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I really envy Massaccesi, aka Joe D'Amato.
RED INFERNO JOE D'AMATO ON THE ROAD OF EXCESS
At the Cinémathéque Francaise, we showed Joe D'Amato's films
during a special event dedicated to him
in 2006, I think.
We ran restored copies of BLACK SEX and ANTHROPOPHAGUS.
Joe D'Amato's films are the product of an era
when viewers wanted to see on screen
what had been forbidden for years.
It's sort of a project,
presented to an audience, an overall picture of things.
That's what eroticism is: seeing things that were hidden for years.
You see naked bodies, and skin, which is very important
and essential in Joe D'Amato's films.
The skin of Laura Gemser, we almost have the desire to touch it,
and she is often naked for most of the film.
Basically, the element of skin, the epidermis, is essential.
But what is under the skin, is equally important,
and this is gore.
It captures our gaze and takes it beyond the skin.
Taking it beneath the skin, so to speak.
In essence, under the surface.
In my opinion, this is what defines D'Amato's films:
his capacity to create a link, in a rather logical way,
between the erotic and horror.
- Can I smoke? - Sure.
I come from a family that lived and breathed cinema.
Even nowadays, people say, "Wow, you come from a cinematic family!"
But it's normal for me,
because my grandpa had a storehouse
with tons of cinema equipment:
cameras, those huge old spotlights,
film reels, and film cans.
My father obviously worked in the biz, and so did his brothers.
Uncle Nando and Uncle Mario, also worked in cinema.
For me, ever since I was a child, the world of cinema was a given.
In this photo, my dad was really young and worked with De Sica.
I got involved in the biz when I was very young
because my father worked in cinema as a technical director.
After school in the afternoons, I did some odd jobs,
just to learn, more than anything.
Then one day, they asked me to assist the cameraman,
to be the camera assistant for Mole Richardson.
After that, I worked as cameraman, camera assistant,
camera operator, cinematographer, director,
distributor, and producer, right up to today.
Our mother was 100% present, because our father was never around.
Except for holidays like Christmas
and August 15th, he was never home.
For him, cinema was...
I won't say it was more important,
but it was very important. That's why he was rarely home.
The first thing that strikes you about Joe D'Amato's career
is the sheer number of films he made, almost 200 total.
This in itself is an interesting fact.
A director who makes that many films must be interesting.
Consider Jess Franco, or even Woody Allen,
who made a film a year, if not more.
It takes interesting people to make more than one film a year,
and Joe D'Amato at times made 5 or 6 a year.
Cinema becomes your life. For you, filming is like breathing.
Aristide Massaccesi was a sought-out cinematographer in those days
because not only was he skilled, he was fast, too.
Aristide was brilliant, but he got less than he deserved.
He did it all,
even hand-held camera operator. We did lots of crazy things.
Skilled, quick, much like Tonino Delli Colli.
He was superior.
Once he had himself tied
to a speeding stagecoach
so that he could film the wheels and horse hooves.
I said, "You're nuts. If anything happens, you're dead!"
My father was a very good cinematographer,
and my mom always scolded him for not sticking to it.
She said that if he'd continued,
he would have become much more famous.
But sticking with one thing is boring.
It wasn't his nature; he needed to keep changing.
And so becoming a director,
I think, was part of his constant search
for something new.
I made my first movie just for fun.
It was TRINITY IN EL DORADO.
I used stock footage for that movie, but in Italy
it wasn't held in high regard, to be honest.
But I think it was rather avant-garde.
We created a horse that looked like a motorcycle with headlights
and handlebars as reins, but the movie was a flop in Italy.
During the Western era, 400 movies a year were made in Italy.
Aristide was very sought-after, so in order to please everyone,
we made one film by day, one by night.
Different actors, same settings,
and different stories.
We only slept 4 hours and worked 20 hours a day!
We earned a lot.
Back then, Boccaccio-esque movies were big,
like THE DECAMERON,
and so we jumped on that bandwagon, too.
Aristide came to me with an idea for a movie of that genre
and asked me to work with him. I wasn't sure if it would work,
but he said it would be a blockbuster.
AN EROTICALLY AMUSING MOVIE
AMUSING, ENTERTAINING
BOCCACCIO-ESQUE
IT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH, LAUGH, LAUGH
The movie was MORE SEXY CANTERBURY TALES.
Pasolini had made his trilogy:
THE CANTERBURY TALES, THE DECAMERON, and
ARABIAN NIGHTS. We lumped them all together
with MORE SEXY CANTERBURY TALES.
Like many prolific and active directors in circles
where the screenwriter and artistic derivation
were not important, he used many pseudonyms.
Some of his aliases were David Hills, Kevin Mancuso, and others.
But it's worth asking ourselves why
he felt the need to have SO many pseudonyms.
I think there are two reasons.
First, he made so many films it would've seemed scarcely believable.
Also because clearly he wanted to trick the audience
into thinking they were seeing a film by an American or Anglo-Saxon.
That's why he used so many Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms
like David Hills, or Steven Benson, the alias he used
for some of his early '80s films.
The use of pseudonyms is very typical of Joe D'Amato.
It was the era of Brian De Palma,
and directors like Scorsese, all Italian-Americans.
Back then, Donatella Donati's father,
who was the head of Coralta Film,
was looking for a name that sounded
Italian-American.
One day, he saw a calendar that said "D'Amato Press"
and he decided Joe D'Amato would be an intriguing name.
That's where Joe D'Amato came from.
When my father talked about himself,
he called himself a "craftsman,"
but he knew he was talented.
He was a great craftsman in the best sense of the word.
If someone can make me a beautifully-made chair,
I bow down to him.
That's what Massaccesi was like: he could do everything.
I recall when my dad was interviewed on TV with Tinto Brass.
Tinto Brass was wearing a suit, and Dad was wearing a black turtleneck.
Labels didn't exist. He didn't feel he had to prove himself.
"This is me, I know what I'm worth."
He was very friendly, smart, and bright.
His problem, and mine,
was we didn't always have the equipment,
the crew, or the actors we wanted
because they cost too much.
He realized that to make a high-grossing, decent movie,
all it took was a skeleton crew and a decent story
that didn't call for too many scenes.
That's how he could make a movie that could be sold.
So he started to collaborate with producers
who made these types of movies, but then at a certain point
he veered toward erotic movies.
Here with editor Vincenzo Tomasi, we have Joe D'Amato, the director.
Let's ask Joe: What is this movie made of?
Many things, including a swarm of gorgeous girls.
They can explain better than me.
Hello, I'm Laura Gemser, your Black Emanuelle.
I'm here again to show you a shocking movie.
BLACK EMANUELLE came out
and I went to see it with Aristide.
It was well-made, and there was this girl
who was incredibly beautiful, full of charm,
with an intense sensual energy.
We quickly got on a flight from Rome to Bruges
and searched the whole hotel until we found her.
- I was expecting a man. - I'm a woman. Disappointed?
No, not at all.
We told her we wanted to make a movie with her.
She told us she had made that movie
but had no intention of making any other sexy movies.
No problem.
Right then and there, before leaving, we drew up a contract
for three movies with her.
About a week later we got a call from Amati,
who distributed BLACK EMANUELLE.
He'd spoken to Laura Gemser
and wanted to use her again, but heard she was under contract with us.
We confirmed this and asked what the movie in question was.
He said, "Another Emanuelle movie."
Folks, your dear Laura will always be an incurable optimist.
Raise your glasses and shout out...
"Hooray for life!”
And that's how the Black Emanuelle series began.
EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS
LAURA GEMSER the real Black Emanuelle
Confused? Why?
It's no surprise!
The protest has even made its way into nightclubs, so no more fakes.
Truth above all. Performances...
Performances need to be alternative and realistic.
Joe D'Amato's eroticism is violent.
If we compare Black Emanuelle
with French Emmanuelle, we can spot the differences.
French Emmanuelle portrays a woman in search of pleasure
which she finds in Thailand,
but it's rather hedonistic; it sings the praises of hedonism.
In Black Emanuelle, the sex is violent and threatening.
Sexual violence is a motif. There are rape scenes,
as well as white-slave trade, prostitution.
D'Amato loves to shock, and his pursuit of shock
is translated into this mixture of sex and violence.
We knew about these snuff movies they made on 8mm
with real torture scenes and even real murders,
and so we wanted to recreate that atmosphere
to shock the audience.
But the whole crew, about 40 people,
were sued by one of the actresses whose breast was cut off.
Not for real, of course.
The make-up artist Giannetto de Rossi made a breast that looked real.
She pressed charges against the whole crew
because the scene was so realistic that it traumatized her.
She wanted to be compensated.
Because of that we all ended up in court.
The charges were
negligence, gross indecency,
and another serious one I can't recall.
They called me to court
for this
and I said,
"Did you check if she still has her breast?
Yes? Then why'd you summon me?"
When Aristide filmed, he had no limits.
He filmed whatever came to mind, the way he wanted,
with rather hard scenes,
because he believed in those kinds of movies.
When I'd look at the dailies,
I'd point out that the movie would never get past censorship.
In the early '70s, the grip of censorship was weakening everywhere.
The success of Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS
raised the limits on how eroticism was portrayed on screen,
even though exploitation movies already introduced some erotic nuances.
D'Amato dives into this world and starts making,
one after another, erotic films, which at first were soft core,
then they slowly became more hardcore.
In any case, his main trait became erotic cinema,
as this genre exploded in the '70s.
It was the era of birth control,
sexual freedom,
protests, occupied universities, hippies.
There was a wave of sexual liberation
that penetrated every social sphere.
Actually, it started with a little breeze, to quote Rossini,
even amongst the middle classes,
because they could go see an erotic, titillating movie
and feel liberated and involved
in a global movement that wanted to wipe out taboos.
My father was taken to court many times in the '70s.
They were only erotic movies, but society was still too prudish.
Abortion still wasn't legal.
My father's eroticism was lovely and rather clean.
He managed to accentuate sensuality,
which is important in those kinds of erotic movies,
the sensuality of the actress or of the scene.
These erotic films were marketable in France and other countries.
They wanted more intense scenes
or even hardcore scenes, for their movie theaters.
Back then, they were only shown in theaters, not on TV.
It was a commercial demand in some countries to better sell the movie,
so we had to add scenes without Laura Gemser.
Like in EMANUELLE IN AMERICA with Marina Frajese,
who was making this kind of movie for the first time.
Nowadays,
striptease isn't enough.
When artists want to fulfill themselves,
meaning to exert their violence on an audience,
they need more sophisticated ways to use the oldest lever:
sex.
In Italian cinema of the '70s,
a thriving genre
was the so-called "erotic-comedy." But then slowly,
our local distributors started asking for more,
saying people wanted to see more.
We decided to make four movies in Haiti.
They set off on this adventure and made four movies:
PORNO ESOTIC LOVE, PORNO HOLOCAUST, HARD SENSATION,
and EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD.
These movies were funded by BNL bank.
Those were sexy movies,
but when Aristide came back, he'd filmed some hard scenes.
Getting a bank to fund a sexy film is tricky, forget about a hardcore film.
There was no hope at all, so the idea was to make sexy films.
But when he came back he said,
"I did some other things, and this is the vision I have."
After the screening, I said, "Okay, that's the vision you have,
but what'll I do with this stuff? What'll I show the bank?"
He had invited me to Santo Domingo to make a series of films.
We shot various films at once. We'd shoot one film's scenes,
get changed, and then I'd go from good guy to bad guy.
We shot different scenes using the same settings, of course.
Back then, I was a casino addict,
and I blew all of my per diem and my entire pay
during the first week.
Since I had no money and Aristide wouldn't give me an advance,
I managed to persuade him to shoot his own film.
He had the actors and location.
If he came up with another story,
he could come away with his own film.
He just needed to provide the film stock.
I told him I would write the story for him.
We agreed on a sum, and in three days, I wrote BLACK SEX,
which made a lot of money.
The first porn movie made
by Italians for the Italian market was BLACK SEX
featuring Mark Shannon.
I'm Manlio Cersosimo, aka Mark Shannon. We're about to watch BLACK SEX.
The tombeur de femmes was Manlio Cersosimo.
He loved making these films. He put his heart and soul into them.
In those scenes, he gave the best of himself.
People liked this movie, and it's one of my favorites.
It's the one I felt most connected to,
the one in which I expressed myself best.
By chance, it was a hit because it had Italian actors.
After that, Aristide and I started a side business,
and we produced some movies together, inventing
Italian style porn: "spaghetti porn.”
I don't recall how I met Joe D'Amato.
In my mind, I have a picture of him in his office:
a smiling, warm person
who was laid-back on set,
making movies in four days, or a week,
one after another.
I asked about the porn movies he made, but he said that wasn't a genre for me.
But I was intrigued by that world and I told him I was interested.
I liked anything new.
Back then, body art was a new trend.
I've always been a fan of contemporary art.
With body art, people got naked and put brains on boobs or dicks
in these super-intellectual art galleries.
So I had associated porn with the world of body art.
He told me it had nothing to do with that and suggested I go see.
So, laughing, he took me on set and I saw a couple in bed,
doing what they had to do, and he asked what I thought about it.
When I told him it had no real effect on me,
he suggested I shoot the next movie for him
because he was tired of seeing actresses do those things.
I took his word for it,
and three days later I was shooting his movie.
Here I am, perfectly on time. Were you eagerly awaiting me?
I was eager, too, my loves. Here I am, all yours.
As always. Come closer, don't be shy.
Come with me. It'll be wonderful.
Relax, I'll lead you to the realm of oblivion,
the realm of boundless impulses of pleasure.
The defining feature
of erotic cinema and porn is that it is built around
the frustration of viewers,
sitting alone in the theater, contemplating
actions, things, pleasures, which for the moment are impossible
or very distant.
The best example of this is EMANUELLE AND FRANCOISE,
where one of the male characters is chained up by a woman
and is forced to observe sexual acts
such as lesbian sex, orgies, swingers, until he goes mad.
This portrayal of frustration perfectly sums up
Joe D'Amato's films.
When Italian porn first appeared,
judges were banning all the movies, both foreign and Italian,
and accused us of criminal association
aimed at pornography.
I was sentenced to two months imprisonment for each movie,
but I always managed to get off thanks to probation.
Probation goes up to 24 months.
You're under arrest. Come with us.
Since I was sentenced for 10 movies, two months per movie,
I'd reached a total of 20 months.
If I had been sentenced for two more movies,
I would've reached 24 months and would've been jailed,
so I stopped making porn.
No! No!
Joe D'Amato decided to try his hand at a late '70s trend
that boomed with the works of Lucio Fulci, Romero, and so on:
gore.
We suddenly witness, so to speak, an explosion of blood.
We see slaughtering, gutting, disemboweling on screen.
Everything is exposed in a rapture of violence.
Once, my father organized a private screening.
It was for ABSURD, and I passed out during the movie
because the scene where he sticks her head in a hot oven
gave me so much anxiety that I fainted.
But he never worried about shocking his kids.
If anything, he was happy about the effect it generated.
BEYOND THE DARKNESS was a great film,
a mix of romanticism and gore.
A truly sick film, in perfect D'Amato style.
Everyone thinks I shot real autopsies.
There was no need to, because the film is entirely fake.
We bought a ton of entrails from a local butcher and used them.
For the scenes with skin being cut, we used pigskin.
We placed it on top and then sliced it with a scalpel,
which created a very realistic effect.
Then we filled it with entrails:
livers, hearts, intestines.
And the actor would keep pulling this stuff out. The end.
In 1980, my father created Filmirage production company
on Viale delle Milizie in Rome, and began producing films
that were made thanks to pre-sales abroad.
The first was ANTHROPOPHAGUS.
COMING SOON
There's the scene with the fetus, where Montefiori pulls out
this embryo and eats it.
Everyone had crazy ideas about it, but it was just a rabbit
we bought at the local butcher and we made to look like a fetus.
Montefiori was just eating a dead rabbit.
At Rome's Metropolitan theater, there were only four people at the first screening.
Two people sat up front quietly, but then they started fidgeting.
They were watching the film, but when they saw the scene
with the rabbit being pulled out of the womb,
they left in disgust.
I can't recall what they said, but they left.
The movie only lasted two days in the theater.
Well, considering what it was...
The film didn't do well in Italy; it was slammed by critics.
Like all my films, actually, not a single one was appreciated.
But it was a hit abroad
and people still talk about it.
Being a clever opportunist, Joe D'Amato followed trends,
especially the trends that came about
with the end of Italian genre films.
So he made films along the lines of MAD MAX
and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK,
John Carpenter's American box office hit.
He also made films similar to CONAN THE BARBARIAN,
namely the "Ator" series. They were made for the international market
which greatly appreciated Joe D'Amato's work.
This genre,
because others made these sorts of films, too,
perfectly embodied the downfall
of Italian genre films.
The undoing of a type of cinema
where everything happened, but all that is left is ruins now.
We can say it's ancient cinema, that belongs to a previous era.
And so what is almost moving in these films
is observing that Italian genre cinema
has filmed its own downfall, its own ruin,
by telling stories about post-apocalyptic motorcyclists
in movies like BRONX FINAL BATTLE,
which is better known by the title ENDGAME.
ENDGAME came from INTERCEPTOR aka MAD MAX.
All of the American and Australian box office hits
were adapted by Filmirage.
ENDGAME was a blockbuster shot in three weeks.
An intense production. Lots of extras, lots of make-up,
special effects, explosives, MAD MAX-style vehicles.
It wasn't an easy film.
The best part was doing things that people said were impossible.
We'd look at them and say, "It's doable."
It was raining, and I'd gone to bed late the night before.
I was still asleep at noon, and the phone in my room rang.
It was an old Bakelite phone.
It was Aristide calling to ask me to direct a movie.
"What?" "Yes, come to my office."
I got up, and like a zombie, I managed to get to his office,
and there he asked me to direct a horror movie, a genre I liked.
That's how STAGE FRIGHT came about. It was just a 35-page treatment,
but I could already picture it.
I liked Michele's film, STAGE FRIGHT, right away.
It was made with a modest, but not too small budget,
because Aristide adored Michele
and gave him more money than he gave himself.
Apart from what people think about B movies
or C, D, Z movies, porn, soft-porn, or whatever,
Aristide appreciated young talents
and loved working with young people.
Partly because he could pay them less,
but he would only work with truly talented people.
He gave young people like me opportunities,
but he was always present.
He watched and knew
right away if you were capable or not.
The organogram of Filmirage was like this:
Aristide was the heart of it all,
the production side was handled by Donatella Donati,
his business partner and associate.
She was a true cinema expert, because her father
was a famous movie producer.
He had his camera operators, a small group of people
that he took around with him. They all had various roles.
He was producer,
director, and cinematographer.
He was a jack-of-all-trades.
I consider him the Italian Roger Corman.
He had created, bit by bit, a sort of factory
for creative minds.
He was commissioned
by American or Italian producers who focused on foreign markets,
and there was a period of time when these films were popular.
They were once a big slice of the American market.
At the American Film Market, films like STRIKE COMMANDO
sold really well.
Guess how he pre-sold movies? With the poster.
If your poster was made by Casaro, who was number one back then,
the film sold.
He said all it took was drawing two bastard American faces.
So all the films started off with the same potential
but, in the end, some came out better than others.
My relationship with Aristide, Donatella, and Filmirage
entailed us giving them a minimum guarantee
for foreign sales,
otherwise we would've become partners.
We made about ten films
in the United States with Aristide and Donatella.
He tried to go to the USA with a truck
containing some wood planks and lights
and had his first experience there.
And so he realized that if he filmed in rural America,
the parts where unions didn't exist,
he could create something like a low budget American film.
So he decided that was the right path
to sell these films on the international market.
The film that rewarded us most,
and which was not bad at all,
was WITCHCRAFT,
made for American home video.
It features Linda Blair,
who, after THE EXORCIST,
made her horror comeback alongside a decent cast.
It was directed by Fabrizio Laurenti,
who was hired at the last minute. It was his first film.
Di Girolamo, our foreign sales agent
who'd already made the deal,
had developed his own method
to gauge if a film would work or not.
He'd thoroughly studied this
and was absolutely convinced and proud of it.
Every script that the two of them worked on together,
with Aristide producing and him distributing and selling,
had to pass the "up and down test," as Aristide called it.
It's not a euphemism for masturbation, even if Aristide said it was.
Essentially, every scene in the script was given a score.
Opening credits, 3 points.
A throat-slitting scene, 7 points because there's blood.
Sentimental dialogue, 3 points.
If you connected all the points, the line went up and down.
The film's quality went up, down, then it stopped.
If it went too far down, that meant there was an issue.
Aristide, who was head of the factory, said,
"Don't worry about that. Just go shoot it. The story is fine."
Our American distributor had asked us
to cast higher-level actors.
It was an impressive cast, with David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair,
so the film cost quite a bit more.
The film was rather rewarding
in terms of return and in terms of earnings,
but the difference was substantial.
With lower budget films,
we could earn more,
but with the other films, we broke even and made less.
So Aristide and I decided to take some time off,
and we stopped for a few months.
That had never happened before.
For Aristide, three months of not working was a lifetime.
Then he found another company
that partially funded his films,
while he put in the rest of the money.
Unfortunately, this put him in dire straits.
At this point, they couldn't pre-sell films anymore.
The money came from BNL bank,
which demanded guarantees.
So, bit by bit, due to his passion for cinema,
my father used our homes as collateral.
Instead of thinking about his family and keeping a roof over our heads,
he decided to gamble it all.
Most likely, he wasn't behind this,
because Donatella Donati was in charge of the finances.
He kept making movie after movie.
But it seems he made one too many without the proper backing.
The market had changed.
It was no longer the era of WITCHCRAFT, so to speak.
When Filmirage went belly up and the banks started demanding money,
it was a mortal blow for my father.
We needed cash, a lot of it, because Dad had several employees
and he wanted to pay their wages.
He had editors, secretaries, etc.
So he did what he could to earn while spending as little as possible.
He started doing what he never wanted to do again.
He felt that he'd evolved
and never wanted to do porn again,
but it was the only genre that allowed him to make a profit,
quickly, in cash, while spending very little.
Then they come in here and get naked.
Aristide Massaccesi hated porn.
He only made these movies to make money
which he then spent to produce non-porn movies.
He produced Michele Soavi's first movie, a thriller.
It drained all his money, and when he finished shooting,
he came back to me, saying he was broke.
I said, "You put in your work, film stock, and the cameras,
and we'll do a movie with Rocco Siffredi."
THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO was the first major porn film
that was a period piece, and we made it together.
That changed everything. We realized it could be a huge business,
and in no time, we became the masters of these productions.
Fuck, I forgot.
All of us who make hardcore porn focus on the asshole.
There's no other way
to define what we do.
We focus on the asshole and whatever goes in it or comes out.
Softcore? That's for churchgoers. We should send it to
the monks, the Benedictines.
When genre films stopped doing well in theaters,
D'Amato continued to indulge
his need to film as if it was as vital as his need to breathe,
making a vast number of porn films for home video.
Porn films were making their way from movie theaters
to video, for home enjoyment, thanks to videotapes.
So Joe D'Amato followed this route.
In this era, the perception of porn
was in between one repressive phase and another.
At first, pornographic cinema was repressed, condemned.
Then it reached a euphoric phase and was seen as an element
that was part of contemporary pop culture.
For me, porn was like a sexual revolution.
I felt the same as Schicchi; we did it with passion.
I wasn't ashamed, but Aristide did it for money and was ashamed.
He always pointed out that he mainly worked on other films.
At first, erotic films had value. They had a storyline,
a script, lighting.
His last porn movies were hell for him, red-light hell.
I think his decision to start doing hardcore porn
was a mistake. In fact, he paid the price,
because then he was pigeonholed for that.
He had some very interesting ideas for TV,
but was turned down instantly because he made porn.
I make hardcore porn for a practical reason:
for income, to pull myself out of the deep shit I was in.
I only do them for monetary reasons.
I don't like making them.
I told him that he should've stuck to producing only.
He had great interpersonal skills. He was likeable and trustworthy.
He didn't want to become influential; he didn't believe in that.
He couldn't stand people who were rich and influential.
I admit I'm a bit pompous.
I realize I can be like that.
I pompously wanted
to make things that don't work out well in the end.
I pompously think I know everything,
even if I don't know shit most of the time.
He gained people's love. Everyone loved him.
I have one regret: I was supposed to go see him,
but as often happens, I put it off and shouldn't have.
I was rather busy working on INCANTESIMO
and barely had time to breathe,
but sometimes, we have to make the time.
Now I regret not having seen him a few more times.
Mainly to delight in his laughter,
because if there's one thing I recall with great emotion.
Sorry.
On the day of my father's funeral,
something disappointed me a bit.
Schicchi was there with his wife, a porn actress,
and people were pointing at her,
as if to accentuate the fact that he made porn movies.
Many of his friends should have come, but they didn't.
Many people turned their backs on him. Friends he trusted
turned their backs on him.
HOT D'OR AWARD CEREMONY
Goodbye to one of the last directors
who still shot on 35mm.
He left behind his masterpieces and a void in his field.
A few images to remember Mr. Joe D'Amato.
The headlines were:
"The king of porn has died!"
But that's not what he was.
He would've never accepted or wanted something like that.
Aristide isn't the king of porn, but the king of the masters of cinema.
I've never met anyone with the knowledge he had,
not even those famous directors, who I won't name.
For me, he's the greatest master of life and cinema.
Porn movies don't exist.
After the death of my father, I opened his briefcase
and there was a note he wrote: "In the end, I'll show them who I am."
I think after Filmirage closed down,
going back to hardcore and those characters he no longer liked
somehow killed him inside a bit.
He no longer considered himself an artist, a master, a craftsman,
even if he still had that flame inside that spoke the truth.
Why do you think there are so many Joe D'Amato fans in the world?
I ask myself the same thing. I have no idea!
I have no idea.
Do you consider yourself a better director or cinematographer?
Cinematographer.
As a director, do you feel you're a master of eroticism or horror?
As a director, I consider myself
a professional
craftsman.
Are you cynical about yourself?
No.
I am...
Your greatest asset?
Modesty, maybe.
Your greatest flaw?
Modesty.
Subtitles: Laser S. Film s.r.I. - Rome