Marco D’Amore: “That volcano that boils inside me”

Marco D’amore celebrates 40 years (June 12, ed) and 25 career with a film, a book and the last act of Gomorrah.

How does it feel in the blender?
«Said this way it really looks like a vortex, in reality it is only an apparent blender, the result of coincidences that testify to very different works done in different periods. One in the field of writing, the other in acting and the last which is really a circle of professions ».

The film, whose shooting ended before the first lockdown, is the thriller Security – directed by Peter Chelsom, from the novel by Stephen Amidon – set in a winter Forte Dei Marmi (produced by Indiana and Vision), available on Sky and Now from 7 June; the novel is Vesuvio, written together with Francesco Ghiaccio and now in bookstores for De Agostini. The last season of Gomorrah it is the fifth, that of the final greeting to Ciro Di Marzio. «Of this series sam the artistic director and the director of six out of 10 episodes, as well as being the protagonist », he explains from a Roman taxi. “And then we must also take into account the very high expectation, the desire that viewers from all over the world have around this last season. Finally, it is very difficult to take up the baton of those who, before me, have told in a superb way ».

How do you face a challenge like this?
“With so much wisdom but also with a shiver of unconsciousness.”

What is Vesuvius for you?
«A biological element that connotes my territory, which flows with its fluid under our earth, under our feet, which conditions the climate, but much more generally it is a danger. And the reason why a community decides to develop around a danger is very interesting, it connotes it even in its most violent ways, even in its most heated passions. Hence the title of our novel, a passionate, dreamlike and fabulous vision of life. Vision that tickles our imagination in the same way that this huge good monster does that we hope will continue to rest and live with us peacefully ».

The protagonists of the novel are Federico and Susy, they are thirteen years old and are the sons of bosses.
«It comes close to the idea of ​​a fairy tale that Sergio Leone had. When he talked about his films he said: “the story is the means to tell them”. But not the fairy tale that has picturesque sceneries as its background, but reality. Sometimes even raw, so raw as to push the characters to build hyperbole, fantastic but which give hope ».

Are there crazy motorbike rides, a way to tell about adolescence or an unchanging approach to life?
«It is part of the wickedness with which those years of youth are lived. But those races were used to tell us, through the point of view of two children, crime like a prank, like a game, until you look into her eyes and you realize how dangerous it is ».

How do you protect yourself from crime, or even better from not being able to decide?
«You must always defend yourself from who decides for you who you are to be. Here the life of Susy and Federico seems to be marked by two criminal families who have decided for them, but more generally it concerns a contemporary vision of life in which today it is more difficult to understand and understand different sexual orientations, political, religious, and above all we want to impose on young people that they have to be in a certain way or have to become a certain way. But when boys should be left free, they should be given the opportunity to grow and become the men and women they want to be ”.

It’s a children’s book, but who would you read it to?
«Obviously it would be nice if teenagers came across this story, but we wrote it as we put in the opening of the book “for anyone with a volcano inside that doesn’t want to go out”. And the volcanoes have them all inside, at any age and at any latitude in the world ».

Its today for what do you turn on?
“Unfortunately, I have a very strong connection to that element, in the sense that I often feel it bubbling inside, I also feel a frenzy for many things that don’t suit me, sometimes I would like to react with much more vehemence but I always look for a way to a little more rational, more democratic, because I believe it is the only way to live together. Come to meet and understand each other ».

Security Forte dei Marmi, on the other hand, is set in winter in a completely different context.
“I enjoyed getting away from the perspective of the pleasant holiday resort, observing it very closely in a moment of great solitude, cold, darkness, fog, therefore unusual compared to the iconography of the place. This film is anything but what it seems, it offers a different vision of things, but it needs an investigation that is what my character does, above all an emotional investigation that breaks a security that is not only that of the fortresses, of the cameras ” .

What does the word security mean?
«It has always meant the possibility of being able to be helped even by those I did not know, and obviously to render you the same service. To be able to be welcomed into a world in which I was a stranger, to be able to receive something unexpected and positive from someone, this made me feel sure that I was living in a world in which I recognized myself, now there is a drift of this term that acts in the opposite way, that is, it makes life considered as a small place in which to close oneself without seeking exchanges, encounters or the diversity of others which is instead the only moment in which existences can be enriched. So from a certain point on this term, more than reassuring me, started to frighten me ».

And for a year and a half the Covid emergency has also changed our habits, making us all a little more insecure
«Sometimes a book, a film, a show have the ability to intercept moments with a crazy foresight. We finished shooting before the very first lockdown and the film ends with an incredible and hallucinating consideration on the risk of locking yourself up at home, not going out, not meeting anyone anymore. These words, listened to after editing and after the lockdown, made me shiver and I really think this is a universal message, an appeal to human beings to come back to meet each other, to no longer be afraid of each other, not to be afraid of each other. be afraid of diversity “.

On 12 June he turns 40
“I have always had a great respect for old age. I’d like to be a wise old man someday. ‘