Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino • Directors of Luce (2024)

12/08/2024 - The directing duo talks to Cineuropa about the film's spectacular lead and the archetypal figure she plays

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Cineuropa: “Luce” means “light” in Italian, yet the film opens with a black screen and a pounding noise. Can you talk me through the decision to set up Luce in this way?
Luca Bellino: Opening scenes are very important for us: we want to put everything in it at once. Here, you see black and everything is sound; there is no action, yet there is some real action behind it – she’s nailing the wardrobe in her room – but it can also remind you of factory sounds, or a metaphorical representation of an obsession, when you have something on your mind so persistently it goes “Knock! Knock! Knock!”

Why did you decide not to specify where the film is set? I was trying to figure it out based on the dialects spoken.
Silvia Luzi: It’s the South of Italy, but a very particular South. In the imaginary, the South is sunny, it’s music, it's the sea, but here we have mountains, coldness, and an industrial small town. It has no name but it’s one of the three places in Italy with leather factories that supply fashion brands like Gucci and Prada. But also the main character doesn’t have a name.

LB: As for the dialect, it’s not the typical Neapolitan one, but a very Ancient dialect in that part of Italy which is similar to Neapolitan, it’s quite old and some of its expressions are very outdated. The workers there use it and they have their own word for the job that doesn’t exist elsewhere, it’s not an Italian word, nor a Neapolitan word, but its own thing that resembles the sound of nailing. Even though they don’t actually nail anything!

How did you write the film’s dialogues then? And the phone conversations that make up most of the dialogue?
LB: Yes, the voice on the phone isn't any particular Italian dialect, but a mix of all the dialects spoken in prison. When you spend 20 years in prison, your dialect changes.

SL: Aside from Marianna [Fontana], everyone else in the film are real people: the workers are real workers, the family is a real family. We also visited jails for months, talked to prisoners, listened to them, trying to understand their feelings, their sadness, their desire to be closer. We had mock phone-calls with them and with the help of their words, we wrote the lines of the father.

I wanted to ask you about the social fabric of the film and the role of the family. They are in the periphery of the main character and her absent father. Why was it important to include them?
LB: It was important for Marianna actually. On the one hand, she actually worked in that factory for three months with the workers, who didn’t know her: she was undercover. For Marianna, it was very important to feel the others.

SL: And for us, to have the family as a sort of choir, like in a church. The social environment, the family, the factory, all of that forms this choir around the main character. All three parts are a sort of jail, if you want: the factory, the family, the actual jail. In these three cases, you become something else, you cannot be yourself anymore.

LB: Everything appears very real [in the film], but in our idea, the film had to be in her head. We needed to feel the oppression she is surrounded by, and we hope that the audience can enter in her headspace and feel this pressure, too.

Luce stays with Marianna at all times and although it is difficult to read her, it is very easy to feel her. There’s something very specific about her acting that I can’t seem to put my finger on.
SL: We worked on a micro-level: micro-feeling, micro-sensation, micro-expressions. One can always do something more expressive, but since the character is experiencing internal turmoil that’s not going to explode, her face has to become an expression of it. We look for acting that is “a line under”, to tone it down. Also, when she cries, she sheds a single tear!

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