Quattro Pareti
Directed by Giada Bossi
Quattro Pareti is the latest heart-wrenching piece directed by Giada Bossi. Shot for Italian musician Arssalendo, we are immediately catapulted into an all too familiar story of death, loss and grief. Take a moment and think about the first time that as a kid you had to face all this. How did you make sense of it all and did it even make sense at all?
Let’s learn more about it with a few questions to Bossi.
Can you tell us how you started collaborating with musician Arssalendo?
Alessandro (ARSSALENDO) and I met in October for a branded content shooting. He was one of the talents involved, and I was the director. But I remember, a few days before the job confirmation - when he still didn’t know I was on the project - he wrote me a dm on Instagram that was more or less the Italian for “Hi! Your works are dope” and that we needed to do something together. And we were on set together a few days after.
This is how I met him, got to know his music, and got obsessed very quickly. He shared with me the new EP he was working on, and Quattro Pareti blew my mind. In the lyrics, there was also a kind of unmeant quote from one of my favorite poems - Your Dog Dies by Raymond Carver.
We started sharing ideas, and we were almost finishing each other sentences and pulling out the references the other had in mind, and we found out we had some common childhood experiences. Joking around, we also discussed doing a blood test cause we were really too aligned. And then went on really smoothly.
You mentioned that the inspiration behind the music video comes from the lyrics in Quattro Pareti “In the long run everything dies, your dog as well”. Can you expand on that and take us through your creative process? Why did you decide to focus specifically on this and how did Arssalendo respond to the idea?
Do you remember the first time you faced the fact that something that once was alive is not there anymore? How did you bump into death?
These specific lines from the song were synthesizing a deep and complex universe. The natural development of life and nature is as beautiful as merciless. Nothing is forever, and everything around us is going to come to an end. But as a child, everything seems eternal. Till the moment you experience it.
The project's core was the elaboration of loss, and I wanted to explore it narratively. I used to put the track in my headphones and listen to it again and again, and always some images come to my mind at some precise points in the music. For example, the scene of Samu in the car, looking out of the window, was there before knowing he would have had the dead dog on his knees.
I involved Tobia Rossi in the project; he's my beloved writing colleague. We are working together on my feature and some short films. He made this project his own, and we worked on it four hands, from the first subject to the last screenplay review the day before the shooting. I feel blessed daily for having his sensible soul and meticulous enthusiasm next to me. What he's constantly repeating to me - I don't remember who this quote is from - is that there's just a way to write a good story: write an ugly one, then fix it. And we did a lot of it until we were happy with it.
We shared the idea in different steps with Alessandro, concept, synopsis, then the final screenplay. And Alessandro was just cool with it, sending out just purely narrative feedback. That was the same with Filippo Patelli, the editor, and Francesca Pavoni, the director of photography, my trusted and scrupulous team.
Making them read and discuss the narrative was fundamental to me, and getting feedback from their perspectives opened us up to new points to fix and rework. And then Alessandro was the first to propose himself as an actor for one of the two protagonists. And I was just impressed by the commitment he put into it.
“The project’s core was the elaboration of loss, and I wanted to explore it narratively.”
The photography and colour grading give us a certain nostalgic and vintage, but also dream-like feeling. Was this your intention and how did you achieve this?
I won’t lie, some of the “choices” we made weren’t actual choices, but you need to make gold out of circumstances when you work on a low-budget and self-financed project. Together with Francesca, we needed to rethink and revise the cinematography approach many times for budget issues trying not to lose focus.
It is a contemporary and dark fairytale. We were looking for a way to capture this dreamy feeling under the bright sun we knew we would have. At the same time, it needed to be vibrant and concrete, particularly for the interactions with the dog, as I wanted the viewer to see it clearly and sharp.
The film is shot then in 16mm, keeping a natural light that makes the greens of nature bloom around the protagonists. Then, of course, we were at the mercy of the rapidly changing weather typical of the Prealps as we shot it in Cunardo, Province of Varese, my childhood place. So there is a kind of melancholy, at least for me, in seeing this story fitting these spaces.
What was the most challenging aspect of bringing this music video to life and how did you overcome it?
Wow, that’s a tricky question. This is actually the most challenging project I have ever done, concerning the problems we needed to overcome and just the big bad luck we had to face. And saying bad luck is a euphemism.
The project was very ambitious for the money we had, and I’m still grateful to the whole team. It wouldn’t be possible without their extra efforts and passion. But for sure, we would still be there shooting now if we didn’t have great performers such as Alessandro and most of all Giulio. Giulio - the kid playing Samu’s role. And finding him was game-changing for this project.
The casting was very long. We needed an eleven-year-old kid acting a challenging role, with many shades in the character development. We did a super wide casting, looking in Milan and Rome. But all the kids coming from agencies weren’t working. But in the end we went for a theatre school in Affori, Milano, where Valeria Pini, the teacher, was doing a fantastic job with young teenagers pushing them to approach acting in a complex and mature way, talking about the character’s intentions and desires. And there I found Giulio. Intelligent, hard worker, observant, quiet, and totally professional. Unique. He kept surprising us until the end of the shooting with his persistence, dedication, and out-of-the-blue blastings to the crew members.
At the end of the day, I have to say that I personally didn’t really overcome anything. Working as a team, having trustworthy human and reliable people next to you is how you get hell solved.
What do you have planned for the future?
I’m still leaving my life three weeks in three weeks, but I actually like this dimension. I’m getting some interesting advertising projects abroad and I keep working on my personal projects at different levels. I’m pretty grounded and cynical (or maybe superstitious?), but I learned that everything is uncertain till the release day, so I’m not keen to mention anything specific, but just exciting times for me :)
Director: Giada Bossi
Writer: Giada Bossi
Writer: Tobia Rossi
Producer: Jacopo Pica
Director Of Photography: Francesca Pavoni
Editor: Filippo Patelli