SWFF 2025, Claudio Giovannesi talks about the film “Hey Joe”

Guest, during the last day of the fifteenth edition of the Social World Film Festival di Vico Equense, the Roman director Claudio Giovannesi to talk to the masterclass students, the press and the public about his film "Hey Joe", work that was screened at the CineTeatro Aequa and is out of competition in the Big Screen section.

The film stars Francesco Di Napoli, James Franco, and Francesca Montuori. The plot revolves around Dean Barry, an American veteran who had a relationship with a Neapolitan woman during World War II and returns to Naples, Italy, in the early 70s to meet his son Enzo and try to make up for twenty-five years of absence.

Giovannesi told the story of the genesis of the audiovisual project: I wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Maurizio Braucci, but the idea came from a story he read to me over the phone: it was about an American soldier who, returning from Vietnam, was looking for a son he'd never met. It was his attempt to get a second chance at life. From there, we decided to make a film about it..

Still on the embryo of his works and the reasons that convince him to start them, he declared: “I always start with the characters. That’s where everything starts. A character brings with him a network of relationships, lives an internal and external conflict, and inhabits a place. That place is made up of other human beings. When I can feel the truth of these bonds, the desire to tell is born in me. That’s what moves me every time”.

As regards, instead, the work of reconstruction and documentation of the historical years in which the film is set: It was a long and complex process. I had never shot a period film before, so I needed to fully believe in it, not invent anything. With the production designer, we reconstructed locations like the NATO base, starting with in-depth research. We consulted archive materials, photographs, documents... we literally wanted to build a time machine. The writing and set design phase alone took two years..

“Hey Joe” It is also a film that testifies to the artistic and human partnership between the director and the young Neapolitan actor Francesco Di Napoli, who made his debut in “The Children's Paranza” in 2019. “I have a very deep bond with Francesco – said Giovannesi – I chose him for “La paranza dei bambini” among many auditioners, about four thousand. I was looking for actors close to reality and who knew the difficulties of that world, even if they didn’t belong to it personally.

I found Francesco in a commercial establishment in a difficult neighborhood and I immediately saw talent and authenticity in him. Today I find him extremely grown and mature, I am proud of his path – and argued the differences between the approaches between the previous set and the current one. “Hey Joe” – When we were filming “La paranza dei bambini”, Francesco didn't even read the scenes.

I told him what was happening, I explained it to him in words, and he brought it back on stage in his own language, adapting it to the reality he knew.

The character was distant from him: a grown man, father of a small child, which Francesco is not in real life. I thought he could win this challenge and for this reason I wanted from the very beginning that the part went to him. In that case he worked as a real actor, with a script, with technical preparation, also supported by an American colleague who did not speak Italian. He did an excellent job”.

The basis of every film is always writing, the primordial and creative act of a story. Precisely for this reason, the director has told his absolutely choral vision of writing a narrative, also recalling the steps he took to cinematographically adapt “The children's gang”, Roberto Saviano's novel: “I never write alone, I always work in a group. But for me the fundamental thing is not to tell about myself, but rather to have a look at others.

The process of writing a film is first of all getting to know human beings different from you, understanding their lives, their conflicts. This is what then shapes the characters and the story. – and continued – The film “La paranza dei bambini” is very different from the novel, while remaining faithful to its core. We were lucky enough to work with the same author, Roberto, together with Maurizio Braucci.

The novel is a choral narration on the crisis of Camorra power. We decided to shift the point of view: to tell the feelings of the kids, the loss of innocence, the choice to embrace crime or not. The language changes: the screenplay must be written in images, it must show, not explain. A profound and necessary change” And as for his experience directing the Sky series "Gomorrah""I did two episodes of Gomorrah in 2015, when Stefano Sollima called me.

He's an incredible director. That work changed me: it was a real lesson in action, in the craft of staging. I've carried those lessons with me ever since.".

Giovannesi's directorial production often sees the metropolitan city of Naples as the location of the plots, narrated from different angles and in evocative terms that aim to stimulate broad-ranging observations in the audience: "I believe that when we talk about Naples, we are not only talking about the specific city - he clarified his intentions - but about the whole world, as it is a universal metaphor, especially as regards "Gomorra" and "La paranza dei bambini", as they tell the adversities and the face to face with evil of anyone born in a delicate and difficult area of ​​the world. – and concluded – “Hey Joe”, on the contrary, is a specific narrative film: Naples is a frontier city, that’s where the Americans arrive and a certain type of society begins, the one we know today. There the city is no longer just a backdrop: it is a historical protagonist, an identity, and everything revolves around it”.

Emanuela Francini