The summer’s best thriller comes to us under the radar, but, from its six-minute opening shot onward, Hungry Hearts grabs viewers by the collar. The winner of last year’s Best Actor and Best Actress award at the Venice International Film Festival (for Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher, respectively) will soon begin playing in the city it pays a brutal tribute to, which means there will soon be an influx of baffled reactions; those who go in with no knowledge will undoubtedly expect a romantic comedy at first glance, only to find themselves veering into psychological horror at a moment’s notice.
Writer-director Saverio Costanzo is open about how all of this happened in the first place. Although he’s adapting a novel by Marco Franzoso, first published in his native Italy, I learned that much of the movie’s magic — and, at its best, this is electrifying work — came from his own imagination and ingenuity, along with a bit of successful experimentation. Having been taken with what he’d devised, I optioned for a technical talk — lenses, aspect ratios, patterns in composition — and it bodes well that Costanzo wanted to get right into the subject, along with a talk about how Driver and Rohrwacher found their harmony with such odd material.
The Film Stage: This film took me by surprise. Your opening scene foretells a few things, but not necessarily things that are obvious from the outset. Did you always know that this would be the starting point?
Saverio Costanzo: Actually, no. The story’s coming from a novel that was published three years ago in Italy. It was a very small book — more a chronicle of a true story. It’s not true, but it looks like this, reading it. So I had the heart of the film in mind, but once I started writing, I just think about something funny — two people meeting — something original, never seen, and so I start writing that scene, and it took me, like, ten minutes, in fact. It was very easy to write, because I was very amused by that situation. And then I kept writing, and the script became a romantic comedy with a marriage, with a wedding, everything, and then, slowly, we got up to the point of the film — which is not a comedy, of course. It becomes more like a thriller.
And then, writing that, my writing became a horror film. And then, at the end, we got back to the drama, which is the main genre of that film. Unconsciously, we crossed four genres without ever thinking about it. I was just writing thinking about my characters, you know? I was following them and following the story, where the story took me. The way I was writing, I was thinking about something always. I was not thinking about genre; I was thinking about characters, and they took me in this crossing genres.
Did you always know it’d be composed as a static shot locked at a specific angle? Where does that idea spring from?
I’m claustrophobic. I was looking for an image that can tell how the claustrophobic can become a life, and you have to think that they we were showing a very small apartment. The third character of the film, let’s say. And so to give the feeling that they were trapped in this very closed and tiny space, we worked a lot with angles, with wide angles. Life is getting wider, but the place where they are is getting smaller and smaller, so the contrast between these two things made them monsters after a while. It was like getting into a nightmare, somehow. But, again, I was not thinking intellectually about images. I was just thinking, “How do we tell how claustrophobia can become alive with cinema?” And so, using lenses, I tried, concretely, to get over problems. When you shoot a movie, you have a lot of problems to jump over. Using these lenses was a way to make a synthesis of the vision of their lives.
I was also surprised you’d shot this in 1.66. You don’t see that so often nowadays. Why this format? Was this entirely tied to claustrophobic stylings, or is there a significant aesthetic attraction?
Oh, very specific! I like that! I think 1.66 is the best aspect ratio for wide angles, so I knew that I was going to work a lot with these lenses for the reason I just told you. I thought the best way was 1.66, which is older, as an aspect ratio. It seems, like, out of time, somehow. But for wide angles it’s much better. It works much better with wide angles; it’s more square, somehow. Then I liked the fact that we tried to find a timeless New York in the way we dress the actors, in the way we shoot the city, and the 1.66, it is, for me, timeless. It doesn’t belong to our time — not nowadays. I felt it was the best aspect ratio for that film, which is a bit vintage, somehow.
And on the subject of a “timeless New York,” I love how pretty much every street scene is shot from a distance, even to the point of one character observing another from a window. Why this? Part of me figured it was a matter of permit costs.
It was very concrete, the reason: New York is a very tough city to choose in. We all know that. People are not very collaborating with cinema, because there are a lot of sets shooting in New York at the same time, so sometimes four people can be a problem, to have all the sets. The best, for me, just because this is a very small film, was to catch them from far away. Again, that becomes a claustrophobic view of New York, because you can have your actor in-focus, but everything else is out of focus, so you concentrate a lot on what happened in their mind, instead of watching what happened outside them. You know what I mean?
So just because the movie is very interior, the way that it’s trying to get inside them. It’s a monologue, like an inner monologue. It was a way, also, to just concentrate on them, on their drama, so it was for these two reasons. Cinema is very concrete. Working on cinema means, for me, to try to find the solution to concrete problems, you know? That solution that you find, it becomes the way you show a story, the way you tell a story. So, sometimes, you don’t think, intellectually, what you’re doing. You’re just trying to solve problems, and, suddenly, that solution becomes the form you’re looking for. So things “go together,” let’s say.
The apartment feels very closely connected with the drama. What was the process for finding a space that seems conceivable as somewhere they’d live in? Did you find a place based on intuition, or was there just a settling for something you could afford?
No. Let’s say that I look for many spaces, but I was looking for something exactly like this. So I was lucky, because I had a very good location scout. This guy knew exactly what he was looking for. He took me many places, but I was looking for something old; I was looking for something really “New York,” where you can tell immediately that it’s New York. That place, for me, didn’t take so many times to find, actually. It was quite easy, because this is a typical New York apartment — apart from the stairs, of course. But there was a brownstone, three floors, and we just closed the other two floors, and we used that stair, because they really need two floors, somehow. They need stairs to pass through the outside and the inside.
It was a kind of middle point between the outside and the inside, so I was looking for stairs. This apartment was in Harlem, which is a very old part of New York and very fascinating, even though the film is set on the Upper West Side. But it wasn’t hard. New York is a very old city; that’s the point. I mean, I’m coming from a very old country, which is Italy, and since I was in New York the first time — it was, like, 20 years ago — I thought, “New York is such an old city and has such an old flavor.” This is the reason why we were into something that old.
I find it interesting how both are troubled and neither is necessarily a villain. What comes from the book and what are you shaping?
I felt a lot of pity for them. I was really empathizing with them, both of them — even with her, which is more tricky, because she’s the one that makes trouble. I was very empathetic with them. Looking at them with mercy was a way to look, myself, with no judgement. Once you don’t judge your character, you can empathize easily with them. They’re human beings trying to do their best. I believe they do everything with the best intentions. They don’t succeed, of course, but they try desperately. They moved me, even while I was writing. I was very moved by both of them.
How much of the performance comes from how you’re telling them to operate, both psychologically and physically, and just letting them run with it?
The script was very precise, I’ve got to say. It was very straight to the point. In this movie, I was also operating the camera. So I was in the middle of the scene with them all the time. That helps. We didn’t even talk; we were just dancing to the same music at the same time. The fact that I was inside the scene, not in front of a monitor on the ground floor, helped us to create a kind of team. We improvised a lot. We were just going.
I would say they were just leaning with whatever happens, and I was leaning with them because I was in the middle of a scene all the time. Directing, in this case for me, was very silent. Usually I talk a lot because I have to explain — I have to act in some way. In this case, operating the camera was acting, in a way. So we really didn’t talk so much about the characters. They were improvising something, and I was improvising that with them at the same time. We were dancing the same music in the same time.
Where did you first find the appeal of them? Watching their work, meeting with them, intuition?
With Alba, for example, I wrote the script thinking about Alba. I had her in mind since the beginning. Adam was a discovery for me. I was looking for an actor. I spent four months in New York auditioning lots of actors in the same age range. It seems like everybody knows how to act, which is not the same as in Italy. But to find somebody with these weaknesses is something else. You know, he’s bringing himself into the character with a lot of honesty. It’s very hard. Adam, the first time I met him, he read the script and was looking for that role, and I immediately felt that he was someone who brings himself.
I don’t need a good actor in the film. I need somebody who’s really part of the film. I don’t know if what I’m saying sounds like something old, like in the ‘70s — the European authors would think like this. But I still believe it’s very important if you want to give to the audience something unique. A good actor has to be a brave man as well. To me, both of these actors are very brave, because they don’t think just about themselves. They have the film in mind, and this is really helpful for our directors, to share a real experience.
Hungry Hearts enters a limited release on Friday, June 5.