Igort: "American cinema mythologizes the mafia, I ask questions"

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(1958, Cagliari, Italy) Comic book author, illustrator, musician, screenwriter, reporter, film director ... Five is the perfect number (Salamandra), his graphic novel about an old mafia hitman, is now out in Spain.

You who are so versatile, how do you define yourself? I am a storyteller, I tell stories, from morning to night. Then things are condensed and become a film, a book, a record ... In my studio I have a computer on which I am now writing a script, next to it there is a microphone with which I am recording a new record and that I also use to dub a documentary, next to it is a Fender Stratocaster guitar that I use to play, behind is my drawing table ... I happily go into my studio every day and play with one language or another. And then a novel comes out, a record, a film, a comic ... Now he publishes in Spain 'Cinco es el Número PERFECT', a graphic novel about a hitman from the Camorra, a guy with many dead behind him. And yet it is inevitable not to feel empathy for him ... What he tells me is a great compliment. This novel tells the story of a hitman from the Camorra, a worker of death. But it is also the story of a rebirth: a person who has lived his entire existence respecting his ideas and values, values ​​made of death, money and violence, and that when he is calm, when he lives dedicated to his son and preparing for a species retirement, he realizes as a result of a tragedy that he has not understood anything about anything and that perhaps he could have had another life. I understand that you feel empathy for the pain of that old man who trembles, who does not know if he will have the strength to do what he wants to do. Perhaps the key to your comic is that it portrays the person behind the mobster, right? For starters, Peppino is a second-tier mobster, he's not a kingpin. And of course, I am interested in telling human beings, people, that is the job of a storyteller. I wanted to tell a person about whom we know his past and present, acts of violence and death and actions that are completely reprehensible. I liked the idea of ​​a little man famous for his ferocity who suddenly, when he thinks that almost nothing can happen to him anymore and that he is practically retired, he has to get back on the track and see how much strength he has. Peppino is a hit man but he has strong values, a code of honor. It is very different from the rowdies of today, right? Absolutely. This is a twilight story, it tells of the passage from the old Camorra that was governed by old codes to the new Camorra, which began in the 80s. This story is set in the mid-70s and already lets us glimpse how the new generations of Brawlers would wear a white collar and give this type of crime a facelift, make it more organized. We saw it later with the NCO, the New Organized Camorra of Raffaele Cutolo, the theorist of this corporate version of organized crime. Peppino is an old-fashioned mobster. When his son, who has succeeded him as a hitman, is going to commit a murder, he tells him, for example, that he has to dress and comb well to go kill ... Yes. And he is also very religious, very devoted to the Madonna dell ' Arco ... It is an anthropological observation that many of the bosses of the Mafia and Camorra are extremely religious and devout, and apply a very personal and highly debatable vision to religious precepts. But that dimension exists, and it is very deep and ingrained in southern Italy. 'Five is the perfect number' raises the reader many moral questions ... Yes, in that sense it has a very Dostoevsky point. These are the questions that Peppino asks himself at the end of the book, when he says that the tragedies he has suffered were perhaps the price to pay for having lived a life like his. Counting the contradictions of the characters seems to me that is what makes them alive, any of us is full of contradictions, and therein lies the beauty of the human being. We desperately seek a kind of perfection, coherence, and we always collide with the impossibility of achieving them, because in the end we know very little about ourselves. And Peppino exemplifies all that. You do a lot of research to make your novels. Did you meet up with brawlers to do this one? Yes. It was a very impressive experience. One of them showed me, for example, a black and white photo of several men. "Look," he told me. "This one, this one, this one, this one and this one are all dead." All of them had been killed. And while they talked, I looked around me, I looked at the house: with false columns, with tremendous porcelain statues, gilded objects everywhere ... All very kitsch, but they consider that it is necessary to show off luxury. It was truly an impressive painting that told a lot about the conception of life of those people. But it is also necessary to understand the context in which these people are born ... In Naples, which is itself the other great protagonist of the book ... Naples is a city that has suffered extreme suffering, that has suffered Spanish domination, French, which has been part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ... It has a whole historical and cultural dimension in which many contexts and cultures have overlapped, and from that point of view it is a rich city. But Naples is also a city that has experienced the miseries of plague plagues and other very terrible, very violent events. Naples has learned to respond with enormous grace to pain, to death, it is as if Naples were dancing a dance with pain with a smile on his lips. I am Sardinian, the Spanish have been here in Sardinia for almost 400 years, I have Spanish blood. But we have a sense of the tragic, of the

, blood ... Someone may blame him for having transformed a character who is a gangster hitman almost into a hero ... I don't know if he's a hero, I'm interested in empathy, yes .

I have narrated a man with the mediocrities that distinguish the human being, I do not think I have used a mythopoietic narrative like the one used by Americans, for example.

Mine is in that sense a deeply European novel, the answer to those wonderful American films by Scorsese, Coppola or De Palma that I do believe they mythologize.

When I see

dream of being Vito Corleone, of being Michael Corleone.

But I believe that my novel does not mythologize, it asks questions.

Peppino is not a capo, he is a B-series mobster. He wanted just that: to tell the Camorra from the point of view of a small Neapolitan brawler, not from the point of view of the American myth.

In fact, I have worked at all times to deviate from that myth.

And, to achieve this, I have used, for example, the sense of the grotesque of Neapolitan culture.

Like when Peppino tells his son that in order to marry his mother he has had to exterminate her entire family, something truly grotesque.

Is it true that it took 10 years to make this graphic novel?

Yes. I am one who is not in a hurry, who waits for ideas to arrive.

Ideas need time to mature, they need yeast to act and rise, as when making bread.

And then I work simultaneously on many things.

I started to draw this story in 1994 in Tokyo, I was working for the Japanese market, I was the first Westerner to work directly for the Japanese market.

I began to devise this story thinking of two very Italian elements: the element of tragedy and the ironic and light element of comedy, a formula that led to success in the Italian cinema of the 70s and 80s, Fellini, Monicelli ... But at that time graphic novels did not exist, there were very few comics that exceeded the 46 or 62 page format.

I wanted to make a novel.

In fact, there are many, many vignettes on each page, because I wanted dialogue as if it were a movie or a novel.

I was advancing, but did not know if it would come to fruition.

You yourself directed the film based on your comic, starring Toni Servillo.

How has this foray into cinema, where times are very fast, been for someone who works slowly?

That scared me, and it was the reason why I had always ruled out various proposals to direct this film.

Toni Servillo, from the first moment we met in 2004, was convinced that I should direct it, but I resisted a little.

Then I realized that I am a narrator, who has told stories for 40 years and has a very precise idea of ​​what he wants.

And that has given me security.

I did not know what to do with the actors on the set, but I have started to learn there, live, but I imagine that it is something that happens to any director in his first film, because after all, making movies means being with 100 people running back and forth wondering how you want this and that.

But, thanks to the complicity of the actors, it has been possible.

And working for so many years on the graphic novel I had preparation: in comics I direct the photography because I decide where I put the lights, I act as the director, I do the costumes because I decide how my characters dress, I direct the actors. ... His books, it seems to me, have the great virtue of being timeless ... That is what we all try.

I have grown up with literature.

My father was a music composer and my grandmother was a very cultured woman who when I was little, when I still couldn't read, she used to tell me the stories of the great Russian and French novelists, whom she loved.

I guess that's where the idea of ​​building universal stories was born in me, that could be read in France or Russia 100 years later.

Maybe I have inherited that, listening to stories and then wanting to tell them.

As an adult, in Japan, I worked with a great editor who when I was writing a story told me that I should be given to read at least 10 people with whom I did not have a direct relationship, other than my employees or my mother or my girlfriend, And that from the reaction of those 10 people he could deduce if he had achieved what he wanted or not. And does he do it?

Yes, I always do.

Perhaps that is why my stories can be read beyond time and space.

Deep down we read looking for the man, I don't care if the man is the Siberian Dersu Uzala or the character

of Chekhov's

, what matters to me is what Dersu Uzala or the black monk have inside, who they are. An edition is now also being published in Spain that brings together two of his most emblematic graphic novels, the 'Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks', in which he narrates some of the darkest aspects of the Soviet regime and present-day Russia ... Make those two Graphic novels have not been easy, it was a test for me because in those books really terrible things are faced.

But at least you feel that you can be useful, that your work can serve to give a voice to people who normally do not have it.

What interested me was to tell the story not from the point of view of heroes or journalism, but of normal people, of street people like me, of ordinary citizens with all their shades.

For example, I was trying to understand how the life of Anna Politkovskaya (a Russian journalist who denounced human rights violations in the Chechen conflict and who was killed in 2006) changed after she was poisoned on a plane: what could she eat, how did she live afterwards of that ... Those are the details that interest those who narrate to human beings.

To make those books he interviewed many people, they are almost journalistic documents ... I have no ambition to be a journalist, I am a storyteller.

Journalism is a wonderful and very complex profession that photographs for a moment.

I am however contemplative.

It is true that for those books I have used journalism techniques.

A great Italian journalist told me that the secret was to be like a fly, which observes the scene but does not pollute it, it does not change it.

It is about your presence not altering reality, something that I had already intuited.

She chose people on the street based on the life they had written on their faces.

And I built questionnaires with questions about their life during the Soviet regime that were impossible to answer in monosyllables, questions that forced them to tell me their stories.

And very strong testimonies came out, very disturbing.

Testimonies such as that of Nicholas Vasilievich, a huge man of 1.90 meters who trembled when he remembered the days of Stalin and began to cry.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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