Years and years ago, on the radio, you could listen to the sound-track of the films being shown on television. Tina Lattanzi, the actress who dubbed Greta Garbo in Maria Walewska, came across “coOme state ooggi Naaapoleone?” Background noise, music, room for imagination. In other words... cinema.

“Inspector Rock, don’t you ever get anything wrong?

Oh, yes, I’ve made a big mistake. I’ve never used Linetti brilliantine.”

It’s funny how one ends up defining oneself respect of the past or respect of one’s environment: we used to be, there was, there were, you’re just like your aunt or vice versa… A sort of appropriation of one’s personality even before it’s completely formed. Certain things cut one to the heart as in Des violons de l’automne and never get healed.

Better or worse never equals: is a Florentine saying. The motto of the football team, too. How one becomes what one has become, is a laborious process. People should either know how and want to help or refrain from interfering. Of no help are diagnoses by caretakers, les psychologies, studios bereft of scientific stature: gossips+chats=nada.

According to Hillman, we each have a dàimon, a demon within us, a sort of hard core: it’s our own personal law of gravity and gyroscope. Alternatively a resource or a burden with which to reckon

"What if you have missed?"
J.W.: "never occurred to me!". John Wayne in The Searcher

There’s no such thing as the psychology of a character. There are quite simply persons; chrysalises we harbour inside ourselves; to everyone his own being, with a history which seems to belong to others or vice versa.

Totò: “I divide human beings into two types of people; men and Caporali. By men I mean those who are forced to spend their whole working lives in dull, grey segregation; by I Caporali, those who profiteer, who tyrannize, who humiliate: always in command, often without the necessary authority, ability or intelligence but in full command of their insolent bravado. A Caporale at birth or never!”

Not all that goes on in a theatre IS theatre. On the contrary, authentic theatre has no need of buildings. Unauthentic theatre, yes indeed, its being a sort of ware-house for props and decorations. Theatre should, like music, be part of a person’s essential education. It should be where it is naturally, within a person. A person is not a room with props.

Totò, apropos of education: “Che so’ i figli? Mica so’ ffiascchi che s’abboffano!”

Peppino de Filippo in L’Avare: “Show me your hands… no the other ones”. He succeeded in giving the line as if he were Molière, maybe even better.

Bergman has written that he thinks of himself as being like the anonymous builder of a medieval cathedral. As a young producer I wasted a lot of time trying to pre-determine the outcome of a production, induced to do so by a desire to appear an intellectual, a definition imposed on me by the circles in which I moved. Today I know that, standing at the helm of the vessel, I can only correct the route so that we reach the harbour in safety. A sort of midwife’s job, full of discretion. Things have a way of happening, according to their own logic, like the laws of flying. In “War and Peace”, we learn that battles are won or lost for their own intrinsic reasons.

“Capurro, halt, Capurro, disgraziato!” Vittorio de Sica in “I due marescialli”.