Original subtitles

The image you see, I shot it myself.

It's sitges,

and I'm there

during the shooting of a screwball film

that will lead us all to a miserable end.

It's our last Sunday in sitges.

Today it's palm Sunday. Next Sunday is easter,

and we'll go back to Rome.

I play lucio fulci

in the first film about his life.

As an actor, 've never wanted to play a real character.

They told me, "no worries, fulci's life was a legend anyway, a myth,

half a lie.

So you can do whatever you like.

You can be the fulci that suits you best."

The film director is Danish, his pseudonym is Saigon.

He wants to make a film about the most important moments

of fulci's life and work.

The centro sperimentale,

the films with Toto, sordi, Orson welles,

and the more violent films. The fame, the obscurity,

and his premature death.

The first scene will be about an aged fulci, alienated from the film industry,

while he's shooting his testimonial film,

a cat in the brain.

You need to start from the end

to work your way back to the start.

I am here in the makeup room

where they are turning me into fulci.

I'm thinking I should have made a film about John belushi.

He was a self-indulgent genius,

someone like me.

But once again I've been told not to worry,

because fulci was a genius

and he had many passions.

I guess "passions" is a euphemism

for vices,

addictions,

destruction.

The film director asked me to talk to those who knew fulci.

He's sending me with a production crew to do interviews.

I'll study and investigate,

like all the good actors,

because in the end

I will find out

who lucio fulci really was.

Saigon told me that if I want to find the real fulci,

I need to speak to his younger daughter,

Camilla.

Everybody believed her to be dead,

to have vanished,

impossible to meet.

Really?

Sorry, I speak Roman dialect like dad.

Romanesco is the language of cinema.

Camilla overwhelms me with her tales.

Life has been hard on her,

but fuck me, she can make you laugh!

We'd started to shoot the house of clocks

and there was this handsome model,

Keith Van hoven.

In the early days, in the evenings after shooting,

I dated this beautiful guy.

He put his hand on my shoulder

as we were leaving the hotel.

Then I heard, amid the murmuring of the lobby,

a voice.

"Good catch, Camilla!"

That was my father,

in front of the whole crew.

Camilla, how much do you miss your father?

My father is always with me,

even now.

For my father, I was like a mom,

as well as a girl and a daughter.

Sometimes he would remember that.

I miss him a lot,

even now while I'm talking about him.

I was born under the luckiest star.

I was tiny, 1.7 kilos, but I came through okay.

I lived in a beautiful house in via zandonai,

a prestigious, prosperous area in Rome.

I went to schools run by nuns.

Dad was a left-winger,

and his daughter went to the nuns. Can you imagine!

Life was good though.

Mom worked at the cinema critics' union.

Dad said she was stunning,

but only from the hips up.

From the hips down,

she had legs like those of a table,

meaning no ankles.

Usually it takes some time before kids understand their parents' jobs.

When did you figure out what your father's job was?

With don't torture a duckling, I more or less understood

that dad was a film director.

I remember the set and the lunch bags,

my first lunch bag.

Saigon says that the beyond is the pinnacle of fulci's films.

It's unique and different from all his other films.

This film begins in 1927, the year of fulci's birth.

In the prologue, an innocent painter

gets killed, comes back to life,

and creates a fascinating, yet infernal world.

Saigon told me to start there to get familiar with fulci's pictures.

By 1981, fulci had already directed 40 films,

but it's at that time that the true lucio fulci emerged.

From zombie

to the New York ripper,

a handful of films

over three or four years.

In my opinion they are the center,

the heart of fulci"s cinema.

Somehow they are the beginning of his story

and the end too.

They embody everything that fulci

is today regarded for as a director.

Nothing shows the essence of fulci

like that handful of films.

Somehow lucio, at some point in his life,

decided that he

should start to tell his story.

Whether true or false, I don't care.

He started to tell a story

around which these movies revolved.

Davide pulici of "nocturno cinema"

will be my guide through lucio fulci's films.

His voice is harsh, unconventional,

yet he knows where to find true beauty.

Camilla told me that in each of her father's films

there's a piece of their family's life.

It's like a mosaic

that we, as an audience, will never be able to reconstruct.

Can you tell of a bad argument you had with your dad?

No, we didn't argue much.

But there was that one time

when dad, at 60 years old, bought a Vespa.

Well,

I was a bit worried, of course.

He drove the Vespa

wearing a red baron's helmet

to go with his beard.

He goes out with this scooter

and comes back home almost at once.

I was dead worried

something must have happened.

But he was angry more than anything else, very angry.

"You didn't tell me anything!"

“What?”

“Here you go again!”

“What?”

“Listen, I stopped at the traffic light.

As I was about to take off again, a chap shouted at me:

'Boccio! Where do you think you're going!"

What is 'boccio?"

Boccio in Roman dialect means

loopy old sod.

He felt like a loser.

Scholars assert that even in his films with Franco and ciccio,

with celentano and Mina,

you can see fulci's trademark.

They say those films are as good as the horror films,

although on an english fulci fan page

somebody wrote,

"you can remove 35 out of all his films without missing anything at all."

Like an uncut diamond, the rough must be removed.

Nobody in Germany, Japan, or France

buys a DVD of a fulci comedy.

Yet his horror films, even the worst,

are released in deluxe editions.

I don't think it's necessary

to watch all of fulci"s films

to understand his greatness.

I believe that a good part of his filmography,

especially the early films

from the 50s,

or partially from the 60s,

I don't think these films

are essential to grasp fulci.

Enrico vanzina is one of the masters of the Italian comedy.

I decided to meet him not only because his father was fulci"s master,

but also because I'm interested in what he remembers of lucio fulci.

Also his extraordinary ability to portray iconic characters of Italian cinema,

and his memories as a child

as well as a fiimmaker.

In the 50s, making movies was a serious affair,

indeed because it wasn't serious.

A bunch of jolly good fellows

with experience in comics

had shifted to the film industry.

I think dad was one of the leaders of this group.

They invented a film genre,

in which a serious topic was depicted in a light manner.

This is what the Italian-style comedy is about, in a nutshell.

Fulci was in his element there

because he was an intellectual,

a very complicated person.

He was a funny communist.

Dad loved this intellectual side of fulci,

because dad was like him.

They were two guys partial to comedy

with a more serious background.

They were very deep,

very well educated.

So they found in their relationship

something absolutely special,

because fulci wasn't just the assistant director.

He was also an author.

Dad was immensely fond of lucio.

He passed this fondness to me and my brother Carlo.

We used to see him often as kids,

because he used to come to our home a lot.

We had a sort of crush on lucio fulci,

because he was like a comics character,

physically as well.

As kids we were mad about him.

Sergio salvati was the most important cinematographer of fulci's films.

He's the man who shaped the images

and visions of fulci's world.

He's one of the greatest men of Italian cinema.

One day I was at the camera, waiting for the lights

and my chief operator,

when two people approached bolognini, the director.

We were in a hall, they were at the counter.

As I'm sitting at the camera

I heard them talking about cinema,

chatting away.

At some point, one of them asked bolognini,

“who's someone among the young directors

who can give us something good?”

I heard with my own ears mauro bolognini

say, “there's only one who can write and make nice films.

His name is lucio fulci."

My mother liked lucio fulci,

but she was also a bit bothered by him

because lucio fulci smoked a lot.

When he used to come to our place to work on screenplays

he made a mess with the ash.

So my mother used to lay newspapers

in my father's study under the armchair where fulci would sit.

He had to sit right there, without complaining,

with all the newspapers around the armchair to avoid any mess.

He was the idol of a guy called otello.

Lucio fulci had an mg,

and when he was leaving the screenplay meeting,

otello would run to the terrace

to see fulci getting into this mg cabrio

and roaring off just like James Bond.

Every time he saw him pulling away, he used to say,

"what a force, Dr. fulci!"

If fulci had died in 1966,

so to speak,

with 15 films under his belt,

more than all the films kubrick made in his whole life,

nobody would have remembered him.

Perhaps because pain hadn't come yet.

Pain, with all it stirs,

with all the cinema it can create.

In her childhood memories, Camilla often told me about sandro bitetto,

a very important person for her family, especially for her father.

I worked with fulci from 1969 to 1974

as a personal assistant.

I used to do a bit of everything,

from paying bills to script boy,

until, bit by bit,

he introduced me to the film industry

as a production secretary of his films.

Judging by his manner when I came into his life,

he gave me the impression of

being a messy guy

in need of someone who would tidy him up.

The first year I was employed by him, in 1969,

there was the tragic death of fulci's wife.

She sent the daughters to the pictures with her brother,

And she remained alone.

She did it on purpose,

what she actually

managed to do.

How did she die?

She died with the gas.

I remember that day.

I came home first, with my uncle, my mom"s brother, by car.

We'd been to the pictures with him.

She'd sent everybody away.

I remember ringing the bell, but nobody answered.

All at once they put me in the car

and drove me to the entrance. They took me

into the watchman booth, where I stayed for hours.

All I could hear were the sirens.

Then they took us to my grandma Lucia, dad's mom,

both my sister and I.

They didn't tell us mum was dead.

They told us she had gone to Switzerland.

He never overcame this tragedy. He was always

very, very...

He never came out of this sense of

guilt or...

More than once he did tell me about his pain,

how much he missed his wife.

After her death, he lived for his girls.

He always loved them very much.

Not now, but when I was young, I was mom's spitting image.

As usual, he would be quite ironic about it.

He used to say, "you look like your mother, without the legs of a table."

Fulci's three thrillers, one on top of the other/perversion story,

don't torture a duckling and a lizard in a woman's skin

are good films,

well directed.

But I object to what has been said

by many, that those films are the secret essence of fulci film-making.

About don't torture a duckling,

you can read everywhere these incredibly

disproportionate reviews

on things fulci allegedly hinted at.

Sin, innocence, purity and the like,

stuff I don't give half a fuck about.

Because I think the power of don't torture a duckling, for instance,

lays in a few scenes.

There's the scene of the maciara,

when the maciara gets killed with a chain,

which, not by coincidence,

will be replicated at the start of the beyond.

I am much more interested in referential quotes like this

than in all the boring discussions about these movies,

objectively useless.

Dad loved dogs and that was the "dog film."

He didn't like snow. Six months in the snow,

he made the first white fang

with an enormous effort... two units,

plus a sled dogs' race.

He was asked to shoot the sequel straight after.

The first one wasn't out yet.

Dad wasn't sure at all. "No, no, I don't wanna make another dog film."

Because of the snow, etc.

Back then, he was married to a German woman, his second wife.

He signed the contract, but the first white fang wasn't out yet.

“I'll make it, it's not about the money, I don't care.

This is the last time I'm doing something like this."

White fang was released and it was the great success that we know.

I went to visit him. The German woman was there.

My sister was with me.

The German woman had pekingese dogs.

We often went up the perennial glacier where dad was shooting.

There was this incredible light on the glacier,

and dad said that the German was so selfish

that we were there without sunglasses,

while she put sunglasses on the pekingese.

I re-watched white fang recently. It's a good film,

don't get me wrong. It's skillfully directed by fulci.

But I don't think in a film like white fang

these explosions of

violence or cruelty,

the ability to overthrow genres, I can't see all that in white fang.

I can see it much more in the four of the apocalypse,

another film of that time.

This thing about the terrorist of genres,

that retroactively labels every film by lucio,

makes me laugh.

If Sergio salvati is the image of fulci's film-making,

fabio frizzi is the greatest composer of fulci"s film soundtracks.

He's the son of fulvio frizzi, a big distributor who also worked with fulci.

Fabio talks about his deep relationship with fulci with a light touch.

Lucio was one of very few who'd often talked about

this nice relationship he had with my father.

He described it, most of all,

as a matter of feeling valued during difficult moments.

Lucio didn't have an easy private life,

therefore he felt the support and the complicity of this prestigious distributor

who encouraged him to be productive again,

to come out with and believe in something nice.

Can you tell me about your first music for fulci in the four of the apocalypse?

It was a horror film disguised as a western, in true fulci style.

The template music already existed,

support music for editing.

We were struck by the fact that the producers decided to use

a Dylan song that would have started any music composer off on the wrong foot,

“knockin' on heaven's door,"

at the end of the film. It was a rough cut.

I was worried about meeting this guy,

as he had the reputation of being rather grumpy.

The idea was to go along with the intention of the film,

not to have a traditional wild west film soundtrack

with trombones and horns,

but to have a different musical tale,

with music closer to the local environment.

I was lucky because I love the west coast in general,

not just Dylan, but also Crosby, stills & Nash and many other bands.

When the film was released, and the soundtrack,

we were all very proud of what we had done.

And lucio had the opportunity to work with people he didn't dislike at all.

Paolo malco acted only in two of fulci's films,

but he was the only actor with whom the director had a bond of true friendship.

Malco says they were a strange pair.

They went through thick and thin together.

It would have been a dream to be there

on one of their many adventures.

The first day of the house by the cemetery

was not a good day.

We were shooting in a small town near Boston, called Concord.

The scene was about me and my family

coming from New York by car.

As we were approaching, just before action,

I had the bad idea to take off my jacket.

“Action!” I'm getting there,

and I come out of the car in my shirt.

“Stop!”

“What are you doing?”

An unbearable scream.

I was crushed and said, “that's not a good start."

“Did I tell you to take off your jacket?

I didn't! So just do as you are told!”

Then I looked at him.

“If this is your start, we can call it a day because I'll take the first flight out!

Nobody has ever treated me like this!

Is that clear?"

At that point lucio,

grumbling with his pipe in his mouth,

smiled at me.

On that day, an amazing friendship was born!

As a film director,

he knew his stuff very well.

He wasn't messy.

He knew the script inside out.

He'd written it, of course, but

he knew it, and every position of the camera.

He would immediately say, “camera here!"

He was a messy person in his private life,

but a perfectionist in his work.

Lucio had an unbridled, passionate relationship with the camera.

He knew exactly where to position it.

When he said “let's put a zoom there,” or “let's put on a 25” or “a 38,"

He knew exactly what he was talking about.

The psychic is interesting because of

some extraordinary self-quotations.

The first one is the most glaring of all.

It's the suicide of Virginia's mother from the cliff,

which is identical to

the scene of Marc porel's death in don't torture a duckling.

With a tacked-on mannequin,

clearly a fake,

fulci turned it into an extraordinarily beautiful sequence,

even if, before our eyes,

right there is a mannequin.

Self-quoting, before fulci became aware of being fulci,

is an extremely thorny issue, in my opinion.

It's like the unconscious desire to hit the audience

with his past life.

Today we are shooting some promos for the film.

Saigon is explaining what we are going to do.

We start with an aged fulci

acting in a cat in the brain.

We start with a mock, then we become something else, like fulci used to do.

We switch to fulci and his actresses,

the man on one side, the images he created on the other.

His views on the actresses, his views on his art,

on the beautiful women he longs for, and on his filmmaking.

A woman gets killed with a hatchet.

Her face is split in two.

Another one is strangled.

Another one

is hanged.

Another one is cut into pieces with a chainsaw.

Another one is drowned in boiling water,

her throat torn to pieces by an enraged cat.

Burned to death,

buried alive,

tortured,

stabbed,

sawn in two,

crucified,

beheaded.

In my early films, women were totally wild,

Full of life,

beautiful and innocent,

like life in the 60s,

like my life at the time.

In my thrillers, they became shady.

Victims, as well as executioners,

mirrors of my dreams,

and of my fears.

In the New York ripper,

I told of the beauty and the dangers of being a woman.

It's my most cruel and

painful film.

I love women.

It is for them I make pictures.

In fulci's movies, sexuality always appears in a quite deviant way.

Lesbianism is at the base of a lizard in a woman's skin.

I can't think of anything more exciting than the scene where florinda bolkan

gets closer to Anita strindberg on that red bed.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think fulci has ever revealed in his films

this sexual frame of mind.

He was consumed with desire because he loved women on the set,

when they were acting, playing any good or bad part of the script.

I met directors who would say, "these are mine and nobody else's,”

to us youngsters, and we had to step aside.

They would say it out loud,

but he never said anything like that.

I met a girlfriend he had for some years.

He treated her nicely.

But women were unsatisfied, because he didn't spend much time with them.

He wasted time talking too much.

Lucio was a skillful talker,

he could talk about everything.

We were in Sarajevo to shoot aenigma.

We stayed at the holiday inn, the hotel

where all the journalists lodged during the war in the Balkans.

The interiors were all glass.

Who did I catch slipping away? And I called everybody, of course!

Dad, who was sneaking in to the room of one of those very young girls.

He shamelessly denied it and went on denying.

We had seen him going into the room, and he didn't come out.

I was patrolling outside the room, but he kept on denying it.

Did he ever fall in love with one of his actresses?

He did fall in love with an actress

who worked with him on several occasions,

but she was very young, very pretty,

and had a boyfriend.

One day I was in a stationery shop with dad. He never went to a stationery shop!

I found him at the till holding a little Teddy with “Christmas love” written on it.

He had gone totally daft.

He would sit next to me on my bed

and say, “Camilla, shall I call or shall I not?”

“Will she call or will she not?” acting like a 12 year-old, and he was 60!

You only told me about young girls,

but what about “old woman 1” and “old woman 2,” who are they?

That's not easy, you know. “Old woman 1” and “old woman 2,”

in his address book they replaced the actual names under “v.”

“Old woman 2” was a mystery to me,

maybe because she wasn't exactly attractive.

I wouldn't say ugly, but she wasn't beautiful.

I don't know why dad had something with this lady.

“Old woman 1” was a very beautiful woman, although of a certain age,

a famous psychotherapist.

There were many anecdotes about dad, I doubt they were all true.

I don't believe dad would have gone for 'dances.'

you know, in psychotherapy they do these sort of 'dances, ' like yoga.

I can't see him doing that.

Dad couldn't lift up a finger.

And there was this thing,

a sex thing,

where she would tie him to a table.

C'mon... dad didn't use to reveal intimate details,

but he said that this woman would tie him to a table.

One day he called me up and said,

“I absolutely need to speak to you."

He came for dinner as usual

and said, “I met this hot chick."

“Where, who, how?”

“Stunning, young.”

I said, “lucio!”

“Two-meters tall!”

“Yeah, right, two meters...”

“Two meters!

She's a stunning Caribbean model.”

“So? What do you wanna do with her?”

“I told her I want to marry her."

The next day we were off to New York to shoot the New York ripper.

We got to New York,

and took a couple of days to settle before shooting.

He said to me, “now,

come down to the lobby because she's coming.

I called her, and she's coming from the Caribbean.”

The taxi pulled in,

stuffed to the roof with trunks, suitcases and all that.

Lucio looked at me and turned white.

The following day, he took me aside and said,

“listen, I need you to do me a favor."

“Okay,” I said.

“You have to call me up from your hotel room."

Our rooms were as follows:

My room,

the cinematographer gigi kuveiller's,

and lucio's room.

“You have to pretend to by my lawyer,

a sicilian,

and you have to speak up

because I'll place the receiver so that she can hear!"

I rang lucio's room.

“Hello lucio!

I'm the lawyer."

And he goes, "hello, all good?"

“Your wife is not gonna Grant you the divorce. You cannot remarry."

"What?" he said.

“Nope, you cannot remarry, forget about it!"

The day after, on the set, gigi kuveiller,

who we called 'Hitchcock' because he was always very collected,

looked at us and went,

“you have to explain something to me.

Last night I was in my room,

and I heard lucio talking to his lawyer.

But I also heard the lawyer talking back to him, how is that possible?"

And I said, “gigi, that was me, speaking sicilian."

“So how did it go with the girl?"

And lucio said,

“I paid for her flight back to the Caribbean with Columbia airlines.”

“What did she say?”

“She said,

'tu es un misérable."

Sergio salvati's life has been luckier than lucio fulci's.

He had his wife berenice sparano at his side his whole life.

Berenice met fulci before salvati.

She worked with him as a costume designer.

We always got on.

I used to ask him first before doing anything.

"Is it okay if I do this and that?"

He used to say, "il trust you."

And I'd say, "I need to know before going on the set and realizing you don't like it.

It's better to say it beforehand so that we're both free afterward."

One day he called me at de paolis studios

and said, “listen, I don't know what to do,

I have nothing more to wear.”

“What do you mean you have nothing to wear?"

“Look, berenice, please do me a favor. You're the only one I can ask

because you're a good person.

I have no more clean shirts. I don't even know if they are clean or not.

I took a full suitcase, please see what you can do."

This softened me tremendously,

because I realized he didn't have anybody else

to count on.

I felt sorry for this man,

because I realized his loneliness,

despite being a lively man

full of savoir vivre.

"I've filled my 64 years of life with women, life, stuff.

I'm an absolute misogynist.

I grew up looking at

the menstrual pads of my mother, my aunt, and my

grandma who brought me up and financially supported me.

I fathered women,

I had women,

therefore misogyny had to be part of my life.

C'mon!"

I imagined your house differently.

I was almost afraid of you,

based on your films, the way you interpreted them.

Not anymore.

Fabrizio de angelis, the producer of most of the films

on which we are now focusing,

was in my opinion unintentionally, yet necessarily, instrumental

to the fulfillment of fulci's destiny.

Perhaps de angelis had no idea

where they were going.

He set the basic conditions

for fulci to be free to shoot these films the way he wanted.

I've very often heard this thing about

these films having great potential,

if only there were more money and equipment.

That's not how we're supposed to look at them by any means.

Those films were released like that because they were supposed to be exactly that way.

He loved gory scenes, full of blood.

I remember this make-up man, his name was,

Franco di girolamo,

saying,

"I don't know how much blood I have to bring today,

because he always asks me to put on a lot."

This is the genre he loved the most,

maybe because of his inner pain,

maybe because of other factors.

On the outside, he would hide these feelings

but on the inside, they were there.

More than once, when I went with him

to sperlonga, where his wife was from,

he shared this pain with me.

One day, on the first or second day of shooting,

we were at de paolis studios in Rome.

We were all busy with zombie.

We were laughing because the extras had to move around

in a clumsy way. They were all keen to play the part,

bless them.

They were awfully made up as zombies.

He came from behind and asked for the wing with all the zombies lined up

to be opened.

When you see that scene, he's the one who indicated to everyone what to do,

with the head like this, slowly moving forward.

And we were all astonished.

The entire crew stopped for half an hour, as they all wanted to see.

After zombie

and its success,

de angelis figured that dad

would make him a lot of money.

But he noticed dad wasn't that happy and he couldn't understand why.

They used to say, “we'll make you do something else." Other producers,

perhaps they would have paid him less,

and dad was always afraid to ask.

It's just not who he was.

I'm exactly the same, I get dead shy.

Zombie was like an athanor,

a furnace containing a mix of different components all thrown in.

A blend of single elements, apparently all quite wobbly,

yet nicely blending together to generate this extraordinary film,

a horror film with almost a touch of western.

But most of all, an incredibly colorful and bright movie.

Even the color of the blood is beautiful in zombie.

The zombie soundtrack is definitely one of the strangest,

because it's like a "making-of." While my idea was taking shape,

the theme of the eye

actually sprang up from my love

for the bridge in sgt. Pepper's "a day in the life,"

something that for me is still fundamental to this day.

The descriptive capacity of the melody is Paramount, even in a horror movie.

You can't just have noises, or induce fear with sound effects.

I believe we all have a sort of switch inside of us.

If you can magically manage to press it,

it puts you in a deeply reflective mode.

On the set of city of the living dead,

both as an actor and as an assistant,

there was the young Michele soavi.

Fulci said that soavi was his only possible heir.

Today, Michele soavi is one of the most important Italian film directors.

Films are often shot in sequences out of chronological order.

Therefore, on my first day of shooting

I already had to be made up as a zombie,

even though that was the last scene of the film.

The first time I saw fulci in full action

was around 3 pm, for my scene's rehearsal.

At one point I looked at him, in my zombie makeup,

and fulci said,

"why are you looking at me? Go to your spot!"

Good morning, lucio fulci! Welcome to the set!

I do remember him as a grumpy man,

like everybody used to say.

The crew was fairly terrified of him.

He especially picked on the main actress, antonella interlenghi,

not only because she was the daughter of a famous actor,

but also because she was a bit of a prima Donna.

I remember his almost sadistic attitude

during a scene where someone,

I can't remember who,

had to put worms in her mouth or something,

and fulci wanted to do it himself.

Another time, in a night scene

there was the role of a doctor,

with just a couple of cues.

Fulci didn't like him because he was bad.

He started to shout and tell everybody to fuck off.

He said, “I'll be the doctor.”

He didn't even know one cue, nor a smidge of english,

so instead of saying “2, 3, 4, 5, 6,” to be dubbed afterwards,

he started to tell everybody to fuck off,

here and there.

"Go to hell!" And so on.

He stormed off with this briefcase, knowing full well

he was going to dub his own voice.

His verbal outrage was just

his way to get his emotions out of his system.

Has he ever praised you?

Maestro fulci did once give me a star, I think,

not as an actor but as a camera assistant.

We were shooting in a derelict house with a lot of wind effects.

There were some enormous fans,

and at some point the wind blew a paper sheet onto a window,

covering the view.

Action had already started though, so I leaped out like a cat

before the camera could frame it, and I snatched that thing off.

The maestro looked at me, after shooting.

“Well done, soavi!”

I think that was the first medal the maestro awarded me.

When my agent introduced me to Saigon,

he told me that the guy had written "the new movie by Saigon"

on the poster of his second film.

When people await the release of your new film, it means you count.

It took fulci over 20 years worth of filmmaking

before having that written on a movie poster.

The mystery of the beyond is the mystery of one color

that tibetans would identify as the color of the bard.

It's a mix of grey, light blue and turquoise.

That's the color of the infinity

which the protagonists walk into at the end of the film.

But it's also the mystery of an 'absolute' film.

In the Latin meaning of the word, absolutus, it means "released, freed."

It's a film freed from everything.

When he asked me to do the beyond,

I was petrified.

I didn't know what to do.

We managed to represent the beyond with nothing,

nothing at all, just a bit of sand, water, and the heat from the lamps on the Bridges.

We spent the entire filming thinking about what the afterlife might look like.

None of us could answer that. The set designer, the editor,

myself, lucio, none of us.

What is the beyond?

Then I had an idea.

I worked flat out for days, on my breaks, in the evenings, with the crew technicians,

the camera assistant, and two electricians,

to try and work out how to do it.

The soundtrack of the beyond is complex.

It's made of many things, and characters,

and different emotions clearly spelled out one by one.

The out-of-tune piano was inevitable, but the idea came by chance

while we were on the set.

Emily was rehearsing her walk through the house, and I was visiting the set.

Like a kid, I saw an old piano,

opened it, and started to fiddle with it during a break.

Obviously it was totally out of tune, as it was just a piece of the set design.

Lucio heard it and said, “that's it, fabio. That's just what I need."

That's how the idea came out to write this crazy thing

that has been making pianists insane ever since

when they play it.

We all think of the afterlife as something grave,

but we very much hope it exists.

That final scene... speaking of Sergio salvati, who I not only admire

but I'm also very fond of, he's a first-class artist.

It hits me every time I watch it, even when I play it in concert.

I have it right in front me, and when it reaches that point,

it gets me. It moves me, because the great magic of a finished film

is that you feel as if you were in another place.

That's a scene which has always swept me away to that place.

The color of the sky John and Lisa walk towards, stayed inside me so deeply

that every time I look up and I see that sky,

that for me is the sky of the beyond.

It takes me back to the same mysterious place

the two blind protagonists walk towards.

Dad was wonderful with kids.

He loved them,

especially with my nephew

gabriele, aka lele,

a beloved nephew.

He would roll on the floor with lele, do things he'd never done before with me.

He had a very special bond with lele,

a very strong one in his life.

His boat named "antonilla,"

antonella and Camilla,

was renamed "lele."

The second boat was named "lele dui,"

because my nephew used to say "lele dui" to indicate his 2 years of age.

Then, when lele couldn't stay with us anymore,

for various reasons,

"ex lele."

I never fully grasped fulci's relationship with kids,

but I don't think it was a plain one at all.

You can tell he had something with kids, something very violent inside of him

that revives with the images of kids.

Although in the end kids survive and are the only ones coming out of the inferno.

Freudstein's extraordinary features in the house by the cemetery

were meant to look like

a sort of former union soldier with the head and the body of an insect.

And the end, where catriona is trying to get out

through that narrow gap that would not budge,

that stuff is incredible.

It's the sum of fulci's raging cruelty and savagery,

like perhaps never before seen in his films.

One of the things I loved about fulci

was his hedgehog hair.

In those days there were shops where you could buy cuckoo clocks, and little dolls

and teddies with fulci-like hair.

We found two or three of those, absolutely marvelous.

Dad bought them for fulci, and it was funny to see him with those teddies,

because they really looked like his sons.

It made me and Carlo laugh out loud.

There is a moment in the psychic

where the revelation of a mystery is hidden in the date of a newspaper.

It features a picture with a woman in the foreground

and, behind her, a young woman riding.

That young woman is Camilla fulci.

Camilla and her father shared a big passion for horse riding.

Dad's love of horses began

in more innocent times,

when the partner of my grandma, dad's mom,

renato sassoli,

used to have a racing stable.

My dad used to live with them as a boy.

That passion started again when I came along.

I started horse riding when I was seven and a half,

and he was always there.

He used to come and see me, and he was very proud.

He would have bought a horse for me if he could afford it.

"Me, fat with a pipe.

Camilla, our little one,

she was ten years old."

Perhaps fulci's passion for horses was something aristocratic

for a director of popular films.

It became a legacy to pass on to his younger daughter,

A passion that stayed with him until his last days,

through thick and thin.

Lucio was always happy amongst horses in any scene on the set.

He truly loved them, and used to call them by name.

On the set of silver saddle he used to show the actor giuliano Gemma

exactly how to ride, how to vault onto a horse.

Lucio loved horse race betting.

Camilla told me about plenty of moments in her life, back in her horse racing days,

about her trips with her father to buy horses.

Out of all those episodes, needless to say,

her horse riding accident is the one that hit me the most.

It was a life-changer, for her and the whole family.

“Back then Camilla had been riding for a year.

She was still too little to be a rider,

and she was not as brave as she would be later on, unfortunately.”

I used to ride horses. We had racing horses.

Unfortunately I would also ride freshly trained horses,

not yet fully tamed.

One morning, I fell from a thoroughbred.

Dad was there that morning.

A gate was left open by mistake,

and the horse skidded at 60 km/h.

I was thrown off and broke the fence with my back.

Dad and everybody else came running.

I wasn't crying. I still had my full helmet on.

I felt as if my legs were bent.

The first thing I managed to say to dad and the instructor,

I remember that one thing very well.

“L broke my back."

Then I couldn't remember anything else.

I do remember the hospital, the plaster corset,

and dad always being there.

He was in tears when he told us, on the set.

We learned about the accident, and her being taken to the hospital.

He was crying, and I don't know if he said something bad about horses.

I remember he burst out in front of everybody.

Before I left in 1976, I called him up to say goodbye,

and when I phoned him

I learned about Camilla's tragic news, her fall from the horse and the paralysis.

I was shocked.

I still am to this day.

Dad dreamed twice of having his hair cut.

He used to tell us this story

about a dream he'd had about having his hair shaved.

After that, my mom died.

Then he dreamed of having his sideburns cut,

and that's when I fell.

“Camilla's first style jumping, a strutted, dignified ride.”

Miraculously, Camilla was able to walk again for many years,

until she was hit by a relentless disease

that left its Mark on her forever.

The New York ripper was the only film that truly disturbed me,

for the practice of violence on bodies. You could really feel it,

and still can, if you re-watch it.

Fulci's rage in the way

he represented the violence,

even nastiness, was almost linkable to

some resentment fulci had against beautiful women.

The main character, the duck, the murderer, is a father who kills

because his daughter is rotting, bedridden in a hospital bit by bit,

to say it as things were.

Who knows how much there is of Camilla in the daughter of the ripper.

Was fulci making those films to exorcise his pain for his daughter's accident?

The original plot of the movie

was about a murderer who would kill because of mental issues.

Fulci changed this. The ripper was not mentally insane,

it was the unfairness of his daughter's misfortune that drove him to kill.

I'd just finished school,

and dad said, “listen,

what do you wanna do now? Keep on studying or work?”

Just like that, Roman style.

I didn't have to think too long about it.

“I want to work.”

I was curious about cinema. I had seen so much of it,

but I'd never really been in it.

I wanted to know what pictures were all about, what dad was giving his whole life to.

If I hadn't gone into cinema, my dream would have been to be a vet,

or many other things,

like a horsemaster,

going to the states and specializing. That was my dream.

But I have no regrets whatsoever,

absolutely none.

It's the nicest job in the world.

Rome 2033 - the fighter centurions,

that was a circus!

I remember the steps inside helios film.

I remember going up and down with scripts, folders and stuff.

That was the true understanding of filmmaking,

the chaos and the beauty of it.

That wasn't just fiddling around with papers.

It was a sequence of meaningful moments, nice.

You said that your father was obsessed with being on top of things.

What does that mean?

I've always had this thing in my head about getting the time right.

It's difficult to get it right though.

Dad used to say, "look, that guy is not on top of things."

In his opinion, I was on top of things.

We were shooting murder rock in Rome.

I was approached by the production staff.

“Camilla, would you like to go to new York, unpaid, only a daily allowance?”

I didn't let them finish the question.

I was ready in no time.

On the plane we bumped into enrico vanzina. I was introduced to him

because dad had a nice bond with the sons of steno, his great master.

He adored him, and was always very grateful to him.

He had a nice relationship with them, because

he'd spent time with them over the years.

We last bumped into each other on that famous plane.

Fulci himself used to tell this story. It happened

by chance. We didn't know he was on our plane.

A total coincidence. It was emotional,

because I used to know him when I was a boy, and now we

were on the same plane and I'd become a film-maker too.

In those few words we exchanged, in the fondness we showed to each other,

with a moving handshake and maybe a pat,

there was a whole history of humanity.

After murder rock, something happened

in a very trivial way.

Dad had a heart attack.

I took him to the gemelli polyclinic to have surgery.

We were waiting for this famous surgeon, Dr. baruffi,

to return from his work in Baltimore

to perform this very complicated surgery.

I believe it was the first of its kind in Italy,

the reconstruction of half of dad's heart.

We were all very happy and optimistic,

but then the wait became longer and longer.

He had to assess whether to wake him up, he was all intubated.

When Dr. baruffi came out of the intensive care ward,

he took me to one side.

I sensed something was wrong.

He said, "look Camilla, it's serious, we need to operate again."

Right then, when baruffi told me that,

I saw death standing before me. It was a great blow to me.

It was like facing death, my death.

He told me he had to have open-heart surgery.

He said it with his usual irony,

to disguise what was coming, especially to himself.

Before and after the operation he thought he wasn't going to make it. It was hard,

very hard. I actually thought he wasn't going to make it.

When eventually everything went well, the operation and all,

he had a stroke of bad luck. A damned blood transfusion

gave him viral hepatitis.

When dad had a heart attack,

he didn't want me to tell anybody

he was in the hospital, not a word.

He said to me, “Camilla, I don't want anybody

in the film industry knowing I'm not well.

I'm afraid they're not gonna let me work anymore."

It's sad, but I think only he knew why.

Our lives went separate ways as lucio had a break.

We were apart for a while, not because we wanted to be,

but for work logistics, because he was making films back to back.

“L'occhio del testimone” was the first book about lucio fulci,

the only one published when he was still alive.

Michele romagnoli was 20, dreaming of becoming a filmmaker,

and ended up becoming lucio fulci's biographer.

That's what the maestro used to call Michele.

Michele hasn't spoken about his relationship with fulci since,

but he has very generously decided to do it today with me.

I set off to Rome with the intention of attending

the filmmaking school and meeting lucio fulci.

He agreed to meet me.

My excuse was an interview for the presentation of voices from beyond.

Then fulci began to phone me often.

He used to say, “romagnoli, are you scratching your belly?”

In the way we say it in bologna.

I wanted to keep this relationship going and try to see him as much as possible,

because he was a real mentor to me.

He taught me how to get around on the set and many filmmaking tricks.

But I couldn't justify this mentoring anymore, so I told him

I wanted to write a book about him.

He said, “Michele, it's not a good deal for you. I'm not dead yet."

The first film after dad's illness was the devil's honey,

shot in Barcelona,

in sitges.

After the surgery, during the film production,

he said to me, "Camilla, I'm so scared!"

He had a tiny laser incision.

You could hardly see it.

I came out with some foundation to cover it, and nobody noticed.

He was nervous, but it was all good in the end.

Here I'm shown with a beard and a coat bought at sitges,

and a hat bought in Barcelona. Successful shopping in Spain!

Camilla, have you ever thought of becoming a film director?

- He gave me a script once, the title was nhf: No human factor.

A nice, beautiful idea,

it still sounds fresh today, easily doable, even now.

It was a fantasy film, and could be turned into horror if you wanted it to,

horror or somehow violent.

You could do anything with that film, the script was truly versatile.

He said that it was a female film. He used to say that some movies are female.

That's perhaps one of my few regrets,

maybe the only regret I've ever had in my life,

but I didn't feel ready for it.

It was too big of a challenge, a Titanic one.

I really couldn't do it.

Such a shame, as I regret it now.

What did your father say when you decided not to make the film?

Nothing,

nothing...

How did you tell him?

I told him I wasn't up for it.

At that time I wasn't up for it.

What did he say?

Absolutely nothing, that's the problem.

Fulci's following movies were like a deflating balloon,

and I can't find an explanation for that.

The comparison is often made to Dario argento's films.

Fans turned away at some point,

considering them to be rubbish. But somehow Dario managed to keep

a technical dignity

that fulci, in my opinion, did not.

It isn't so much a change of the directing eye,

but more of the so-called contributing

circumstances, which didn't allow fulci to

make movies like he used to a few years before.

I was keen to have the book out as soon as possible,

because I was sure it could help the image of fulci the filmmaker.

One night he called me up and said,

“romagnoli, I have the title for our book,

it's "the eye of the witness."

Then I knew he understood what I wanted to achieve.

From that point, my interviews were no longer interviews, but long conversations,

from cinema topics to more private chats.

“Romagnoli, you understand me like no one else,

you'll forever be my official biographer."

I have to say that I've always felt like I was,

as I managed to carve out things from that man

that otherwise would have been lost forever.

He appreciated it.

“At least you, romagnoli, discovered me while I'm still alive."

They say that a cat in the brain, today a huge cult film worldwide,

is somehow your film.

Is that true?

This film was a special experiment for dad.

He liked the idea very much.

I took everything on my shoulders. I was the general supervisor, assistant director,

all sorts of jobs! Everything!

And on some occasions

I know that dad praised me a lot for this film.

And I'm obviously pleased that you recognize it too,

but it was a commercial production. I think it came out nicely,

dad acting,

with his usual fixations. "Am I pulling faces?"

Every time he acted in a cameo, he used to say, "Camilla, did I pull faces?"

Dad was a big surprise, even for me, in that film,

because he was a proper actor,

not just a cameo. He amazed me a lot.

At first, he wasn't supposed to play the main role, right?

I think, deep down,

in that case it was like once in a lifetime.

It was a challenge he wanted to take on, make it or break it.

Fulci used to say a cat in the brain was his daughter's production masterpiece.

All the people who worked with Camilla have the nicest words for her.

They say she was professional, efficient, shy, and quiet.

I can't imagine her being silent.

Every time I meet her, she's a torrent of witty words.

She says she now speaks as if her father were speaking on her behalf. I believe her.

Michele romagnoli persuaded fulci

to propose door to silence to producer aristide massaccesi.

Unfortunately, that was fulci's last film.

That time around he believed he could finally make his comeback on the big screen,

because massaccesi's productions were out in cinemas.

Unfortunately, that film was dragged into the

fall of filmirage, the production company.

Door to silence was practically never released,

and in the end, he didn't like it that much.

We were shooting door to silence.

He said to me, “we need to choose the main actor. One option is John savage."

“Oh dad! John savage!”

He was my idol.

"The hunter", this blond guy. I usually didn't like blondes, but he was a legend,

with his longish hair,

his beautiful face. Who didn't like John savage?

But there was a problem.

There was a John savage 'before' and a John savage 'after.'

who was the other candidate?

I chose John savage, I didn't even hear the second option,

because he was my idol.

Guess who the other candidate was?

Gene hackman.

In 1993 fulci was invited to receive the honorary award at the fantafestival

in Rome. Asia argento was on stage presenting the award,

and she called her father Dario argento to the stage.

Fulci was next to me in a wheelchair.

When argento called his name, fulci got up.

I don't know how, with great effort he reached the stage and they hugged.

In the following days he told me that argento called him up

and proposed a project to work on together.

In 1994 I had the pleasure to have fulci again as a guest at a festival

in the ferrara area, where I was born and bred.

Together with effects artist Sergio stivaletti and other guests,

they talked about that project a lot,

enough to have a storyboard of some scenes already in place.

And they were actually made in the end.

However, this memory of his vitality

clashes with his real state of health at the time.

He disguised the fact that he was not feeling well.

He called me a few months before he died,

full-on keen to make that film.

He was keeping me up-to-date with the production.

My regret is that he told me

this time I was going to be his assistant director.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

Fulci believed very much in that film, the wax mask.

I was with berenice when he called me up and said,

“I'm going to pick up this film produced by argento, although it's a difficult one,

a difficult character, but he's good, I want to do it, I want the whole crew."

We were about to prep the movie. I was ready, and he was feeling a bit better.

Then lucio died.

It was sorrowful for me, but also for many others

who loved him. Not just his daughters, everybody.

Why couldn't fulci's career be better?

He's also to blame for it, because he talked too much

about colleagues, producers, directors. He would speak the truth right to your face,

not between the walls with a couple of penniless losers.

When lucio was gone,

in the evening gatherings at friends' houses, the leitmotif

of our conversations was how much we missed lucio.

I used to hang on his every word. I adored him because lucio, as I said before,

was a great storyteller and hugely cultured.

It wasn't like a father-and-son relationship.

It was more like two on the road.

Lucio fulci is like a constant riddle. His memory is now more powerful than ever.

You just have to browse on social media to realize that fulci's name

always arouses massive interest.

Around lucio and his memory, there's an enthusiasm

that many other directors and horror masters don't have.

Why?

Lucio is like a question Mark.

You never really know if you can grasp his full essence.

After door to silence, it was all over for him and for me.

I fell ill six months later,

and within 2 and a half years my dad died.

When my dad died, I was in the hospital.

I had cervical spine surgery.

I learned it when the phone rang

at five o'clock in the afternoon.

My partner wouldn't say what had happened.

I was bedridden.

My partner hung up and didn't speak.

I said, "Gianni, what happened? What did they want?”

At first he didn't speak, and then

he spoke up and said, "Camilla, your father is dead!"

I didn't cry.

I was frozen. I only thought, "I'm alone."

I didn't think I had Gianni. No.

"I'm alone," that was my first thought.

My last memory of lucio fulci is similar to the

one I have of my father when the writer longanesi died.

It was in the 50s, I remember dad didn't go

to work that day. He locked himself in the study, lowered the blinds and cried.

My last true memory of fulci is not physical.

The day I learned that he died, I pretty much did the same.

When I'm out there and see fondness for lucio everywhere,

his fans, the almost hysterical appreciation, you can see people love him.

They love him, full stop. And every time I tell something, or play,

or I just attend the showing of a film,

it's like he's really backstage, and the ovation I receive

is nothing but a fraction of the ovation he would get if he were on the stage.

Today lucio fulci is acclaimed by everybody,

but in the last years of his life, none of the

old producers would offer him films to make,

films that today would be distributed worldwide and make rich earnings.

Thinking that his old rival Dario argento

was the only one to try and produce a film for

him, is absurd! Tragic and poetic at the same time.

Alright... time to go and see antonella now.

The only time he talked to me about antonella,

I said to him, “by the way, how's antonella?”

“Don't ask. She's getting into trouble, she's out and about day and night.

I do love her, but I don't know how to show it to her,

and perhaps she doesn't know how to show it to me." He was talking softly.

I saw him saddened. He was not working. That was

the first time he was talking of his daughter, antonella.

I hope the girls are both well.

Lucio, let's say he didn't have an easy relationship with women.

He had extraordinary girlfriends, but he was trying to be the tough one

to compensate for his apparent shyness.

So he would just shout to prove his toughness.

But he was very sweet with his daughters. They weren't easy.

When antonella sums up her life, she says terrifying things,

but I've learned that just because one made mistakes,

it doesn't mean she's not an exceptional person. In her, I can see

all of lucio's features perfectly reproduced,

including things not too suitable for a woman. Maybe this isn't a compliment.

I don't know what lucio did for them in detail,

but I believe it was the best he could offer.

Fabio frizzi is right. In antonella, you can see her father's accomplishments,

the intelligence, the depth, the generosity

of a daughter who stayed by her father's side

in his last years, the most difficult ones,

I stupidly met her last, when she was actually the one

who told me better than anybody else who lucio fulci truly was,

through her words, and the stunning family and work footage

her father recorded throughout his life.

When did you figure out what your father's job was?

The moment I truly realized what he was doing

was during a visit on the set of don't torture a duckling,

during that famous scene of florinda bolkan covered in those little tubes.

I was fascinated.

For me, that was one of the greatest games I'd ever seen,

all those little pumps and stuff.

Then, I went with him to the premiere of the film. I was young, 12 or 13.

That was the real stuff.

It wasn't my father playing with little tubes anymore. That's when I realized

that perhaps I didn't understand many things about my father until then.

What do you think your father missed?

What did he really want, but couldn't have?

He missed a male child.

This came out through his behavior.

Just like in the past, when families were waiting for a son,

but he got two girls instead. "Where's the boy?”

The lack of a male child was offset by the birth of my eldest son.

That's when I was convinced, once and for all,

that he picked on me because he wanted me to be a boy.

Also my sister, he wanted her to be a boy. What good are girls? There must be boys!

This was a very hidden side of him. When my son was born,

I hadn't ever seen my father like that.

There are no pictures of him with me in his arms,

no pictures with anybody, not even with my mother. He wanted to stay

behind the camera. But with this little boy, he was like a different person.

He spent time with him. He would take him out to the playground.

He'd buy sweets for him. He was like a fairy-tale grandpa.

Antonella, I've got to play your father in a film about him.

Is there a way to understand who he really was? Can you help me?

I think it's a very complicated task

to try to understand him. Perhaps it's better not to. Instead, listen to him,

watch his films, and absorb all the madness

in his images, which you will take with you.

Even in the most puzzling moments, when you'll ask yourself

who he was, or what you should do, or how he would have behaved right now,

don't try to understand. Just imagine you're behind the camera,

that's when you might understand.

The greatest filmmakers are masters of lying,

a sort of giving vent to their creativity,

and lucio fulci was one of them.

According to him, Brian de palma told him that the psychic

was a flop, as people didn't go to the pictures

because they were afraid of the red brigades.

And again, scorsese allegedly told him that

Spielberg had been inspired by the house by the cemetery

when he conceived poltergeist.

Then the iranian officials, who were so impressed

by fulci's films with Franco and ciccio,

allegedly offered him the directorship

of the national cinema institute of Tehran,

according to him.

Lucio fulci created his own myth before we did.

This is something only the great ones can do.

In the very moment it is told, some bullshit becomes immediately true.

For example, I wonder whether the world would have been a better or a worse place

if what fulci used to say was actually true, about him being asked to take part in

the TV quiz show "rischiatutto,” as a contestant expert on proust.

But, since proust was gay, this thing came to nothing.

I believe that had fulci been on "rischiatutto," as an expert on proust

impossible, really -

the world would have been a much better place.

Dad wasn't one to show affection with his kids.

He never gave me a kiss on the cheek,

no hugs. That wasn't how he showed his love,

but he did it in other ways.

So when he was ll,

the day we finally left the hospital,

for the first time I saw him particularly emotional.

He had watery eyes. I was shaking,

I couldn't believe it. After all we'd went through

fighting that battle,

dad took my hand.

I was almost embarrassed, because this contact with my father,

hand in hand, was like a hug.

And I understood what he went through,

which is what I went through, the same.

And right there you felt like father and daughter.

We were father and daughter in many ways.

How was being fulci's daughter when he was alive,

and how was it when he died?

When he was alive, I was like a character in his films,

a rather fussy one, out of frame,

one of those who always has rows with the director and gets kicked off the set.

When he sadly passed away, I became a spectator of his films,

and of the emotions they produced in the audience.

In my case, he was more of a director,

not the typical parent

who, between the two options of getting a degree and

going around the world on a boat, would say to his kid,

“get a degree!”

No, he would have said, “get the boat and travel the world.”

A couple of unforgettable times, he would just come out of the blue and say,

“listen, I have an idea.

I'll buy a boat, and you're going to set off around the mediterranean islands."

And I would reply, “dad, I don't know how to sail.

Why should I go around the mediterranean islands?”

Or, “did you know there are people selling boats in polynesia?"

And I'd say, “dad, why should I go to polynesia?"

"I want a tobacco shop on my doorstep!”

Stop.

Lucio fulci directed dozens of films, starting from the

musicarelli, Italian musicals, starring adriano celentano

and Mina, and the cycle-comedies and sketch-comedies, starring Franco and ciccio.

In 1969, he debuted in the thriller genre, proving the unique style and vision

that he would ultimately show in his revolutionary and shocking horror movies.

From the second half of the 80s, he only shot very low-budget films,

which progressively estranged him from the filmmaking he deserved.

He died in 1996 at 69 years old, after 5 years away from a set,

and just when he was about to make his comeback with an

important film, the wax mask, produced by Dario argento.

Today he is one of the most loved film directors worldwide.