Gomorrah

Scene from Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone, director

Interview: Matteo Garrone
by: Jason Anderson
Eye Weekly - 03/12/09

A view from inside Naples' mafia society.

Doing for Naples’ reigning crime syndicate what The Wire did for Baltimore’s drug trade, Gomorrah is a resolutely unglamorous kind of mafia movie, and no less powerful for it. The sixth feature by Matteo Garrone — a Roman-born filmmaker previously best known for The Taxidermist, a surprisingly unsensationalistic tale about a dwarf embalmer — Gomorrah portrays the experiences of various small-timers spread throughout the sphere of influence enjoyed by the Camorra, an organization that was brought to wider attention by journalist Roberto Saviano. Provoking the wrath of mobsters (the author has since gone into hiding), his bestselling exposé Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia became the source for Garrone’s richly detailed film, a second-place finisher to The Class at Cannes last year. Garrone spoke with EYE WEEKLY at the time of Gomorrah’s North American premiere at TIFF last September.

JA: As a study of the workings of mob life in Naples, Gomorrah is a fiercely local sort of film — are you surprised it’s had such success internationally?
MG: When we decided to do this project it was very important for us that the movie not just be a local movie but also a metaphor for something more global, more universal. So when we saw the reaction at Cannes, we were very happy to see that people realized this wasn’t just a movie about the situation in Naples but in places all around the world.

JA: The most shocking thing about Gomorrah is how this crime syndicate doesn’t merely corrupt every part of the society there — in terms of how it functions on a day-to-day basis, it pretty much is the society.
MG: That’s one of the most important points in the book — I started working on the movie for this reason. Saviano was talking about the Camorra in a new way: from the inside. The Camorra grew up for many reasons and if you are inside it, you understand very well why. The absence and failings of state institutions, unemployment, lack of education, desires for power and money — there are so many reasons. And for me as a filmmaker, this was a chance to rewrite the genre of the mafia movie with new characters and new faces. But I didn’t want to do it with glamour — I love those movies but they always have this component of glamour. With this, we could have two different levels. One is the awareness of this kind of cinema, this model of the mafia movie. The other is the reality of everyday life, which is very different.

JA: Was it also very important that the movie not pass judgment on the characters?
MG: We’re trying to follow them in this kind of jungle, in this fight for survival. We’re showing their contradictions and their conflicts, as well as the consequences of their choices. We can eventually arrive at a moral conclusion, though it’s not a movie about who is good and who is bad. You can’t avoid the Camorra if you grow up there. If you grow up in a system like that, it’s very easy to make those mistakes. There was something that Rossellini said about the movie he made in Berlin after the war, Germany Year Zero. He said, “They live without the awareness of their situation.” I thought the same was true in Naples. Sometimes they are not conscious because it’s a closed world — it’s its own kind of ecosystem.

JA: And is that why you declined to really condemn that world?
MG: It’s different from the book by Saviano. The book is a denouncement. It has the point of view of Saviano, but that is not there in the movie. The movie is not against the Camorra but about the Camorra. It’s another approach. It’s probably for this reason that we are free and Saviano is not! But for me, it was most interesting to see how people lived inside it.

Trailer
Code of the Camorra - Documentary