@Courtesy of Lucky Red

Q: Yours film takes the time to witness the moral status of the collective consciousness in 1970s Italy. That required very precise editing. How did you work on it?

Andrea Segre: We looked at and chose a lot of archival material. I think 70 percent of the whole editing process was devoted to the archives and the choice of music. It was the backbone, what we thought would add the deep heart of the film. I didn’t want to make a film about Enrico Berlinguer but with Enrico Berlinguer, I wanted to talk about a way of being in the world. There were millions of people in Italy who thought that being involved in politics was part of the meaning of life. This is true for communists but also for other activists in other parties such as socialists, Christian Democrats, radicals and extra-parliamentary groups. Certainly the communist community was the largest, most popular, most rooted in family life. Being a member of the Communist Party meant making food at the Festa dell ‘Unità, cleaning the section. At that time dealing with cleaning the sidewalks and avoiding a world war were part of the same commitment. The work of editing was to find the thoughts of those faces, the looks, the eyes, what they are telling you, what they are thinking.

Q: How did you work in managing such a large cast of actors and extras?

Andrea Segre: Without taking anything away from the central importance of Elio Germano in the role of Enrico Berlinguer, we had as many as 50 actors and 1,500 extras in the film, plus all the faces in the archival images. I asked that most of the extras would not come from any extras agency. I asked for what I called militant casting, that is, people who knew in today’s world what militancy means. In the end we found only 500. In the film in total we see 2,500/3,000 faces and each one had to be able to tell us something. This allowed Elio to feel as part of a community. His artistic talent is based on being able to listen, he works so much in that direction, in interacting with each other. His always remaining in the character is more related to listening than to speaking.

Q: This leads to the next question: in addition to a lot of historical research, what was the key to also show the human side of politicians like Enrico Berlinguer, Aldo Moro or Giulio Andreotti?

Andrea Segre: First of all, it was very important to identify this element. With my co-writer Marco Pettenello we understood that actually we had to study like historians first, without holding the right to be able to describe someone’s psychology without first understanding what was going on at that time. That means spending months and months inside a historical archive, reading all the materials, reading hundreds of pages of history books. I don’t think Paolo Sorrentino studied a lot when he made Il divo, which, by the way, is a film that I really like. But in that film Sorrentino feels entitled to put forth what Andreotti was thinking. I, on the other hand, want to understand what that person is thinking in order to give the viewer a chance to have the feeling that he is really thinking it. In order to do that, I have to study a lot.

 Q: How did you manage to convey this concept to the actors?

Andrea Segre: We did six months of study before we started writing the film, then with the actors with whom we held political discussion assemblies. If a scene was set in October 1973, the rehearsals consisted of assemblies where we discussed that month. Everyone slowly began to understand that this was the centrality of the work. All the actors sooner or later then began to study. Elio Germano rehearsed with us for four whole months. 

@Courtesy of Lucky Red

Q: The film talks also about the difference between political and private life, something that has been lost in Italy, especially since the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi…

Andrea Segre: It is true, there was a great separation between private and public. However, this meant that in the public figure there was the private being. At home, at the dinner table, fathers talked to their sons about politics. When I was a teenager, in my house we talked about politics. Because it was part of the way of being in the world, it was an active, lively and pleasant discussion, a confrontation because politics was part of the private. It is another thing, however, to have the spectacle of the private, which found its apotheosis with Berlusconi and before with Bettino Craxi, but which is also linked to a transformation of the world. In that period, on the other hand, politicians were very careful not to showcase their private life, not to make their private life a mediatic event. 

Q: How do you think New York audiences might react to your film?

Andrea Segre: I would like American audiences seeing my film to come to the realization that the impossibility for a huge party like the Communist party, which reached 34 percent of the voters, thus a gigantic piece of Italian society, to participate in the government actually represented a lack of democracy in Italy. Both in the 1970s and in the preceding decades. 

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@Courtesy of Lucky Red

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Here’s the trailer of The Great Ambition – Berlinguer: