Director Ivano De Matteo took the best-selling book The Dinner by Dutch author Herman Koch and made it even better.
Listening to the recording of my interview with director Ivano De Matteo brought back a happy memory. Every interview I’ve done, every single one has been a pleasure. I have done enough now to say with some authority that Italian filmmakers are for the most part unassuming, kind, and overall delightful people, but Ivano De Matteo was just a little bit extra delightful. He’s got an infectious laugh and a likeability that made me fall absolutely in love with him.
When I talk about the new generation of Italian filmmakers and how admire them, I am thinking of directors like Ivano De Matteo, who calls what he and his peers are doing a kind of “neo-neo realism” (love that).
I talked with De Matteo about his film, I Nostri Ragazzi, the English title, The Dinner, last summer when it screened at New York’s Lincoln Center for Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, and the film has just now become available to US audiences, but it’s world premier was at the Venice Film Festival in the Giornate Degli Autori or “Venice Days” section.
The Dinner stars Alessandro Gassman, Barbora Bobulova, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and my favorite, Luigi Lo Cascio, as two couples who don’t particularly like each other but go out to dinner together once a month because they are family. Such an amazing cast; did he picture these actors when he was writing the screenplay?”
“When we are writing a script we already have actors in mind; if they are unavailable we go back to the script and rework it”, says De Matteo. In this case, the actors couldn’t have personified the characters any better had the book’s author, Herman Koch, chosen them himself.
But Koch’s book is so dark, and Americans found it a little too much so, so I told De Matteo that I felt that he’d made it a little lighter, not in weight, but in appearance, and made the characters seem more human.
“Those are actually very loaded terms”, said De Matteo. “I gave more light to the film, and in that sense I made it less dark, but in that sense it made it even more disturbing (the contrast)”.
“In the book, the main character is a high school teacher that is sick, he’s got a mental disorder, and is on medication. When we were reading the book, we decided to remove that one element, and by removing that one element we removed the justification (for his actions).”
As long as that justification is there, anything could happen, mass murders, anything. Without that justification it becomes something that anyone could do, you and I could do.
He laughed hard and reminded me that it could happen to me too. (He saw right through me – awkward!)
I was a big fan of Koch’s The Dinner, so I was surprised and delighted to find a movie that actually improved upon the book. In the book, a major part of the dialogue takes place over the course of one unpleasant evening, but De Matteo’s movie’s more natural plot progression and the changing settings in the movie make it less claustrophobic. De Matteo ultimately “fixes” all the problems of the book, makes it more human and less excessively theatrical.
“It would have been very difficult for me to squeeze it all into that one dinner”, said De Matteo. “And I also decided to film it a different way than in the book. I created a prologue with an element that is not in the book.”
And so I wanted to know; why did he decide to add that part?
‘Because I’m a writer!” he laughed. (Oh yeah, duh. And he’s a good one, too)
Because of my preoccupation for accountability, I asked De Matteo. “Who’s to blame for all this? The parents? Technology? Were the kids just bad seeds?”
“It’s a great question because my thinking is that there is no one guilty party; I don’t want to point my finger at this one or that one.”
And if he (heaven forbid) ever found himself in the same situation with his own kids?
“It’s a decision that you could only make in the heat of the moment, but would be great to be like Gassman’s character”, said De Matteo, “So that everybody in the world would say, ‘he’s such a good person’.” (More laughing; he’s kidding).
This is a film that you don’t want to miss, and luckily for us Americans, there’s no reason to. The Dinner is now available on VOD (for example, Time Warner On Demand), and on iTunes. The DVD will be available from Film Movement on November 24.
You can also pre-order it on Amazon.com.
I Love Italian Everything 