Simone Scafidi on Dario Argento and DARIO ARGENTO PANICO – Maitland McDonagh interviews
Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (2010) was the book that solidified my career as a movie writer, and it’s a pleasure to revisit Argento’s work all these years later. Argento was and is the maestro of Italian horror. His first feature, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1972) received little love from mainstream publications with the striking exception of Variety, whose reviewer called it a “deftly executed thriller” while also remarking, in the publication’s trademark too-cool-for-school way, that Argento was “a garlic flavored Hitchcock.” Yes, meant to be a complement — a first-time filmmaker was being described as cut from the same cloth as the internationally-acclaimed master of suspense — but really, a garlic joke because, you know, Italian cooks have a heavy touch with the pungent bulb? On the other hand, The New York Times critic who reviewed Deep Red (1975) dismissed him as “a director of incomparable incompetence,” and that was pretty much the mainstream American take for some years. I’m sure it stung, but it was the party line for “serious” film critics, who dismissed Italian popular cinema out of hand as sentimental, excessive, violent and unsophisticated.
In any event, Argento’s stock has risen steadily, though there are still naysayers appalled by his films’ substantial and rapturously bloody body counts, with special approbation reserved for the fact that the corpses were and are largely those of beautiful women. Argento has hardly helped his own case by blithely telling interviewers over the years that he’d always rather murder — onscreen, of course — a beautiful woman than an ugly woman or a man. But in the half-century since his directing debut (following years of screenwriting, including the then-popular Italian Westerns, a.k.a. Spaghetti Westerns as they were glibly dubbed in the US), he has only gained wider respect and appreciation. Enough so that in 2022, the august Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a comprehensive career retrospective of Argento’s films.
Dario Argento Panico director Simone Scafidi — whose work includes a documentary about Lucio Fulci, often referred to as Argento’s rival as a master of horror al Italia — has said he wanted to portray Argento not just as a filmmaker but also as a man: son of producer Salvatore Argento, ex-husband of the late actress Daria Nicolodi, father of actresses/filmmakers Asia Argento and Fiore Argento. Dario was born to be a filmmaker, but Scafaldi addresses issues that range from the difference between the myth of Argento and the reality of him to the skewed perception that Argento is a misogynist who claims he loves and respects women while being notoriously demanding on set and placing them in roles that culminate in violent murder. Scafidi’s documentary will convert no one who’s appalled by Argento’s films. But but admirers of Argento’s work would do well to seek it out. It premieres February 2 on the streaming service Shudder.
Maitland McDonagh: What made you want to make a film about Dario Argento?
Simone Scafidi: I was interested in trying to portray the man as well as the film director, in a period in which there are a lot of books coming out about Dario and retrospectives of his movies around the world. There was also a great show about his career in here in Italy, Torino [at the Museo Nazionale de Cinema in 2023], and also his coming back to directing movies with Dark Glasses, about ten years after Dracula [2012]. That was something unusual…. For Dario to stay so long without directing a movie was a sort of trigger to make a movie about him. Like nothing that has been done before. I mean, of course Panico is quite classical: You have talking heads and you have footage from his movies and from his appearances on television. The key was to start from the myth, the legend of Dario, and go in deeper to find the real essence of Dario, why he makes movies and [why] movies like this.
Dario himself, when I proposed the movie to him, told me that, ‘Yeah, I want to do this because it’s the right moment.’ I don’t want to say that this is a definitive movie about Dario [but rather a] love letter to him. But when you see that man, that great director, that great artist at the end of the movie sitting on the chair, tired, old, but always thinking about his demons. Well, I think that this was the moment because he’s a very reserved man and when he made this movie he decided to share with me [and] of course with the audience all he wanted to share about his life. So it was an important moment to portray him and a great occasion to me because … I am ambitious and trying to make a movie that is about Dario as a father [and] as a director…. [It] was an interesting challenge.
MM: I’ve known Dario since the mid-‘70s, when I started work on my book about his films. How would you define the myth of Darrio Argento as opposed to the reality of the kind of man he is?
SS: I think that the difference is that Dario is…. it was very difficult to find a friend of Dario’s. He’s a very reserved man who has created a sort of comfort zone of relatives and [regular] collaborators. … Dario is a very generous person with the people who work with him. But of course he’s also interested, first of all, in himself [and] the greatness of his idea of cinema. Also … he produced the movies of Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi and, yes, they were Soavi and Bava movies, but first of all Dario Argento had written them, produced them.
Also, Dario is very focused on himself and on his family. I don’t want to say that surprised me, because saying this could seem ungenerous, but he was a really good father. … He told me that he did all he could do to be a good father. And it was not easy also because he was always on the set or in hotels and trying to make a new movie. So the fact that his daughters are nowadays so [connected] with him might mean that he did a good job.
Dario is not the kind of man [who], when you make a movie about him, opens his heart and tells you everything. He decided what to tell me, what of his personal life he wanted told to me. But I think that it was enough. And so I think that I didn’t want to break the myth of Dario, but I wanted to put the myth next to the human Dario.
MM: How deeply do you feel he’s invested in the myth of himself? Not in a bad way, but he’s created a persona for himself over the years, one that I think is significantly different from the man he is. He’s a man who loves his daughters and has great respect for women, which many people writing about his films suggest is not the case. Some suggest that he hates women. How do you feel that he’s dealt with this?
SS: I think that since [the 1973 Italian anthology TV series] Door to Darkness/La Porta Sul Buio, the moment when he became a well-known face to the Italian audience, he understood that maybe this myth, this Dario on the other side of the mirror, could be also a safe way to protect the real Dario. Dario is very jealous of his intimacy and so the myth of Dario maybe to him is useful to protect his privacy.
Dario loves women in, I think, a very spontaneous way. He loves their beauty, their intelligence and also, when he makes movies, the great quality of actresses and of the other collaborators [interviewed] in Argento Panico. … But for him the important thing is the movie, and when you maybe have to hurry up to gain the goal you want from the actress, you can become impolite. So Dario on the set is one Dario … but inside the walls of his house with his relatives, he’s another man.
MM: What made you want to make this documentary? And I ask that as a lifelong fan of Argento movies, which I have loved since I first saw Susperia in Times Square in New York. His movies took me to another realm, and that’s what I loved about them.
SS: When I have seen Dario’s movies — of course, not of them — they show me something intimate. Sometimes they shocked me, but I’m not talking about violence, about horror stuff. He made real on the screen [something] fierce that I was not able to think about. I like all kinds of cinema that leave the audience with more [questions] than answers, from Federico Fellini to Pier Paolo Pasolini, through Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch, so not only horror directors. I also wanted to make a movie on Dario Argento because he’s one of a kind — he’s unique — and I was interested in trying to find why he is unique. And last but not least, because making a biographical documentary is a genre. I have made three of them before this, and every time is a challenge, finding a personal key to portray a subject. Every subject is different from the previous one…. And of course I also knew that making a movie about a director who is loved all over the world was also an occasion to have a movie released all over the world. So it was also a commercial choice.
MM: What is the worst thing that you have ever heard anybody say about Argento and how would you answer it?
SS: Well, there are two different things. One is that all the stuff, all the movies he made in the last 30 years, are bad, are terrible. I don’t agree. Of course, I think I said that after Opera something changed. But I think that all the Dario movies [show] something interesting about Dario as a man. Once, I heard that he had no friends in the Italian cinema world because they hate him … but I don’t, so I’m sure that is not true. Dario is really loved by critics, by colleagues. I think that whoever said that was simply finding it difficult to keep in touch with him, to spend time with him, because Dario is very reserved and his way of being reserved could [make it] seem that he thinks he is better than his colleagues. But it’s not true. I am not a famous director, but Dario with me — with all the people that worked on our movie — behaves in a wonderful way. So it hurts me to listen that kind of stuff about him.
