Interviews and reviews of the film W Zappatore by Maci Verdesca with Marcello Zappatore as the Main Character
Watch the trailer of the film W ZAPPATORE
Meltingplot: interview with Marcello Zappatore about W ZAPPATORE
Meltingplot
Having met Massimiliano Verdesca, I couldn’t resist interviewing the unique, inimitable, and enormously [drum roll]: Marcello Zappatore.
As well as playing the lead role in W Zappatore, he also wrote the music.
We talked about it in the interview, here it is:
First, DEATH TO FALSE METAL!
Death to all the falsehood surrounding music, and to all the business and hype surrounding artists, or that keeps supposed artists on their feet, or lock real artists, who are not prone to falsehood, from expressing themselves.
True words. Metal runs through your veins.
In W Zappatore you are the main character and also the composer. How did it come about? Is it all your work?
It is all my work, I love composing and especially recording very much, maybe more than playing music in the strict sense. The truth is that it is an evolution born out of my already existing music. During all these years of working with Maci, whenever I recorded something, I made it part of the film, some scenes were put together and made into my previous pieces (for instance, there is a scene where we play at a 50th wedding anniversary and we play a shred-metal version of a famous Argentinean tango, putting the old tango dancers in trouble: this piece existed years before the movie, Maci listened to it and thought up this scene based on it).
I suppose Maci is Maximilian. Well, great.
Let’s take a step back. Maci said that this film evolved from a short film. Was the idea of the short film a result of the desire to do something around the music?
We have to take more than just one step back in time. Maci, the director, and I went to the same high school. We were both shy and introverted at that age, we didn’t notice each other at all. About ten years after graduation we met by chance, through the internet.
He lived in Milan and had been in the States. I was still in Lecce, I was on tour in Italy with a metal band. When Maci saw me in this remarkably satanic-folkloric context he was stunned, he was soon commissioned by MTV (where he worked as a copywriter) to make a commercial and he decided to do it on me. He came to my house in Lecce, and filmed me 24/7, expecting who knows what rebel-satanic-extreme-spericulate life. Instead, he filmed hours and hours of nothing. I play the guitar in my bedroom. I Drink coffee and go out for a walk. Nothing. A nothingness that he was incredibly in love with. He cut this commercial in which nothing was happening at all.
The MTV people were annoyed and ordered him to edit the whole thing immediately. Within a day of delivery, he came up with the idea of superimposing my voice-over (a recorded one) claiming my descent from Frank Zappa over my weak footage. The result was a masterpiece, which you can watch here
From that moment on, Maci became “artistically obsessed” with the idea of creating something that would feature me in it. He went so far as to be forced to tell me that he was not gay.
He wrote many different scripts about me, but the one that came to fruition in the short film ‘In Religious Discomfort’ is something like the idea behind W ZAPPATORE. It is the prospect of the worst nefarious event that could happen to a metal guitarist: the appearance of divine signals in his body in the form of STIGMATE.
The short film was shot in 2005 and was on its way to various festivals around the world, you can watch it here:
A great bromance is yours. I’ve watched your videos, and now you’re my favorite superhero. But back to the film: real music, real actors, … beer and burps?
I haven’t had a drink since 2005 and I don’t burp, even when I’m alone. I am atypical as a supposed rock’n’roll icon. For me, rock’n’roll is a musical genre. Or, if we want to use it as a metaphor, it is an attitude of authenticity and freedom of thought and action.
Recomposing. The house of James Bond is heard several times in the film. In one of them, is Sandra Milo who sings it, but the voice is borrowed from a singer. Who is it?
To be more accurate, the song is called James Bond and I reworked it in all sorts of ways for the film. Often Maci would ask me to do a heavy version of James Bond, an acoustic version, or one with just piano, but in the movie, there are only a few, but I’m going to have recorded dozens of them while working on the project. The talented Salento singer Marta De Giuseppe provides the ‘singing’ voice of Sandra Milo.
Well done, Marta. I have been listening to a few of your songs on the web. I can see that you are interested in different music genres, your passion is always metal. Do you have any plans for a music/metal project in the future?
[And since I know you’re also a fan of jazz, I’ll start with a related music topic].
I’m a musician, so I deal with music. There are different types of music. I don’t think music genres are useful. I love all music and there’s good and bad in every genre. Ugly music isn’t made for music itself. It’s made for things that have nothing to do with music.
My new solo album is being mixed and mastered with the help of sound engineer Antonio Porcelli. I’ll wait for the right moment and the right distribution offer to release it. I hope the release will help me get more visibility since my music is absurd and lacks any commercial appeal.
I’m certain you will succeed, regardless of the film. However, I imagine it is difficult to ‘breakthrough’ in music and have a good distribution in Italy, especially when you are not aiming for the mainstream.
What inspired you to write this new album?
I’m not looking to break through. I’d love to be able to create better music every day. The world is full of inspiration, from all my life experiences and everything I’ve learned. When I make a note, that note is the child of all the others, all the things I’ve already said, all the music I’ve listened to. I get a lot of inspiration from the music, the music I listen to, and the music I play. I live my days in music.
What about acting? Would you like to go on?
I’m not an actor, but I really enjoyed it and it was fun, so… why not go for it?
I hope so. I’d also love to see W Zappatore in all the Italian cinemas. Is there any news on that?
It seems hard to get a film like this through Italy, as we’ve had offers from various countries, but nothing’s certain yet. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything official.
Well, best of luck with both the film and the new album! Just to be clear, would you mind repeating one more time:
DEATH TO FALSE METAL?
or ‘NOT THE DOGS ’?
or ‘ROCK’n’ROLL, SON OF GOD. ROCK’n’ROLL’?
AHAHAH…no… ‘Is it serious?’
Yes. It is God.
TV SORRISI E CANZONI about W ZAPPATORE 13 settembre 2011
W ZAPPATORE on Vanity Fair interview with Sandra Milo
The NEW YORK TIMES website reviews W ZAPPATORE
W ZAPPATORE on ROLLING STONE
Article published on ROLLING STONE, May 2011 issue
Article about W ZAPPATORE ON IL PAESE NUOVO
W ZAPPATORE on MALE DIVINO
Talking about cinema in the modern sense optimizes the potential of a language that works on interpreting a table full of smoke signals, in which the most intimate aspects of allegory merge with the idea of the sense of reality seen from different angles and experienced for what it is, that is, as a projection of a world that plays with mixing with its surroundings and, at the same time, doesn’t renounce the path of unique realization, to be all about the vast spaces of freedom.
It is the spur that reduces the fences of misidentification to a minimum and works on the double, dismantling the idea of evasion about an adjacent world that is still waiting to be experienced and will be when the time is ripe, with the new skin that results from the convulsions of a dark, seemingly inexplicable, but inevitable alienation.
The ways and forms of detachment from who or what are the characteristics of a secular world made up of needs, sometimes unspoken, to which language gives voice, with the thousand faces and expressions of an end that justifies itself in means, facing the crossroads that recomposes the dialogue where it was opened, around the meaning and the need to identify and reform the buried part of oneself. The circular experience is synonymous with the profound journey, all internal, like a force that creates and destroys, the effects of which color the path with different tones only in appearance, with the motifs of the past pushing them out of the way, but then recovering them, directly from the fray of a new emotionality and hand in hand.
In W Zappatore (2010) by Massimiliano Verdesca, a film in which the good rhythm of the narrative is accompanied by the memories of introspection, in a story about the fear of the ghost that is there but cannot be seen, that appears to make merry when everything should be running smoothly, it is the taste of narration that unravels the more or less tight knots of a sounding board ready to work elbow to elbow with the subconscious and its projections.
W Zappatore, which premiered at the 12th European Film Festival in Lecce, is based on the story of the Salento guitarist Marcello Zappatore (playing himself).
The main pillar of the script is accompanied by reconstructions of places, customs, and traditions of the Salento, filtered through narrative modes that focus on detail to create a story of its own as if the world we see has somewhere a small secret door that only the spectator can enter if he enters in tune with the new habitat and the emotions of the protagonist. The game is played openly from the beginning and we are immediately in the hot core of the plot, we could even say the boiling point, because Marcello feels the fire of something wrong and he feels burning alongside his passion for heavy metal, his daily artistic work with his band, his love for his girlfriend Rosa, which little by little becomes the fading desire of emotion he can no longer give a clear name.
Overwhelmed by a world of old assurances that collapses on him as a strange bruise grows on his side, Marcello prepares for the great confrontation with himself, in which the upside-down cross, a symbol of formal recognition in one’s surroundings, decodes the old meanings in favor of a battle between good and evil that will lead Marcello along the bumpy path of bruises that become stigmata on the body of a metalhead, of friends who leave him, of life that becomes a mockery and a paradox of itself. Close to the epilogue, a balance of light and dark. The script is very fluid, and the cast is well-matched. Beautiful is the climax of sentiment and melancholy between grandmother Sandra Milo and her grandson Marcello, guardians of the old and new private world in the smell of a slight compromise, just enough not to die.
Daniela Estrafallaces
Tgnorba (telenorba) about W ZAPPATORE
Interview for Radio Orizzonti Activity – April 2011
PAPERBLOG about W ZAPPATORE
This film, lively and original in content and style, was warmly applauded by the audience.
The protagonist, Marcello Zappatore, is an older boy from the province of Lecce who plays in a band of Satanist metalheads. He is struck by a strange itch on his side that soon turns out to be a stigmata.
His mystical crisis is exacerbated by the betrayal of his girlfriend. She dumps him for the lead singer of the metal band. Confused and depressed, Marcello leaves his historic band to perform with an Elvis Presley impersonator, but the metal soul within him rears its ugly head and in the end wins out over everything: the bloody wounds that have taken possession of his body, the prayers of his mother, who asks the Virgin Mary to help her son find a Christian job, the exhortations of a priest who tries to set him on the right path.
Zappatore, fearless, forms a new band, with his grandmother as the singer (an unmissable Sandra Milo!). He sets the stage on fire and wins back his girlfriend
A humoristic, surreal, and good-naturedly blasphemous movie that pokes fun at superstition and clichés in a light-hearted way. All the actors are good and the characterizations are very effective.
The choice of music is excellent. In the background, as the director himself likes to point out, there is an unusual Lecce. It has been robbed of the wonders of its baroque, but not of the beauty and poetry of its sea.
IL PAESE NUOVO su W ZAPPATORE
Lecce – The festival was officially opened. The task of breaking the ice was given to ‘W Zappatore’, an out-of-competition film by Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca in the ‘Special Events’ section.
The life, difficulties, and grotesque legends of a guitarist in a Satanist band in the sunny province of Lecce. This is the subject of ‘W Zappatore’, an electric guitar virtuoso, now 33 years old, struggling with a bigoted mother who wants him to have a “Christian job” and with the paradoxical and uncomfortable appearance of a strange itch on his left side, a sign of future stigmata.
The protagonist of the grotesque events is himself, Marcello Zappatore, a famous composer from Lecce, a long-time study companion of director Verdesca, author of the bizarre biography, suspended between reality and fiction.
Whether the stigmata is a gift from God or an eval sign of Dante’s contrapasso is irrelevant; what counts is its functional appearance on the scene, capable of pulling the story along the path of redemption. On his journey through two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, the black world of rock and the white world of God, Marcello loses his girlfriend and the house they live in, then his Satanist band (who certainly don’t want a stigmatized guitarist); he tries to end it all in the stormy sea of San Cataldo, but is saved by an unlikely athlete with long blond hair (could he be an allegory of Jesus?) and meets new friends. These include a young, dark bassist and a cute drummer in blue overalls, with whom he forms a new metal band.
But it is his grandmother, the funny and energetic Sandra Milo, in an unusual guise, who will lead Zappatore to the final resolution of his troubled journey. The driving force of Verdesca’s story, together with the stigmata, the character played by Milo (perfect in the role of grandmother-singer-metal) pushes Marcello towards the realization of his talents and inclinations, thwarting the attempts at expiation, who in the end succumb to the call of rock ‘n’ roll.
W Zappatore’ seems almost the final act in a series of stories and fantasies that Massimiliano Verdesca and Marcello have been telling each other since high school, with the promise of a future homage. It is a witty and paradoxical film in which each scene seems like a photographic snapshot of landscapes known to the locals. Who knows if those unfamiliar with the places, beliefs, and dialects of the universe that the 95-minute film creates will find some of the gimmicks as amusing as I did.
(Chiara Melendugno)
Direction: Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca; Screenplay: Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca, Emiliano Ereddia; Photography: Fabio Casati; Editing: Claudio Bonafede; Set design: Alessio Baskakis; Music: Marcello Zappatore; Costumes: Alessandra Impalli, Susan Boffi. Starring: Marcello Zappatore, Sandra Milo, Guia Jelo, Monica Nappo, Ilario Suppressa, Raffaele Maisto, Raffaello Murrone, Augusto Papadia. Producers: Simon Puccini, Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca; Production: Apnea Film.
The director, Massimiliano Verdesca
Born in Lecce in 1976, Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca started working in an advertising agency as a copywriter for the D’Adda, Lorenzini, Vigorelli, B.B.D.O. agency.
After a few years in an agency, he left Milan and moved to New York. He studied directing at the NYFA (New York Film Academy). Back in Milan, he began to work with various production companies. His first commercial with Hfilms was the launch of MTV on SKY’s digital platform. The commercial was later shortlisted at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
He continues to work with other production companies such as The Family, Fargo, and ApneaFilm. He was co-producer of the film Onde by Francesco Fei, released in 2006. The short film In religioso disagio, which he directed and produced, screened in competition at the 2006 Rotterdam IFF. It went on other festivals, including Milano Film Fest, Arcipelago, and Kolkata Film Fest. The short film is part of a larger project about the fantastic and real character of Marcello Zappatore. He was the subject of a ‘digital portrait’ broadcast by MTV in 2004. The project also includes a book of stills taken from video footage of Zappatore and the feature film W Zappatore.
MetalArci WEBZINE about W ZAPPATORE
SalentoWebTV about W ZAPPATORE
Cinecittà News about W ZAPPATORE
FuturaTV about W ZAPPATORE
Press conference on 12/4/2011 on W ZAPPATORE
Otranto Oggi about W ZAPPATORE
Interviewed by Corriere Salentino for W ZAPPATORE
The first work by Massimiliano ‘Maci’ Verdesca, produced by ApneaFilm and entitled ‘W Zappatore’, will be presented this evening as part of the twelfth edition of the European Film Festival.
Shot entirely in Salento, it tells the story of the guitarist of a metal band who receives the Stigmata.
‘W Zappatore’ is the story of a journey through two incompatible worlds, the Rock’n Roll and the Christian World.
W Zappatore’ is the story of a journey between two seemingly incompatible worlds: rock’n’roll and faith.
The star of the film, which already promises to be a cult hit, will be Marcello Zappatore, a guitarist of undisputed fame.
Hi Marcello, what can we expect from this premiere of W ZAPPATORE?
We expect a large audience, which we are delighted about. The tickets were sold out as soon as they went on sale, a clear sign of the great anticipation generated by this feature film, thanks to the word-of-mouth generated by the Internet and the undoubted value of the presentation trailer.
During the press conference, you seemed relaxed, not even slightly excited about your big screen debut, why?
I’m not excited or tense, because I’m used to the adrenaline rush of something I have to ‘do’ at the moment, like an important concert or recording, this time my work is already done, the film is already shot, the soundtrack (composed and recorded by me) is already finished and included in the feature film, so my job is already done, now it’s just a matter of reaping the rewards. Naturally, I am very happy to see a creative activity that lasted seven years, since the first work done by myself and director Massimiliano Verdesca dates back to 2002.
You have compared yourself to professional actors such as Sandra Milo and Monica Nappo. How did you deal with this challenge? Did you improvise completely or did you study your role in the film? How much of the film is based on improvisation?
Nothing was improvised, I faithfully interpreted the script skilfully written by Massimiliano Verdesca and Emiliano Ereddia, even though it was smooth for me, considering that it was practically written for me, and I had to play the role of myself, of Marcello Zappatore, or rather the role of Marcello Zappatore as seen by Massimiliano Verdesca.
What do you have planned for the future? You are known to be a talented guitarist, but if you had to put yourself forward again for a movie. Will you do it again?
I have already recorded and finished a new solo album (the previous one, ‘THE CHERRY ON THE DOOR’, is from 2009) I hope, perhaps with the help of the film release, to find a record label and distributor who can release it worthily and with all the bells and whistles. I am not an actor, so I doubt anyone will be crazy enough to want to involve me in film productions, I am up for anything so I would be happy to offer myself acting, singing, playing, dancing, or painting fences.
What would you like to remember most about this adventure?
The most beautiful memory concerns the atmosphere of friendship, brotherhood, and solidarity that reigned on the set; we were one big family, all on the same level, and we all fully believed in the cause of ‘W ZAPPATORE’. It was only thanks to this immense collective spirit that the film came to a happy conclusion, despite the many difficulties of an independent production with a budget that was not that one of Hollywood.
We thank you, and good luck for this evening!
W ZAPPATORE on IL PICCHIO MAGAZINE
The newspaper IL PICCHIO MAGAZINE has just released an amazing in-depth look at the film W ZAPPATORE, presented on Wednesday 13 April 2011 in Lecce at the Cinema Multisala Massimo at 8 pm.
Interview with Marcello Zappatore in La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno about the film ‘W ZAPPATORE’
