This article is published in number 49 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 30, 2021
“I am happy with this call at this moment”, begins Maria Pia Calzone. “I’m in the car waiting for my son to leave school, but luckily Dad is over, for heaven’s sake …”. She is quiet, almost restrained, and then – in the course of our long, good chat – she will let go, let go of the brakes. Which is what happens to his character in I don’t pay you, the comedy by Eduardo De Filippo now adapted for TV with a cultured-popular attitude by Edoardo De Angelis. Calzone – lots of cinema and theater, then «instant icon» with Donna Imma di Gomorrah – The series, therefore a career between arthouse and pop films (Veiled Naples di Ozpetek, Blessed madness of Verdone, Sirens di Marengo) – is Concetta, the feignedly submissive wife and actually head of the family “without her knowledge” of Ferdinando / Sergio Castellitto, a man who dares to gamble and domestic balance.
The film is beautiful, how was the set?
“I’ll just tell you that one day I arrive and find a donkey in the fourth-floor apartment where we were shooting. Reading the script, I thought it would be a special effect: instead it was really there, demonstrating that it was a truly unconventional work, we were free to experiment ».
Do Eduardo’s sacred words, paradoxically, leave more freedom?
«Naples, in reality, jealously guards its own tradition, experimentation always causes a great leap of the heart. If we experiment with Shakespeare according to contemporary languages, there is more resistance on De Filippo, perhaps because we met Eduardo, we saw him recite his own works. But his texts lend themselves to a freer vision: Edoardo De Angelis puts himself at the service of tradition and does it with courage ».
Concetta looks like a contemporary woman.
“It was the first time I confronted Eduardo, I never did it even in the theater because I was not born in Naples, I had this modesty of the language … I don’t pay you, which is perhaps the purest of his comedies, I had to find the figure of this woman who, like all of Eduardo’s, has the strength of the matriarchal culture of the Kingdom of Naples. Finding the right balance worried me, then one day I enter the room where Edoardo was and he says to me: “But you are very sweet!”. It was still the first days of the set, I was looking for the measure with the text, and perhaps I had finally found a way to be the figure that acts as a glue, that holds everything together with discretion ».
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