05/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: The director chatted to us about the universal nature of the punk rock scene, provincial cities and how to shoot a concert scene

We met with Niccolò Falsetti, the director behind Margins [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Niccolò Falsetti
film profile], the only Italian title competing in the International Film Critics’ Week sidebar of the 79th Venice Film Festival, to talk about the universal nature of the punk rock scene, provincial cities and how to shoot a concert scene.

Cineuropa: I imagine the film’s freshness comes from the fact that you’ve recounted your own experience.
Niccolò Falsetti: Life never has moments of pure tragedy or pure comedy. It’s always a messy combination of both. It would be impossible for me to make another personal film like this one: about my own city and the particular scene I come from. But it’s important to make films about things we’re familiar with, even if it’s a sci-fi film; you have to draw from what you have. This is especially true for the writing phase: you tap into the humanity around you, the people you know or you’ve crossed paths with in your life, otherwise it’s hard to make up. Personality types, characters, nuances. When it came to this film, all I needed to do was remember.

There’s a list of bands in the closing credits. Are you in contact with all of them?
Bands which were part of the punk genre’s story in Italy and worldwide. They’re our idols. We wanted the source of the sound which the characters and the audience listen to to always come from on stage, rather than being extradiegetic – from a TV, a radio or headphones. It was the soundtrack of our characters’ lives. So, in the writing phase, we said to one another: let’s contact these bands so that we can include their songs. Negazione, Kina… they all responded positively. We all support one another in the punk world! 

And it’s universal, it goes beyond borders.
That was the intention. The more we got into the specifics, the more we found we were telling a story which many people could identify with. It’s a film where conflicts are low-intensity; we went in with a magnifying glass and savoured the details, with music as our driving force. We’ve had a band for 17 years and when we held a concert in Bern, in the rich lands of Switzerland, we met kids who were drifting around trying to find their place; they were experiencing the same unease, the same desire we felt to turn the world upside down, to make it different, in line with our requirements. It’s an attitude which my generation has started to dismantle. But it’s a responsibility which we should seize hold of, because after the G8 in Genoa, solidarity and determination to take a stand together on political and social causes, has started to wane. 

Punk is also a pretext to talk about the provinces and the “short-circuit” that’s created vis-à-vis those who feel “on the margins”.
We started out with our memories of what we did in Grosseto, going out and ruining friends’ birthday parties, playing in beach resorts, disused nightclubs, restaurants with checked tablecloths and people who listen to you while eating tortelloni. We thought it might be fun to highlight the contrast between punk and this province. Ridiculing your city is a declaration of love. John Lydon from the Sex Pistols at the time of God Save the Queen explained that you don’t write a song like that because you hate England, you write it because you love it. Tommaso Renzoni, who wrote the final draft of the screenplay with us, chastised us for caring too much about our characters. What we needed to do was make them follow all the way through on their choices and allow them to get hurt.

Did you think of other films which have explored these themes during the writing process, such as The Commitments, for example?
Of course. We thought about lots of them: films about punk culture and films about music more generally. To mention The Commitments is a real honour for us; meanwhile, one of Margins’s reference points from a structural perspective was definitely The Full Monty, where they’re trying to organise a male striptease rather than a concert.

A British school of filmmaking which explores tragic situations, such as unemployment, with clear comic tones, like Ken Loach’s movies.
I’d like to make entertaining films. We Italians have gone through school with both neorealism and “Italian-style comedy”. My aim is to not bore the people I work with and to not make cinema audiences yawn. One of my British references is This Is England [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a film which changed my life. And the French movie L’odio, whose subject is anything but light-hearted but it’s explored with humour.

The concert scene is especially realistic. How did you shoot it?
In the only way possible: by organising a real concert. We were in the middle of the pandemic and the production team were a little bit worried. There were some who suggested we should add the extras in digitally or teach them how to mosh. In the end, we called a group from Florence called Iena, and Payback, and friends from Florence, Rome, Bologna, Modena, Genoa and Pisa all turned up.

(Translated from Italian)