Un fallito di successo. Incontro con Ennio de Concini

This is a series of interviews with "those who have known Ennio De Concini well." These are the tiles in a mosaic of praises that are never repetitive. Each of the people interviewed dwells on a different quality from among the many that marked the activity of this protean film writer who has written screenplays for hundreds of films and collaborated on a hundred others without having his name appear on their titles. He has directed two films and produced another two. This mosaic has been disassembled as it was being put together. Ennio De Concini, the main figure, is the one who does this. He seems to have fun debunking the people interviewed, reducing the importance of his craft, and making a distinction between his craft and talent. The reason he gives is that talent should be discussed in relation to the greater arts and not in relation to scripts, which are a rite of passage between the film story and the film. It is an activity that in the end gets its blood sucked out by the images in the film because if it were not for this, the film would not be worth existing, as often happens.

"Ennio De Concini took on the task of telling his own story with the most intransigent determination to ruin any kind of celebration of himself. No success that he had in the world of cinema could have, can, or could ever make up for his great disappointment: he was never able to write a single line in an inspired way. In short, he thinks that not being Dante, Leopardi, or Dostoevsky was the biggest defeat that life could have inflicted upon him in the sphere of creativity, something that overshadowed everything else" (F. Brogi Taviani).