“Rome deserves more attention, especially in the suburbs”, Carlo Verdone will be ‘mayor for a day’

“We will go around the center, even if there is little to do because Mayor Gualtieri is doing a good job. Unlike the suburbs, where public transport leaves something to be desired as does the degradation. If you don’t set a good example with some work starting, the inhabitants of those neighborhoods will continue not to care about the place they live in. Instead, if they start to see that someone takes care of them, maybe they will love their neighborhood more. Doing something for the suburbs is essential.” Thus the director, screenwriter and actor Carlo Verdone at the Rome Film Festivalwhere he presents the fourth and final season of ‘Life as Carlo’ (from November 28 on Paramount+), reveals what he will do as ‘mayor for a day’ on November 17, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. A role also entrusted to Alberto Sordi in 2000 “and this moved me very much”.

To Gualtieri “I will say that in a side street of Via Cavour, where Sergio Rubini (in the cast of the series, ed.) lives, everything is dark. In fact it is one of the darkest streets in Rome. It was a nightmare to go to dinner with him, three hours to understand where I was. You couldn’t read the writings, there was the dust of the 1930s”, says Verdone with his irresistible irony. As mayor he would also like to “improve the aesthetic taste of the city, often absurd constructions are started, one of one color and one of another. We are the country of great taste, of painting and architecture, but from the 60s onwards we have become hideous. Wherever I can get my hands, I will gladly do it”, he assures.

Rome, a city he loves deeply and which has given him so much: “Leave it? Impossible. I can’t stand the vulgarity, the hubbub, the traffic, but I love this city and continue to love it. If I hadn’t loved it, I wouldn’t have made ‘Un Sacco Bello'”, explains Verdone. The capital “gave me so much from a human and working point of view, many situations I experienced are in my films. And I owe it to this great theater that was the squares of Rome, such as Testaccio, San Cosimato and Campo de’ Fiori”. Every now and then, however, he takes a break from Rome: “When I can’t stand it anymore, I go to my house in the countryside, in Sabina. There I feel like a stranger and I am reborn”, he concludes.

Life of Charles 4

“At the center of the fourth season is the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. It was nice to return there for the series. This allowed me to pay homage to my father Mario, who was a manager for many years and to my years as a student there, I graduated under Roberto Rossellini and for many years I held the role of board member. But it is also, and above all, a dedication to young people.” said Carlo Verdone at the Rome Film Festival.

In the new episodes he is entrusted with the role of directing professor at the CSC: “Here I will have conflicts with my students because they see the world as it is now, they speak in a way that is correct for them and incorrect for me. In the meantime I try to understand this new language and their ideas, I come from another era”. But in the end “clashes, meetings, enthusiasm are created and we will be able to create the end-of-year directorial performance, which in the series we bring to the Cannes Film Festival. A scene that ends with a final round of applause for my students and me leaving the scene”, says Verdone, who adds: “It’s a bit like life, what I’ve given I’ve given, now it’s up to them”.

The fourth season “will be the last. If they said to me ‘do you want to do the fifth?’ I would answer ‘no’. I have told everything about myself in these years of ‘Vita Carlo’, it seems to me like I live in a glass house. Maybe I’m the first actor to tell his biography, fictionalized of course, but there’s a lot about me.” But, for the moment, he doesn’t stop making films: “I’m finishing the film ‘School of Seduction’. My life is cinema.” After doing four seasons, “going back to making movies felt like going out for coffee,” he concludes.

Voice to young artists

Always close to new voices, Verdone praises the new generation of artists: “I have discovered some really smart twenty-year-olds, they deserve a certain consideration otherwise we risk having cookie-cutter casts. Some of them need to be put to the test, from acting to directing. They are intelligent boys and girls and, sometimes, we have wrong ideas about young people, who are living in a difficult world created by old people who create the real problems of today’s world”, observes Verdone.

“The cuts in the audiovisual sector are also, in part, the consequence of all the waste that has taken place in the past, but they are never good news. We must be careful: it is above all independent productions that are affected and this is dangerous. We risk no longer seeing new debuts, new actors, new directors, new screenplays by young authors.” This is how Carlo Verdone comments on the cuts to the fund dedicated to audiovisual productions in Italy. “If we don’t give space to new talents – observes Verdone – cinema will not renew itself. We will always continue to see the same faces, the same stories, and the public will end up staying on the sofa watching films and series on TV”, he concludes.