Italian Filmmaker Stefano Sollima on His Upcoming Netflix Serial-Killer Drama ‘Il Mostro'

Italian Filmmaker Stefano Sollima on His Upcoming Netflix Serial-Killer Drama ‘Il Mostro’

“Very beautiful and very challenging.” Those are the first two words that director Stefano Sollima uses to describe his upcoming, four-part Netflix  crime series Il Mostro, which has just finished filming. Created by Leonardo Fasoli and Sollima (who also co-produced with Lorenzo Mieli), and produced by The Apartment – a Fremantle company – and AlterEgo Productions, this is a series that has faced titanic challenges. Sollima is no stranger to the crime genre, having directed the so-called Romanzo Criminale (criminal Rome trilogy) – ACAB (All Cops Are B*******), Suburra and Adagio – as well as Soldado the 2018 sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, and Senza Rimorso (Without Remorse), the 2021 thriller co-written by Taylor Sheridan and based on the book by Tom Clancy. This is all in addition to being the showrunner on the seminal Italian crime series Gomorra and ZeroZeroZero, his ambitious series based on Roberto Saviano’s book about the international drug trade.

But Il Mostro may be his most ambitious endeavor yet based on what The Hollywood Reporter Roma was able to observe during a recent visit to the set in the town of Fiumicino, just outside Rome. In the middle of winter, Sollima and his crew worked in a location – Testa di Lepre (Hare’s Head) – that seemed very appropriate to the eerie story being told. From 11 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. a scene was constructed with the camera operator hidden among brambles, framed to film the climatic scene of a car driving away under the eyes of a ruthless serial killer.

Il Mostro tells the story of what has been called the “phantom” of the Italian judicial and criminal system, perpetrator of nine double murders between 1968 and 1985. Despite intensive investigations, the weapon employed in each murder – a 22 caliber Beretta – was never found and the killer never caught. This cold case is one of the longest and most complex Italian investigations into the first and most brutal serial killer in the country’s history: The Monster of Florence.

Sollima’s series is based on direct testimonies, procedural documents and journalistic investigations. It is all terribly true. “And telling the truth, and only that, is the only way to bring justice to the victims,” he says. “All 16, maybe more.”

The series was almost entirely shot from dusk to dawn, between Florence and its surrounding wilderness and the outskirts of Rome, in extremely low temperatures and with obsessive precision for ballistic trajectories, in the positioning of cars and corpses, with assistant directors and technical departments always on the edge.

Sollima sat down with THR Roma to discuss why he chose to re-examine the case of the Monster of Florence, the challenges of chronicling such a dark chapter in Italy and how he divides his time between Hollywood and Rome.

Stefano, is this yet another revolution in your cinema? From showmanship to greater devotion to reality?

I don’t think so. I have always “studied” a lot. I think of ACAB, Suburra or ZeroZeroZero, there is a lot of research behind those works. Though it’s true that in this series there is another way of looking at the darkness of the soul and man. For the first time I started from a true story and therefore owed it special attention, care and respect. And modesty and rigor, let me tell you, we owed it to the victims. All this made this journey very strong, emotionally, but also enlightening.

It was also a true story in the Romanzo Criminale series. The approach was radically different, though.

That story had already been the subject of a literary adaptation, a novelization by Giancarlo De Cataldo, a magistrate but also a genre writer. And the names, already in the book, were fictional – there was a proper distance from everything. Not with our story. We talk about real lives, real names. In Gomorrah, we were inspired by a real [mafia war], but were able to afford real staging freedom. Here you have to check the facts before adapting, a cinema with a reality approach.

And there was another problem. Not only journalism, but also those who were independently investigating. They had done a lot of fictional work. The truth from the beginning was hidden by real-time fiction.

This is perhaps the most incredible thing. Those of us in the making of the film ended up correcting mistakes … suggestions put in place by interpretations, prejudices and truths that built so many monsters of Florence. Our whole purpose, our maximum effort, was trying to reconstruct a historical reality. We have tried to tell all the truths, reconstructing a country, its habits and systems, its hypocrisies that have so hindered the solution of the case.

What led you to tell the story about the Monster of Florence? No one has ever had the courage to confront it.

There are so many reasons. The men involved, the biases in the field, the difficulty and enormity of the challenge, which at times bewildered and frightened me as much as it fascinated me. And why not seek the truth, to give order and organization to a chaotic and fallacious narrative and investigative material? It happened at a time when the tools of inquiry, scientific and cultural, were limited and limiting, and sometimes could even lead you into error. This did not create a narrow enclosure around me in which to work, but on the contrary only opened doors, gave me suggestions and led me to ask, “but then could it be so?” Many alternatives opened up for us that were not there for those who were investigating in those years.

Can you give some examples?

We reconstructed to the millimeter the crime scenes, the angle of the shots, the location of the cars and the killer. And in some cases there were things that didn’t fit with the official versions. In other cases, the way the perpetrator killed tells you, immediately, instinctively, a lot about his emotions and motivations. The way he killed women and how he killed men already made it possible to compose a criminal profile that would be easy to compose in detail now and was more difficult then.

How did you pitch it to Netflix? Il Mostro as the Italian Zodiac?

No, I convinced them by simply showing them how much was present in the collective imagination of our country and that beyond the news, judicial and otherwise, it had never been told outside the newspapers and the many books by the enthusiasts, investigators and of course reporters who followed the case. But they were all works with a flaw, an original sin – the thesis.

I, on the other hand, deliberately avoided providing answers, and looked for a way to reorganize the information. It was important to understand that I didn’t want to look for the Monster of Florence, but to tell of all the monsters of Florence and all the points of view of the story. I know, it’s a boundless ambition, because it assumes a total control of the subject, which in the end, I think, we achieved. We were able to tell of all the Italies of those years. And all the facets of a case about which everyone has an idea, but no one has really dealt with the whole – the enormous amount of insights, suggestions and facts. I pointed out what incredible and extraordinary, in the sense of “out of the ordinary,” human beings were involved.

The heinousness, the ferocity, the brutality of the murders is only one part of this story and not necessarily the most interesting, just the most obvious. The point is that this series, like all the ones I love, asks a lot of questions and does not pretend to give answers. And that is what I take with me from this experience.

Stefano Sollima is Italian in Hollywood and Hollywood in Italy. Do you see yourself in this description?

I am fortunate to be able to tell the different stories that fascinate me in the format and market that best suits them. My approach to the work never changes, only the medium, the time and place, economic and geographic, in which I develop them. I did not go to Hollywood and stay there, my base has always remained in Rome. I am lucky enough to be able to realize where and how I want to conceive my dream at that time. Netflix, for example, is the best “place” for Il Mostro, because it is an Italian story that is indeed universal.

I consider myself privileged. When I am in Hollywood I know I can go back to Italy and find another project, escape certain logics. When I am in Italy everyone knows that if I get nervous I can always leave and go overseas. We are lucky in this era to have an expanded market that has lost the obstacles and divisions of the past. I have always known this and done this, and up to ten, fifteen years ago people were calling me crazy. Now everyone is following my example!

After The Monster of Florence is it back to Hollywood?

After a job like that, my future project is to be able to take a two-week vacation. I have several possibilities ahead, when the next one takes shape you will certainly read about it in The Hollywood Reporter. And more importantly, you’ll know where.

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