by Helen Barlow
This year, Luca Guadagnino won the best director Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Bones and All, a surprisingly touching story of cannibal lovers starring Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell, who took out the newcomer award.
Yet two years ago at the same festival, at the height of the pandemic, I had an exclusive interview with the director for his Ferragamo documentary, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, which is just as captivating – though of course, minus the blood and guts of his new movie.
Can you explain your fascination not only with shoes but with fashion in general.
“I am happy to explain my fascination with fashion, even though I don’t think that Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams is necessarily a movie about fashion. I think fashion is of vital importance when you come to understand that it’s a sort of intersection between capitalism and imagery, and how one can help the other. I think that ever since the beginning, fashion has been able to convey a sense of the self in the future, to anticipate our desires and to create a desire for our needs, maybe needs that are not really necessary. So that is a fascinating thing to me. But the other point is that fashion deals a lot with form and it’s not a secret that I’m very interested in the concept of form.
“Lastly, fashion is a system that really asks us to understand our relationship with consumption. How do we deal with that and with sustainability today, compared to what was before? How fashion changes throughout the decades is super fascinating. Maybe one day I’ll do a movie about that. But regarding Salvatore Ferragamo and this movie, the trigger for me was less about fashion and more about what makes a person a genius, and how we can understand that kind of complexity and the mystery of the man and to witness his presence in the world.”
He was so young when he discovered his talent. Did you have that genius at a young age?
“People think that I’m arrogant, but I’m not so arrogant to think of myself as a genius. But I can say that I have been kind of sticking to my point as a filmmaker since I was very, very young. I had a Super 8 camera when I was seven or eight. I wasn’t as good at that as Mr Ferragamo was at making shoes at seven or eight, but I knew what I wanted. And I’m very fascinated by the mixture of humility and resourcefulness and discipline of knowing what you want and trying to get it without getting distracted along the way. And I think Ferragamo never got distracted. Even when he lived in Hollywood, he created. In fact, he was one of the people who participated in the creation of Hollywood.”
Did you feel connected to the story of Ferragamo during the shooting?
“I liked the idea that Salvatore is a sort of underdog, a maverick, someone who is very much off-centre. This is something that I kind of share. Salvatore was always able to understand the nature of what he was creating, and how to distribute that creation to the world. He knew that he needed artificial weapons to be talked about. So, his idea of Italy, his idea of Florence, is as artificial as the idea of Italy in a movie made in Hollywood in the ‘30s. He knew that what happens in our minds as consumers is more about the wish for something and the imagination of it, rather than the actual reality. He wasn’t Florentine, he wasn’t Tuscan, he was from Bonito in the south of Italy. He knew though, that Florence carried with it an idea of Italy that was very important in the world. And that’s how he started to forge the identity of his brand.”
What do you think he would make of the fashion world today?
“I think he would be quite dispirited, to be honest, because with Salvatore everything started from an idea that was taking form in the work, in the craftsmanship. I don’t know if he was a genius with the drawings. There are designers like Mr. Lagerfeld who was great in designing. He could make a drawing and you could see the drawing becoming the dress and it was exactly the same. But not all designers work like that. I think Salvatore was thinking of the concept of what he wanted to do and trying until the shape took form. Today, I think that apart from very few exceptions, the system of fashion is about letting us believe that there is a sort of process of ideas in the way Salvatore had, whereas in fact it’s mostly a replica of other ideas and a sort of reproduction of ideas that are already there. It’s a constant revival, plus the fact that fashion still is created and produced mostly as mass production.
“When he arrived in America and he saw in Chicago how the factories were working, he said ‘No, no, no, I can’t do that’.”
Are Ferragamo’s shoes still handmade?
“In the movie we show how they create two shoes, the Rainbow shoe and the Marilyn shoe, which are still sold. They’re really up to date today as much as they were in the ‘30s and ‘40s. It’s a mixture of artisanal, handmade and with the help of machinery. Those are the collections called creations, which are reproductions of what Salvatore designed. I can’t speak for the brand though. I can talk about the movie (chuckles).”
Do you have a pair of Ferragamo shoes?
“Yes, I do. They’re incredibly comfortable. And they are really great in that you can see them, but you can also forget about them. I think they’re something that stands the test of time. They’re something that you understand are great, but not obtrusive.”
So, his creation of shoes is somehow parallel to your creative view?
“I was interested in the fact that he was forging new things. He was one of the first creators of fashion items in the sense of contemporality. He was in Hollywood, and he understood the star system before the star system became what it is. He realised how to sell the ‘Made in Italy’ dream before it existed. He understood the importance of the idea of a legacy by buying Palazzo Spini Feroni before anybody started to make that assumption. So that sense of discovery, that sense of entrepreneurial capacity, of foreseeing the future, is something that I really am fascinated by. I don’t think he’s a sort of fairytale. He was so obsessed with his work and his creation, which I love, of course.”
Was making the movie difficult at times?
“I can’t deny the fact that making movies is always a very difficult process and many times you feel more defeated than uplifted. For any kind of success that someone can have, you have gone through hell a lot of times. So, probably it’s not that I have my movies talking to me, but the truth of the matter is that I learn not to feel downsized by difficulties. They will always be there constantly, and we have to face them.”
The material obviously came from Ferragamo’s family, but were there things you wished you had captured, even if what you got was incredible?
“Making this movie was a long three-year process and it involved interviewing many people. Because we had to be in the realm of two hours, it was a bit sad to not extend many of those great interviews, but at the same time, the research was enormous.
“I have to say that my editor Walter Fasano was wonderful in making sure that we could have all these incredible materials and the Foundation Ferragamo gave us so much access to unseen things, such as the home movies that Ferragamo himself was shooting back in the ‘40s with his Super 8 camera and his family pictures that have never been seen. Also, the juxtaposition of things is great, like when you hear costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis discussing how Ferragamo shoes can signify the identity of a character in a movie. We can see that in her words, but also in the pictures of the movies that we show. That’s great, because you start to have new perspectives on things.”
How was it for you to work on a documentary?
“I started out making documentaries. My first attempt was a documentary about a young blue collar worker, who was working in the Italian car industry. I never stopped making documentaries. I made Bertolucci on Bertolucci and Italian Unconscious. It’s such an incredibly liberating and fascinating medium. And it has as many genres and as many possibilities of form as fiction.”
Is beauty something that constantly tempts you?
“I’m a little dispirited by this need of beauty. We cannot deny that beauty is an important aspect of philosophical thoughtfulness, the concept of beauty over two centuries and people painting and sculpture and so on. The problem is that in our present times, beauty is a trade of superficiality. We believe we can access beauty by using a filter on a social media app, so we have a beautiful picture of something. The orgy of images that we are immersed into is something that I don’t want to be defeated by. So, more than beauty, now I am interested in intelligence, and for me intelligence is being able to welcome others and say, ‘Ok, you are different from me and I want to experience your difference’.
“Let’s talk about that more than beauty, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Something beautiful for me doesn’t need to be beautiful for another person. The idea of an absolute beauty is borderline fascist also.”
Can we talk about your other Venice 2020 film, the documentary short Fiori, fiori, fiori, where you travelled from Milan to Sicily to discuss the pandemic with your childhood friends? Can you tell us why you wanted to make that?
“It has been a very difficult time for me personally. I mean, I think it has been difficult for all of us in the world, not being able to live our lives the way it used to be and being distanced from people, changing our habits of work, our social habits. We know each other and we would hug if times were normal. So, it’s a toll that we have to think of paying for in the future, I’m sure. And apart from that, it has been a very difficult time for me personally, because of losses in my family and losses in my private life. And I felt restless. In Italy, I discovered a production company that was among those companies that was allowed to continue during lockdown, in case you needed to do something that was worthwhile. So, we made all the legal inquiries and we realised that we could go to Sicily from Milan. More than talking about myself, it was interesting to see what people dear to me were thinking about during the lockdown in Sicily, where I grew up. So, I went to their houses and places and in the process, I even bumped into my dad’s village. For four days we travelled, three people with our iPhone and iPad – one of the few times when an iPhone is useful – and then we made this short film. It was interesting because it was a very heavy, lacking-in-oxygen time. And yet we arrived in Sicily, and it was all colourful, with flowers everywhere. So, we thought this is what the movie is going to be titled because nature is telling us something hopeful.”
Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams is in cinemas December 1, 2022; Bones and All is in cinemas November 24, 2022
