me. But I have a part of me that can be very calm. And I think certainly if you are at the helm of the ship, if you're the captain and you're running around and screaming, it creates a certain tension. I've been on those sets. I just feel like, ‘Why is it that you have to put people through that? That's just not very nice.’ So I try to do it a little differently and with a little more harmony, and I feel like I get results like that.”
In terms of choices, does she try to mix it up a bit?
“Very much so. You know, one of the directors that I look up to is Ang Lee. Ang Lee works across different genres. As a matter of fact, we're going to Cannes this year, my son and I. We had that pleasure in the year that Life Of Pi came out. So we were in the breakfast room, and the breakfast room was empty. It was about 11 o'clock in the morning and Ang Lee was there having breakfast. And so I said to my son Nicholas, who at the time was 9-years-old, I said ‘Look, we just saw the Life Of Pi. This is the director.’ And so he went up to him and he started to talk to him and he engaged Ang Lee for 45 minutes at 11 o'clock in the morning, talking to him very specifically about moments in the movie that he loved. And Ang Lee, at the end of it, looked at me, and he said ‘Your son is going to be a writer/director.
“And it so happened, out of all the people to run into in Cannes, that it should be Ang Lee, who I admire because he embraces and is attracted, as I am, to different genres. I can direct, I feel, a comedy or an intense drama or a biopic or an adventure. I'm attached to doing a sci-fi thriller called Helios. We have a lot of authentic space companies on board, including Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, with Michoud at NASA for 12 days. It's a very exciting project about sun flares destroying the Earth.
“I'm always attracted to things that are timely, something that could happen. Something that has never been said before, which is hard to find. You can imagine everything's been done and said. But I always tell my students – because I teach acting – I say, ‘But you haven't done it. Yes, it might have been done, but you haven't done it.’
“It's certainly pleasurable and fun to shoot comedy. If you're doing a comedic scene, you're behind the monitor and you're smiling, you're laughing, you know, sometimes you're belly laughing and trying to be quiet. But when we did Miranda's Victim, the energy on the set was very light, even though it was tough subject matter. We didn't have that heaviness on set, not at all. We were just all coming together with the joy of telling an important story that had never been told.
“When you're editing it is fun to be editing a comedy. It really is. But that's not to say that I'm not going to be doing dramas, of course. I have a few more movies in me. After that I'm going to support my son because he's writing and directing a lot, and I'm going to be helping him, which will be interesting because then the vision will not so much be on me. I think I'll always have a project or two that I will direct, but he's been such a rock and such a help. And of course, we've all joked that this is film school, being on set with me. It’s the best film school he could get because there's nothing like hands on experience.
“There was this scene with Lainie Kazan, in the nursing home. We did three takes, and Lainie was wonderful. It was an emotional scene. Of course, it brought up something for me. I tell my students, you can never do a scene with a mother or a father and not let it bring something up for you, because you bring up your own mother. And my mother passed away in the last few years. So my son comes in after we do the third take, and he says nothing, he just puts his hand on his heart and he looks at me with tears in his eyes. So, you know, I'll never forget that he's been a rock. He's been an incredible help and I’m grateful, not only to him, but to everybody. I work with my sisters. My sisters produce, and they're very helpful, and we're all a family, you know? So I made a movie about family and the Italians and we're family. But you could say that for every movie that you go into and work on: it's a family. You create a family for that moment.
“My mother was Italian, but this family is Italian American. My mother was from Milano, from the north of Italy, so my whole childhood, I went to vacation in Italy. The Italians that live in the north and the in the south, you know, they have two different philosophies. I never quite could muster the courage myself to bring home anybody to meet my family. My dad was very mellow, but my mother was tempestuous and fiery. You never quite knew when the spaghetti was going to fly, but you knew at some point it was going to fly. So, you know, the son in this movie is quite brave. I could identify with that.”
Was it fun getting to play the mother then in that situation?
“It was. You know, I felt I really understood it. I channeled not only my mother, but my grandmother, my great grandmother and my sister. It was an amalgamation of all those people in the family.
“The question always asked is ‘What was the challenge?’ It was easy. It was really well organised. I worked with the same DP, I worked with my production designer, costume design. My first AD, who's wonderful. My editor. So this group of people that I adore, that I work with, and everybody's happy to see each other. I make sure everybody gets great catering, you know, whatever their preferences are. I make sure everybody's well taken care of. And we come together and we see each other and we're creative for a certain period of time. And it was fun. It was a great, great shoot.
We shot very little. We shot, I think, 18 days. We were ten days in the house, then we went to this church in Santa Monica. So, you know, before Covid you couldn't get a permit on this church. And I said to them, ‘It's a little indie movie.’ And because it was the strike, we had more trailers and trucks, so it looked like a bigger movie. And the priest comes up to me. I mean, we tested his charitable side, and he's like, ‘I thought you told me this was a little movie.’ I'm like, ‘Yes, but, you know.’ And then one of the crew members broke a candelabra, and we were freaking out. We had to try and shoot everything in the church because we thought ‘They'll never let us back in this church again, not even to pray.’ And we tried to fix the candelabra. Anyway, we were in the church. We were in a soundstage. We were an apartment in Brentwood. Those were our locations.”
We talk about the actors.
“ I enjoyed all my movies with Rob Estes. I’ve know him so long, it makes me so old. We did a play here in LA, The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams, and we ran for almost a year, and we won a lot of awards. A lot of people came to see it, and it was a hoot. We had a lot of fun doing it and we stayed friends. So all my scenes with him, I just felt, you know, this relationship with him. People have come up to me at film festivals and said ‘Are you guys married in real life?’” She laughs, shaking her head. “But we have this connection. And, you know, I love Lainie Kazan. I mean, to me, she is a legend. I love working with her.
“This young actress, Olivia Lucardi, who plays the girl that Angelina wants to set her son up with – with that laugh that she had, she walked on set and she gave us all like a blood transfusion. I'm not kidding. She had so much energy. I had seen her the year before in a TV show called Channel Zero. My son showed it to me. You have to understand that my son has shown me every single horror movie on the face of the Earth. I go to movie theatre all the time. We see everything. So this was Channel Zero. She was the lead in season three, and I thought to myself, not knowing that I was going to cast her ever, but looking at her work, I thought immediately ‘What a talented actress!’ I love them all.
“Abigail and I had just a great relationship. I think that whether you know the actor or you don't know the actor, you have to establish some trust. You know, for instance, with the wonderful Toni Collette, that moment came on day two. She didn't know me. She has jet lag when she walks on the set, so it takes a little moment to find the way in. But with Abigail in The Italians, I already have her, so I could immediately get in there and we could talk about the scene and try things. So that was fun. And she's just lovely. It's just wonderful to work with her again. And she's wonderful in the movie.”
There’s also a lot of wonderful food in the film. What became of it all?
She laughs. “There was nothing left because the actors ate it. You know, I had a lot of Italians in this movie. My production designer, Alessandra Manias, she prepared everything. And the delicious recipes! You never get this kind of cuisine on a movie set. But that was part of it. I wanted people to go hug their families if they had to forgive somebody, because the movie is very much about forgiveness, and go and eat a great Italian meal, you know, their favorite foods. That was the point.”
It's sometimes a challenge for actors, I point out, if they're doing multiple takes and they have to be eating in every scene.
“You have to put little morsels in your mouth,” she advises. “As a matter of fact, let's say you have a steak. If you're very careful, chewing a steak, you can take tiny little bites. It's an art to eat in front of the camera, absolutely.”
In the end, The Italians was a very personal project for her.
“I always say, as insane as my family was, and dysfunctional and crazy and all over the place, at the end of the day – and I say this to my kids – you know, every holiday we would go home to spend with my mother and my sisters and of course, there's always stuff, when you have a big family with big personality, there's always things. But I always said to my two boys, I said to them, ‘Listen, no matter how crazy it's going to get, at the core of it, what makes it work is that we really love each other deep. And love takes care of everything.’ And it does. The spaghetti flies for sure, but at the end of the day, there's this love that keeps it together. That's very much what I wanted to say in this movie.”
