We interviewed Roberta Bellesini Faletti wife of the great Giorgio Faletti who told us about him as a comedian, actor, writer, singer, painter and much more.
She was first the companion and then the wife of the great Giorgio Faletti. How did you meet?
We met in the most Italian way possible. At the house of mutual friends to watch a football final with a nice plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce in hand. At the end of the game we immediately started chatting and he enthusiastically began to tell me about the latest project he was working on which was a song album that would come out shortly thereafter. We got to know each other a little better and within six months the official statement arrived.
The first memory I have as a child of Giorgio Faletti is when I watched him on TV with my family as Vito Catozzo. A character whose way of speaking has entered common language. How was this character born?
Giorgio drew inspiration for his characters from the environment around him. He always said he couldn't know where and how the inspiration to create a text, a song, a character, a story would come from. He had to be like a radar, open to 360 degrees, immersed in the world to grasp every idea. Then he worked on it, created the comic gags that we all saw in the drive in and then in the subsequent broadcasts. Vito Catozzo was practically a security guard who worked at the bank of which Giorgio was a client.
The book "From when to now" is an autobiographical book that also includes two music CDs in which Giorgio Faletti interprets his songs already brought to success by others, including Jacques written for Milva, who recently passed away and unpublished songs. There is also “Signor Lieutenant”, which achieved platinum status, has sold over 100 copies. How was this unforgettable song born?
This is a very special story. Giorgio said that this song had been inspired by heaven, as if someone had whispered it in his ear. Giorgio was a person of great sensitivity and like all Italians he was not absolutely indifferent to the massacres of Capaci and via d'Amelio. He had many friends who worked in the police and when he happened to meet them they told him about their moods, anxiety and fears. From these emotions this song was born. Giorgio told the exact moment in which this song was born. He was sitting in the car in the parking lot of a cabaret club and at a certain point he took the notebook he always had with him and a pen and began to write down the words. He didn't have music yet, we needed very minimalist music, something that barely emphasized those phrases. His friends, including singers, convinced him to let the artistic director of Sanremo listen to the fact that it was Pippo Baudo. The song participated in the Festival, came in second place and won the Critics' Prize.
Teseo's ship has republished Giorgio Faletti's books in a new series dedicated to him. In particular, "I kill" has a double cover. I kill is the book of his debut as a writer. It has sold over 5 million copies so far and has been translated into many languages. How long has Giorgio Faletti had this plot in mind? When did you decide to make it a book?
Giorgio had in mind the title of this book, that is "I kill". He told me it was a title that he wanted to use sooner or later. To talk about Giorgio the writer, I like to make a small introduction. Giorgio was first of all a great reader, he had been reading since he was a boy, slowly he had begun to become passionate about genre literature and in the last decades in particular he had become passionate about American literature. He began to follow and become passionate about two writers in particular. To Jeffery Deaver and also to Michael Connelly. He fell deeply in love with the American thriller genre, he liked the mechanism by which these stories were constructed. Giorgio perhaps even a little unconsciously had begun to acquire the mechanisms of American thriller writing. Then, at some point, he abandoned television and had more free time so he decided to try his hand at writing this novel. He began to work out the plot. He chose to set it in Monte Carlo because it was a place he knew well and also because no one had ever set such a bloody thriller in the principality of Monte Carlo.
Being the first book he thought it would also be the only one so he put everything he liked into it. He started writing pretty fast because he was very systematic. He got up in the morning and had breakfast then he would write until the afternoon and then he would resume the text to reread it and see if there was any change, something to change. Thus was born "I kill".
The Pulcinella Film Fest, the international Comedy Festival, takes place every year in Acerra. This year the film “La recipe della mamma” based on a story by Giorgio Faletti won, thanks to Dario Piana, the award for Best Director.
This is a very short story he wrote for a collection that had come out several years earlier. It was a collection in which an element related to the kitchen must have been present. It is a very particular story because it was actually born with great suspense but then inside there is a very notable ironic component. I must say that Dario Piana was a very dear friend of Giorgio. They had also worked together so this great friendship remained and they had always said that they would then want to do something together also in the cinematographic field but for their respective commitments they never succeeded.
Then a few years ago Dario and I met in Milan and started thinking about how to carry out this project. This short film has really given us great satisfaction. They dedicated a special event to him at the Taormina International Film Festival where it was screened out of competition and then later we participated in many competitions around the world. In Chicago we won the prize for best foreign comedy and then we went to several European festivals and many Italian festivals including that of Acerra which I care a lot about.
The latest work of the imagination and talent of Giorgio Faletti is "The last day of the sun", with lyrics and music by Faletti that was produced by her, Roberta Bellesini. He staged this play and took it to New York where it was a tremendous success. Do you want to talk about this show?
I talk about it with great pleasure, above all because this is the very last job to which Giorgio has dedicated himself until he has had the energy. In the summer of 2013 he decided to write a monologue for a very good actress friend of ours named Chiara Buratti. Giorgio would have liked to direct it then, experience the role of theatrical director. He then begins to write this monologue which also consists of seven musical pieces written specifically for this story, a sort of theater, song and music. Then unfortunately Giorgio passed away in July 2014. He had put all his last energies into this work and therefore, after a few months towards the end of 2014 I thought that this could not remain an unfinished job. Exactly one year after his death, we brought the show to the Teatro Alfieri in Asti. There was also this wonderful American experience, we presented the show in New York in a competition in which eight Italian shows are chosen to tell what Italian theater is in New York. Of all the Italian shows that made that competition, ours was chosen and then it was brought to the stages of Manhattan. It was a wonderful and exciting experience.
Perhaps few know that Giorgio Faletti was also a painter and that he was passionate about car racing but also about Ducati and Ferrari. Where did he find the enthusiasm to do everything?
Basically Giorgio was a kid, he had the enthusiasm of a seventeen year old. His pictorial phase is the least known and it was the one that gave him a lot of satisfaction. When he was writing a book or thinking about a film he needed to clear his head, he needed to let go and this he found in painting. This was his way of relaxing, of reconnecting with himself and his emotions.
