«They gave me 4 years to live, that’s why I chose the cinema»- Corriere.it

Smiling, available, from one disarming sincerity. Gabriele Salvatores, one of the protagonists of the Bif&st International Film&Tv Festival – where he will present a preview of his latest film on the evening of March 25th, The return of Casanova

— was told with an open heart on the occasion of the master class that opened the festival, directed by Felice Laudadio, combined with a tribute to one of his classics, nirvana. For the critic Enrico Magrelli he outlined the stages of his career in front of a packed Petruzzelli audience. Arriving in Milan from Bari, founding the Teatro Elfo, of which he is still a member and a passionate supporter (The only utopia that came true in my life).

The arrival in the cinema, thanks to a medical prediction related to a diagnosis of polyemia, fortunately wrong: In 1980 they gave me four years to live. A doctor cabled me, “Try to put your things in order.” Luckily it wasn’t like that. But in the hospital I decided: if I leave here, I’ll do what I really enjoy. Or the cinema. Which, as Fellini said, is better remembered than reality. become a substitute for life. We take refuge in a movie, for us you stage a world that you control, you can play and end however you want. There is no script in life. You can only be an actor and maybe even bad, he jokes. Sincere, even when he tells it
the regret not to have had children. I thought I didn’t have time for her. Films are not children: you cannot accept a film.

Remember the emotions of
‘Oscar for Mediterranean Sea
. I don’t know if I deserve it. it was a stroke of luck. There was at least one film that deserved more. After the win, I was the same as the day before, but now who knows what people expected of me. But the Oscar isn’t film school, you should remember that, for me it was like the spider bite for Spider-Man, it gave me that superpotere to choose to make different movies, such as “Nirvana“. List the rules that the Academy imposes on the statuette: In the meantime, you cannot give it away or sell it, as the Academy could always ask you to return it should the worst come to the worst. For years I didn’t even keep it at home, I put it on the bench. I’ve only recently come to terms with it and put it in my library. very heavy, perfect for supporting books.

His films are all differentcon a common thread mean, he says: The protagonists are children who defy the rules of the pack. I will speak of the latter with Toni Servillo and Fabrizio Bentivoglio, in cinemas since March 30th at 01, only after the preview in Bari. Just a few vague hints. For a long time I thought, like Hitchcock, “For you just a movie, for me my whole life”. I’m not 100% sure. Today, however, life is more important to me Cinema makes life more beautiful. And he mentions his analyst more than once, including the poems that the therapist writes to himself every birthday. Lost the illusion of changing the world, sometimes I float, sometimes I sink, that for 60 years.