«Trastwest it was born by chance in Trastevere on a day in the red zone, when in Piazza San Calisto I found myself in front of the scene of a duel between two people armed with bananas. I had my smartphone in my pocket, and I started to turn around ».
April 2020: the lockdown has emptied the streets of Rome (and the world), transforming them into an unreal place, suspended in time, inhumane. Ivano De Matteo is a director, actor and author with a 32-year career behind him who lives another surreal day in Trastevere, a historic neighborhood at the foot of the Gianicolo. Strolling around errands, walk around what looks like an abandoned movie set. He doesn’t have a professional camera with him, but like everyone else he has a smartphone, an iPhone XS from a few years ago.
Struck by the interpretation, De Matteo begins to film the “duelists”, two inhabitants of the neighborhood who usually live in the shadows, on the margins, but who have now taken the stage and lend themselves to the game. It is not the first time that De Matteo uses the smartphone to shoot, but this time it is the beginning of an experience that will lead to the birth of the short film Trastwest, presented today at the Giornate degli Autori, an independent review within the Venice Film Festival. Not bad for a freehand job because “the iPhone was like an extension of my arm”, and entirely post-produced with iMovie, the basic video editing app available for free on Apple products.
«Usually I don’t work with digital – De Matteo confesses – for an ethical question and to impose more discipline on myself and the crew. If you use digital you have no limits, while when you have 30 thousand meters of film, take it or leave it, it means that you have on average only 5 takes per scene and you can only shoot what you need. So everyone is obliged to do less and better – he concludes – and for example the actor must be more prepared to arrive ».
This does not mean that De Matteo is an integralist of analogue: even if he loves “everything about film, especially the grain”, this has not prevented him from making the most of the technologies he had at his disposal to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. immortalize and tell a world usually invisible, but which in the streets emptied by the pandemic had temporarily regained space under the sunlight. And who chose to indulge in De Matteo’s lens perhaps also because, in the familiar and compact form of a smartphone, it looked more familiar and less scary than a professional camera.
“This work is not a reportage or documentary, but an act of love – explains Ivano De Matteo – It is a poem dedicated to this neighborhood and its characters, a narrative that goes on between despair and laughter made possible by a lockdown that here For some people it was like when low tide comes on the beach: it is then that corals, jars and unknown living beings come out ».
Of course, if on the one hand technology helped him, on the other De Matteo had to work a bit: for some shots from above “I had to let a friend who works out at the gym take me on my shoulders” he says, and then during the editing phase “with iMovie I only had three fonts for the titles, and in the absence of a stylus I had a hard time working with precision”. In the absence of a gimbal (device to stabilize the images), he had to swing his arms to get fluid shots, to the point of having to shoot some pieces in apnea “because if you breathe it dances everything”. Yet the result is there and is striking, especially remembering that the iPhone XS brings with it a technology that is now three years old.
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Part of the credit also goes to the soundtrack, composed of two unforgettable songs signed by Ennio Morricone and taken from the film “For a fistful of dollars”, but even here there is a story behind: «The idea was not mine but of duelists – confesses De Matteo – because when I met them in Piazza San Calisto they had put one of these music in the background ». Watching Trastwest, it is immediately clear how images and story are deeply linked, and how this relationship generates a powerful emotional impact on the viewer. One would think that Morricone too would have liked this quote, and perhaps it is precisely for this reason that his heirs authorized the use of the music for the short film: “Since I could not afford the costs for the rights – explains the director – I thought to send him the job to ask for permission. They accepted”.
Trastwest it is a story that took shape by itself, that offered itself to its narrator in the street, one shot at a time. And which then led him into the life of his characters. And in their homes, when they had one. Now De Matteo has taken a liking to it, and although the film remains his great love, the director is still thinking of continuing the story that began with Trastwest, again using the smartphone, “but this time using a few more tools, such as an external microphone or a trolley for shooting on the go, which I would also like to breathe”. In short, we will see some good ones.
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