Giuseppe Spata: “I want to take a leap”

Yesterday I went out with the idea of ​​getting a pizza in a place nearby, but I found it closed: the situation is dramatic ». In this year marked by the pandemic, Giuseppe Spata, 27, speaks of “the need to follow common sense”, saying that “we must get out as little as possible”. And that “President Mattarella is right when he says that if we continue to divide, the damage will multiply”.

With the tone of someone who is not yet an adult, but not even a kid, the Ragusan actor answers the phone from his Roman apartment.

Coronavirus aside, he is having a good time: after his cinema debut in the film Simple soldier by Paolo Cevoli, in 2016 he got his first leading role in the Rai series How are you wrong.

Among other tests for the small screen, The mafia only kills in the summer e The promised life, works that have earned him a growing notoriety. But above all the return to the cinema in the new film by Paolo Taviani Farewell Leonora, now at the end of processing. “An opportunity that makes me very happy,” says Spata. “It would have been a dream to go to that set just to watch.”

We are talking about a director who, with his late brother Vittorio, has won many awards, from the Palme d’Or to Cannes in ’77 with Master father at the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2012 with Cesare must die. Do you see it as a turning point?
«As an opportunity that I hope will allow me a leap. I have always loved the Taviani brothers and auteur cinema. Maybe I’m a fan of Gian Maria Volonté, but I love Elio Petri. It is not snobbish towards TV dramas: I have done many, facing them all with seriousness and pride ».
But?
“But to see a gentleman like Taviani taking all the time necessary to decide the right shot, to make choices … There is no time elsewhere and this moved me to the point that sometimes I almost forgot that I was there to act: I observed, I looked at the scenes on the monitor. All in the midst of a team intent on working in absolute silence: extraordinary ».
Farewell Leonora a film inspired by Pirandello is shot in his Sicily.
“Yes, when Pirandello died his ashes took a journey that is a story unto itself and the film narrates that journey in a rather visionary way. I have a fairly small role, but an important one for me: I am a young man who is returning by train to Salina, to its origins ».
Who else do you dream of working with in the future?
«Among the young people, Pietro Castellitto. And then Matteo Garrone, he is a painter like me, I am fascinated to think about how this affects his gaze ».
Does he paint?
“As a kid I perceived school as something dictatorial, so I spent my time drawing. I’ve never stopped, but I don’t have a style, I experiment. Even as an actor I don’t have a method, every time I have a role to prepare I invent a way. Gisella Burinato, with whom I studied acting here in Rome, taught me: the actor is like a craftsman, he builds characters by fusing pieces of life, of stories. In front of the canvas, however, I act more instinctively, I vent. I also do portraits ».
Whose?
“Recently, I don’t know a gentleman whom I often see with his dog in the house, but he always seems to have cumbersome thoughts. And from my grandmother Idea, which is called that because, when she was born, her father was at war, and she sent my great-grandmother a letter in which she wrote: “I would have the idea to come back, but alas I’m in the trenches”. She is blonde with blue eyes, a rarity in Sicily ».
The land where he was born and raised.
«I left her at 19, after years of theater; I started in middle school on the advice of a teacher who saw me listless in the study. I got my diploma – classical high school with artistic address – but one day I looked in the mirror and realized that I really wanted to be an actor, so I moved to Rome. It was not easy, I did a month of trial at the Experimental Center of Cinematography, but they didn’t select me: I was too amazed by everything, I had never left Ragusa in my life. Disappointed, I fled to London, worked in a Mexican fast-food restaurant, cut onions. But I wasn’t building. nothing, so I went back and thanks to an agency things started to turn around ».
You starred in two fictional stories about the mafia, what effect does this word have on you?
“It makes me think that we can all contribute to fighting it, the mafia, with a simple gesture: paying taxes. Because criminal organizations are strengthened where the state is absent, where it does not provide the necessary services, and this happens not only, but also because there is a lack of money. Not to mention that tax evasion often becomes an excuse for politics ».
With The woman of the wind will return under the direction of Ricky Tognazzi. Talk about Ilva, right?
“Not explicitly. We should have shot in Puglia, but due to the pandemic everything has moved to Lazio. But yes, Ilva is not mentioned, but that is the reference. I play a worker who works in a steel mill that pollutes, makes you sick. It’s nice when cinema and TV are also a complaint, especially my generation must understand that we live in an age where every problem is global and can only be solved by uniting. Individualism leads nowhere ».