During an informal meeting with journalists after the press screening of Fascisti su Marte on Monday, October 16, the film’s director, Corrado Guzzanti – accompanied by his group of “actor friends” Marco Marzorca, Lillo Petrolo, Irene Ferri and Caterina Guzzanti and Fandango producer Domenico Procacci – spoke on how the film, which is being shown at the RomeFilmFest in the Extra section, came to be.

“We didn’t think about making an actual film, it was an idea only for television. Thanks to an intervention by Procacci it then became a film for the cinema. It’s more of an oddity than a film. I was interested in portraying the language of fascist propaganda and why still today it is expressed in such a mystificatory form. So I delved deeply into the subject, studying a lot of archive material, to be able to speak in the manner of the fascist newsreels, to master the jargon and thus create neologisms that play on the words used in the 1930s”.

“I always considered Fascisti su Marte my baby, a very private film made by all friends, some of whom aren’t even actors. Everything began in 2002 when, as part of the RAI 3 programme ‘Il caso Scafroglia’, we began performing sketches of Fascisti su Marte, a group of Fascists who conquer the red planet in 1939. At the end of the programme the adventures of the Fascists were left suspended and a lot of fans wrote to us, begging us to continue the saga. So in late 2002 we rented a quarry and there continued shooting. Part of the filmed material was edited and presented at the 2003 Venice Film Festival, out of competition in the New Territores section. In other words, Fascisti su Marte wasn’t supposed to be a film but became one through a series of chain reaction catastrophes. In the future I’d like to return to cinema, but with a more thought out film”.

“The film cost approximately €1.5 million, most of which was spent on special effects and music, which we tried to make as similar to that of the newsreels. At first, we shot it like a silent film then later, upon realising that a fascist-style voiceover for 90 minutes could have been overly weighty, we interspersed it with images with musical inserts and dialogue. Gradually, from a silent newsreel with captions, it became a spoken film in colour”.