An Interview With Lorenzo Zanoni - Ill: Final Contagium (2020) : Gully (Spoilers)
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Disturbing Cinema: What can you tell us about your segment "Gully" & what was the inspiration/influence behind it?
Lorenzo Zanoni: I began working on Gully when the topic of the disease touched me personally. I was sad and frightened and tried to reproduce these themes in the film. I wanted to focus not so much on the illness, but on abandonment and the reaction to the illness and its loneliness. Owen loses everything in his degeneration, but maybe he finds himself; He's the real virus of the story: a parasite who lives morbidly hanging onto his relationship, so fat that he looks like a larva, unable to take an independently step in his life. The blindness that led to Owen's reckless behaviour, leads him to a real loss of sight, a perpetual darkness where the only guiding voice is Stella's who accuses him of "needing to change" just when the guy is mutating his essential condition. It's basically a story of love and hate, more with one self than with ones partner. The Cinematography of the 80's was obviously very important as a visual and sound reference: we wanted to work on some aspects of it while keeping the narrative time unspecified. It's undeniable that this story pays homage in some ways to The Fly (1986) directed by David Cronenberg. I wanted to re-propose some elements, such as the preservation of Owen's body parts in a jewellery box, which had fascinated me and to which I felt debtor. The transformation itself is affected by a literary study on Kafka and there is a small cameo tribute Leatherface and some references spread throughout the set design.
Disturbing Cinema: How did you use colour to tell your story? Lorenzo Zanoni: I decided already in the writing phase that the colour should be a marker of the progress of the disease: we start with a first very dark phase, a nocturnal external premonition of the terrible things that will happen, indicative of an ill-advised human behaviour (that of Owen) that will lead to suffering. Immediately after his first phase the cinematography becomes pallid, the set becomes empty, a symptom of an empty life that is also devoid of colour, monotonous and annoying. There are many s, a lot of space to fill just as Owen's life has many unwritten pages because of his indolence. |
Lorenzo Zanoni: From the moment of the infection everything quickly degrades to a sick tone, the colour becomes densified, there is a strong organic use of grain, the cinematography seems to become more dense, full of bacterial spores and mold. The darkness of loneliness, the colour of misery envelops the couple even in the finale, where the sharing of illness and pain suggests a biological need for companionship during a period of suffering. In this case Stella returns because she is afraid to die alone and sick? Has she repented? Is she pregnant? I left the ending open to think about this. Disturbing Cinema: What kind of fucked up things are we going to see in Gully?
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Lorenzo Zanoni: I find Horror can be an incredible social glue and a manifest receiver on society, it is a political genre, it makes politics , it explores and investigates the problems of humanity. Sometimes it is "satisfied" also to placate some of our repressed (not so much) paraphilias, some of our primordial instincts. To love Horror is to love oneself, to know oneself . I find it very comforting. Personally I have found in Horror an artistic reason, since I feel very close to the theme of suffering and death. Last but not least, I'm absolutely convinced that violence, when represented with finesse and knowledge, is a great satisfaction in terms of aesthetic pleasure. |
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