10/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: The Italian director chatted with us about her casting choices, her work on the vernacular within the film and her sources of inspiration

We met with Susanna Nicchiarelli at Venice’s Tennis Club, on the Lido. Her latest film Chiara [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Susanna Nicchiarelli
film profile] is competing in the Venice Film Festival and recounts the life of Saint Clare, played here by Margherita Mazzucco.

Cineuropa: What made you decide to tell the story of Saint Clare at this point in time?
Susanna Nicchiarelli: I actually came across Chiara [Clare] on 7 March 2020. They were about to shut down the country and they’d already closed the schools. I took my children to see Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi. We were all alone, there was a strange atmosphere... I’ve always been fascinated by Saint Francis, I’m Umbrian myself. His message is so radical, and the fact he chose poverty is so striking, even if you’re not a believer. I knew that Clare had been by his side, but in films about Saint Francis, like the one by Franco Zeffirelli [Brother Sun, Sister Moon], Clare doesn’t appear very often. You see her more in Liliana Cavani’s movie [Francesco]. It intrigued me, and I bought a couple of books about her. That’s how I discovered that there’s a reading of the saint by this historian called Chiara Frugoni, who spent years working on a historiography that’s completely different from the official version of her life. […] Clara wanted to follow Francis’ example. When I realised there was this discrepancy between the official historiography and the true story, I was intrigued. This period coincided with the first lockdown; we were locked up at home. There was something about this medieval tale, with its fears, illnesses and isolation, that seemed to speak to the modern-day. I was struck by the urgency and radicality of the story, and her decision to live communally, alongside the ill, in an extremely dangerous world. I realised that medieval times were far more similar to our own – especially at that particular moment in time – than we might believe. A rethinking of the concept of community, life as part of a group, was also at the heart of their ideas, as well as a radical critique of society. I felt that these themes were closely linked to today’s world.

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Which acting qualities did you seek out for the roles of Francis and Clare?
First of all, after all my reading, I immediately decided to pay attention to age. In so many films about Saint Francis, he’s always an adult, much like Clare who is always thirty-five… But they were kids. She was 18 years old; he was twelve years older than her, but he was still essentially a boy. I thought it was crucial to find actors who were the same age as the characters whose story we were telling. It would make it more realistic. I continued along these lines, and also added a level of modernity to Andrea [Carpenzano] and Margherita’s [Mazzucco] acting approach. I thought it would bring us far closer to the story in question.

In terms of naturalness, how did you work on the vernacular aspect of the language, given that it seems to come so naturally to your actors? First-time actors could easily have sounded ridiculous...
That’s how the vernacular works. Not only has Francis always been depicted with different ages, he’s also always been dubbed and, for one reason or another, has always spoken standard Italian or dubbed Italian, a language from the hyperuranion. I went for the vernacular to bring them closer to us. At that time, Italian didn’t exist, dialects did. Dialect is a way – I’m thinking, for example, about the Franciscan brothers in The Hawks and the Sparrows – of conveying that fragility, that truth. That’s why I used the vernacular like a dialect, like a funny language which is endearing, childlike, a way for them not to speak like printed books… [..] The kids did really well, they learned this language amongst themselves, as if it were a code. They weren’t restricted, they were free to play with words.

You mentioned Giotto at the beginning of our conversation. What influence did medieval iconography have on Crystel Fournier’s photography?
We definitely worked on images from the era, for Clare’s fantasies too. Paintings and frescoes were used as reference points. Directness was undoubtedly part of the film’s language. Crystel’s use of light is very straightforward and I’m pleased about that. We didn’t use much light, but we worked continuously in the film’s mise en scene. It’s a dark medieval setting, lit by candlelight, but we managed to retrieve the colours we needed through the film’s set design and costumes, which hark back to the iconography of the time. The film’s format [cinemascope] was another important decision. It forced us to tell Clare’s story with people around her, and nature … We were always looking for the metaphysical while shooting churches and fields, [and to convey] man’s smaller side, as well as the choral and communal dimension.

(Translated from Italian)