THE DAY I INSULTED JAMES GRAY

I’m in Cannes, the day is almost finished and I get into the Palais Stéphanie. I hear people saying they’re waiting for Francis Ford Coppola on the terrace for a conference.

So I take the lift, which is impressively large and quiet full of people.
A plunging neckline on the opposite side of the entrance drags my attention.Nobody talks.

All of a sudden I realize they must have seen my glance, maybe too insistent, because they all watch down and try to hide their laughs.
I look somewhere else and I find out that in front of me, a kiss distance, there’s a tall and slim guy without the badge, who looks like a geek and seems familiar to me.
A year ago I was at the première of his film, where the guests of honor were him (the Director) and Gwyneth Paltrow.

So I exclaim:
- Hey, I think I know you!

All start laughing, because they think I was fixing him and were waiting for my reaction.
- Your film, last year. Good.
- Thanks for not saying it was even bad.

And we get out.

P.S.: The neckline in the lift was of his wife.

AN USUAL HOLLYWOOD STORY

I met a Brazilian Actress who lived in Hollywood for a long while. To pay the rent she used to work as screaming girl in low budget horror films.

She tells me that one evening she is at a party and a young man holds her face and starts talking like a crazy, telling her he likes her very much, he saw all her films and they must do something together.

He writes his number on a piece of paper, and later she throws it out, because she thinks he’s a maniac.
Then she leaves for Brazil, and for a year she works in a soap opera. But she gets bored, and comes back to Hollywood.
There, she sees the guy from the party on TV, now famous.

It was Quentin Tarantino.

THE DAY I MET VITTORIO CECCHI GORI

I get in Vittorio Cecchi Gori’s house with just one thought: whatever the result of our meeting will be, this event will stuck forever in my life, and will mark the edge between before knowing Cecchi Gori and after I met him.

Whoever I will be, whatever job I will have, from now on I can say at the age of 27 and with no big studio backing me I’ve been able to set up an appointment with the biggest Italian Producer, 3 times Grammy winner, in his home, to tell him about my project.
I’m with the giants now, that is Cecchi Gori’s Christmas tree, and the bathroom I get in is the same Cecchi Gori uses.

We are at the end of a busy day for both of us, he has just finished a meeting with his management, he’s tired, but welcomes me in his studio like I were one of his lot.

I’m struck by the humanity I find in this room: his collaborators treat him with an intimate respect, because he’s the boss, but is also a man for whom they have feelings.
But most of all I’m struck by the humanity the man I consider the biggest one shows to me, who am still no one, and I don’t feel anymore I’m the professional who is leading a very ambitious project, but a little boy deeply inadequate.

Despite his tiredness, I see a charisma in him I never saw elsewhere, and if in my other experiences I faced bureaucrats who seemed interested just in delaying my projects, he seems to try to find a way to help me before any valid reason not to.

Cecchi Gori doesn't tret me with the patience of a teacher with a student, but as a professional who talks to another professional. He doesn't just talk about his ideas, he fights for them: he slaps the table and cries Films have to be made in Italian and subtitled in English, that’s the way you win Oscars! Americans have 10 professions to do what just one can do, and Financiers can’t say anything. I’ve always been a Producer, Executive Producer and so on… like [he names a film I don’t understand] they had to shoot in a villa full of mirrors in the woods, and nobody thought that the cameras were going to be reflected in the mirrors! Then they called the agency to make things straight. Hey, that little joke costed me 2 million dollars!

He’s not just a person with the right intuitions, who treats all the film as products that grant him money: he is someone that still puts his soul in what he does, he puts his face in his projects.

At the end of our meeting he asks me for the script, and tells me we will meet up again. His sentence appears to me meaningful and a lot more real compared to the usual We’ll let you know that people use in the show business.

We’ll meet up again, he says, Nobody does a film in just one meeting.

P.S.: I’d like to thank very much the Head of the Press Office of Cecchi Gori Group, Mr Emilio Sturla Furnò: a very nice guy without whom I wouldn’t be able to have this meeting.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

(Cannes, 20th May 2009) Sometimes it is hard to be a man and keep the emotions, especially thinking about all the efforts, and that that hell could be ended forever.These are me and Charles Fries: my American Distributor and Executive Producer, with whom today I signed a deal for a worldwide distribution.

From now on I have all the guarantees I need to give to my investors, I can take their money and make my film.

Shaking his hand, today he told me:

“The end of the beginning”.