Tale of Tales Is an Epic Vision of Cinema
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SALMA VINCENT TOBY JOHN C. HAYEK CASSEL JONES REILLY MATTEO GARRONE, RAI CINEMA, JEREMY THOMAS PRESENT IN ASSOCIATION WITH HANWAY FILMS, NEW SPARTA FILMS, LE PACTE A FILM BY MATTEO GARRONE MATTEO GARRONE RAI CINEMA JEREMY THOMAS PRESENT IN ASSOCIATION WITH HANWAY FILMS NEW SPARTA FILMS LE PACTE AN ITALY-FRANCE CO-PRODUCTION ARCHIMEDE AND LE PACTE WITH RAI CINEMA AND RECORDED PICTURE COMPANY WITH THE SUPPORT OF MINISTERO PER I BENI E LE ATTIVITÀ CULTURALI E DEL TURISMO - DIREZIONE GENERALE CINEMA AND EURIMAGES AND APULIA FILM COMMISSION SALMA HAYEK, VINCENT CASSEL, TOBY JONES AND JOHN C. REILLY A FILM BY MATTEO GARRONE INSPIRED BY INTERNATIONAL SALES INTERNATIONAL PRESS “IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI”BY GIAMBATTISTA BASILE HanWay Films Le Public Système Cinéma 24 Hanway St. WITH Alexis Delage-Toriel, Agnès Leroy & Elsa Leeb London W1T 1UH Tél. : 01 41 34 21 09 Tél. :+44 20 7290 0750 SHIRLEY HENDERSON, HAYLEY CARMICHAEL, BEBE CAVE, STACY MARTIN [email protected] www.hanwayfilms.com CHRISTIAN LEES, JONAH LEES, GUILLAUME DELAUNAY [email protected] WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF www.lepublicsystemecinema.fr HanWay Films in Cannes ALBA ROHRWACHER AND MASSIMO CECCHERINI 1st Floor, Residence Gray d’Albion, 4, rue de Serbes Le Public Système Cinéma à Cannes 06400 Cannes 29, rue Bivouac Napoléon - 06400 Cannes Tel: +33 4 93 99 3 626 / 786 Tél. : +33 7 86 23 90 85 SYNOPSIS nspired by the celebrated fairytales by Giambattista Basile, Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is an epic vision of cinema. I From the bitter quest of the Queen of Longtrellis (Salma Hayek) who forfeits the life of her husband (John C. Reilly), to two mysterious sisters who provoke the passion of the King of Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel), to the King of Highhills obsessed with a giant Flea (Toby Jones) leading to heartbreak for his young daughter, these stories weave the beautiful with the grotesque, creating a stunning and unique work of gothic imagination. TALE OF TALES by Giambattista Basile n Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile, Italy possesses the oldest, richest, the Brothers Grimm two centuries later, for some of their most famous works and most accomplished of popular fairytale books. including Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Donkeyskin, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. Through his taste for fantasy, Basile’s work, with its comic and Basile, Count of Torrone (cir. 1570-1632) was an academic, courtier and sentimental aspects and frequent touches of horror, is several centuries ahead soldier to various Italian princes, including the Doge of Venice. He drew of authors like Hans Christian Andersen, J.R.R. Tolkien, or even the Harry Potter Iinspiration from popular oral traditions in Crete, and especially Venice. saga. But the Neapolitan dialect in which Basile’s tales were written explains why they remained virtually unknown to the wider world for some 200 years. A seminal narrative monument, Basile’s work comprises 50 tales. The first tale acts as a framework in which a group of people tell each other 49 stories over five “This collection was for long the best and richest found in a nation. The author days. In delightful language, using a style that blends eroticism and violence, the had a special talent for collecting them, and what’s more, an intimate knowledge elegant and the grotesque, codes of honour and bawdiness, the author depicts of the dialect. The stories are told almost without a break, and the tone, at least in with consummate skill and extraordinary vigour an incredible gallery of moral the Neapolitan tales, is captured to perfection. We can, then, regard this collection portraits and social mores. Yet the sorcerers and ogres, kings and princesses, of 50 tales as the basis for many others.” dragons and enchanted animals in these stories have a naturalistic appearance, and Basile moves them through an accessible world, at once rich and poverty- Wilhelm Grimm (1837) stricken, one that is very physical and visceral. The backdrop for the tales is the everyday life of fully-fleshed men and women, in which extraordinary elements; the magical, the monstrous or miraculous, burst in. “The Tale of Tales is the dream of a Neapolitan Shakespeare, obsessed with all that is gruesome, with an insatiable appetite for sorcerers and ogres, fascinated Whilst other works written after the Decameron were made up of stories that by convoluted and grotesque images, in which crudeness merges with the could be called fairytales, such as The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, Tale of Tales sublime.” is the first in which all the stories are fairytales. Moreover, Basile was the first writer to succeed in perfectly reproducing oral intonations. Tale of Tales inspired Italo Calvino DIRECTOR’S NOTES The choice of Basile work; we really didn’t add anything. At the end of a long selection process, once I chose to tackle the universe of Basile because in his tales, I found that blend we had chosen and created the connections between the tales, we realized to our between the real and fantastic which has always characterized my artistic endeavors. great surprise that we had followed an invisible but very strong thread that linked The stories recounted in The Tale of Tales cover all of life’s opposites: the ordinary them. Actually, it involved three stories about women, each at a different age in and the extraordinary, the magical and the everyday, the regal and the obscene, life. But what struck us even more was the capacity of these tales to capture some the straightforward and the artificial, the sublime and the filthy, the terrible and contemporary obsessions: the powerful desire for youth and beauty (which Basile the tender, scraps of mythology and torrents of popular wisdom. The tales recount even describes in a hyper-realistic manner, offering a satire on today’s cosmetic human feelings pushed to the extreme. surgery, four centuries ahead of his time), the obsession of a mother who would do anything to have a son, the conflict between the generations, and the violence The approach to the tales: the real and the fantastical that a girl must deal with to become adult. From the first reading of the 50 tales which make up the book, myself and my fellow screenwriters faced numerous choices in choosing the stories that we liked most The language of the film and then making them credible, concrete, as if we were seeing them take place We chose English, beyond mere production reasons (given that it’s a film with an before our eyes. Our approach was to search for something powerful, physical, international cast), but because that language is the way to make The Tale of Tales, shared and authentic, even in the stories in which the imagination was the most this book on which some of the most famous fairytales in the world are based, fired-up. In Basile’s work, there’s a great pleasure in the narrative, and that should accessible to the widest possible audience. The imagination of these tales goes also be a prerogative of cinema. beyond any limit, and in that respect Basile is a universal author. What’s more, the use of English means you don’t immediately identify the landscapes which form My previous films have been based on true stories, which I transformed to the the backdrop of our story, and that avoids fixing the characters in a particular limits of an almost fantasy dimension. Here, we did the journey in the opposite dialectal tone. direction. We were inspired by fabulous situations that were brought on to a realistic basis through a process of subtraction, so the spectator can at each moment feel Faithfulness and betrayal involved in the story, and become immersed in the adventures of our characters. Using English was not the only “betrayal”; we took some other liberties. But the rest is in the very nature of the fairytale, which is continually translated and reinterpreted. Modernity of the tales We found so many versions of the same stories. You can never be faithful to a tale: This process of subtraction had no effect whatsoever on the themes and the each time you tell it to a child so they go off to sleep, something changes. What fundamental sentiments in the book, which still show all their surprising modernity. we absolutely didn’t want to betray, what we tried to keep intact, was the spirit, We were the first to be amazed by this. The horror, for example, is all there in Basile’s that evocative power of the Tales, which has fed the universal imagination through the centuries, influencing writers like Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. And the come through and can already be felt in my previous work: in The Embalmer and language in which we wanted to transpose it was above all the cinematographic in First Love, the horror notes can already be clearly heard; in Reality, the fairytale language – a language which can have its own specific richness, like that which we mood inspires the stories as much as the style; and even in Gomorrah, beyond find in Basile’s work. If there can be a fantastic version of Shakespeare’s Tempest the realism of the situations, the tone of some episodes is that of a genuine dark rewritten in Neapolitan by Eduardo de Filippo, we thought perhaps there could be fable. When you think about it, The Embalmer – which also has some grotesque a Basile in English. And let’s not forget that anyone who reads Basile today, even and poignant aspects – actually resemble one of Basile’s tales: “Once upon a time in Italy, reads the dual version, with the original text opposite the translation.