Street: What in particular drew you to Saviano's book and made you want to turn it into a screenplay? Maurizio Braucci: Before becoming a screenwriter I was a novelist. I collaborated with Roberto Saviano before his book came out, because we have common interests, but my insight is more about the Camorra [Naples' organized crime body] phenomenon. I was involved in the screenplay as a writer and as a natural observer of those realities when Fandango decided to turn the book into a movie. It’s strange to believe, but just before the book was published I told Roberto, “It will become a movie with the direction of my favorite: Matteo Garrone.”
Street: How did you ensure that the screenplay kept things true-to-life? MB: I live in that reality. My first book, The Rotten Sea, is a short novel about a young Camorra member's last day of life. At the same time I was promoting creative social projects with kids living in the hard conditions of the suburbs, so I know how it goes when the Camorra has control. All the stories of Gomorrah are inspired by reality. In 2005, a terrible feud within the major clan of Naples made victims of innocent inhabitants of the city, as the movie shows. The trafficking of toxic waste and the cruelty of the clans against young outlaws are every day occurences in the south of Italy.
Street: The film seemed more concerned with using disparate stories to convey the atmosphere of the Naples and Caserta, rather than trying to clearly tie together or resolve the stories. Was this always your intent? MB: At the beginning we chose the six most representative stories from the book. We built the dramaturgy and the psychology of the characters, because in the book they were absent. We made up a temporary sequence of the stories, and then we wrote each episode separately and changed the order many times until we reached the definitive sequence. You have to think that the stories answer the question “How did it happen?” rather than “What happened?” Therefore they appear as an insight into a terrible world instead of a distant vision of stories that the audience has to contemplate. This was our original intention.
Street: Was there anything from the book that you had to leave out of the screenplay but wish you could have included? MB: Saviano's book is full of stories, so was impossible for us to adapt it in a complete way. One of the stories is about a priest who was killed because he began to talk against the Camorra. After his murder he became a target for calumny, which tried to reduce the respect people had for him. This is a story I would like to have included in the movie, to show that criminality kills people in different ways, not only physically.
Street: In the film there seems to be little interaction between the provincial communities and the outside world. How aware are people in Italy of what goes on in crime communities like the ones depicted in Gomorrah? Do the events that go on in these crime communities have any effect on Italy outside of Naples and Caserta? MB: The Camorra has connections all over Italy and also in other parts of the world. The same is true for all the other organizations, like the Mafia and ‘Ndrangheta, which were born in Southern Italy but now have relationships with others criminalities – Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Nigeria, Turkey, China. The Camorra operates in the region of Campania — of which Naples is the capital — but invests the money gained in illegal trafficking in different sectors of the economy. In Gomorrah, the stories of the toxic waste and of the tailor address the international dimension of this organization. At the same time, the story of Don Ciro, the old man who distributes money to the families of the members of a clan who have been arrested or killed is an example of how the Camorra keeps the people's consent.
Street: Gomorrah is very different from the typical crime film. It's much more dreary, raw and, presumably, more realistic. Did you reference past crime films at all when writing the screenplay or did you purposely approach the film as something different from other crime films? MB: Gomorrah is a fake documentary: the movie seems to be a direct shooting of reality but it is a film, a representation. Films like Goodfellas or The Godfather were not really in our minds when we wrote the screenplay. We come from the Italian tradition of neo-realism, and this is clear in Gomorrah. But, personally, I referred to John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood for his description of the fatal destiny of poor young people living in modern suburbs. I’m sure that the suburbs we depict in the movie are an example of all the parts of the world where people are abandoned to the laws of the violence and of the survival. Our film is a dark fable, where the Camorrists are the ogres, and it is real because our society lets the absurd become real.
