‘Sicilian Letters’ Directors Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza on Film

Directorial duo Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (“Sicilian Ghost Story”) tell the true tale of Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro – who was dubbed “the last godfather” – in their new drama “Sicilian Letters,” launching on Thursday from the Venice Film Festival.

“Sicilian Letters” pairs two top Italian actors — Elio Germano, who plays Messina, and Toni Servillo as his antagonist Catello, a shady secret services operative who is trying to catch him — working in tandem for the first time. The title refers to a surreptitious correspondence between them using “pizzini,” small slips of paper that the Sicilian Mafia used for high-level communications.

The film looks at a time during Denaro’s three decades as a fugitive from Italian justice, when he was at the peak of his nefarious powers. After being on the run for three decades, Messina Denaro was arrested in mid-January 2023 outside an upscale medical facility in Palermo, where he had been undergoing cancer treatment for a year under a false identity. The top mafioso, convicted of masterminding some of Italy’s most heinous slayings — including the killings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino — subsequently died in September of last year in a maximum-security prison.

Below, Variety speaks to the directors about how they delved deep into the personality of Denaro and the role he played in Sicily’s deeply corrupt society.

The film is based on reality. Talk to me about your research.

Reality is the starting point for us. We have been studying Matteo Messina Denaro for almost five years, and the most difficult part of starting to try and understand him is that there was not much out there that was believable. Just a lot of mythology. So it took time for us to separate what was really true and what was just legend. The “pizzini” helped us a lot. Through these letters, we started to understand him on a psychological level because his personality is really something completely different from the rest of the mafia people we had known up until that moment.

Matteo Messina Denaro was one of the last of the bosses of Cosa Nostra. He’s a real person and you had access to aspects of his personality. What was your approach in depicting him?

There were two sides of him that immediately caught our attention. One was his relationship with his father because his entire world – and also his mind – was somehow forged by his father. We are looking at a sort of pathological, patriarchal world. Archaic and patriarchal. Matteo is the son of a big godfather. He is also a hyper-narcissistic criminal. That that was very clear for us reading his letters. But the difference between Matteo and the mafia bosses we’ve been used to is that he was always surrounded by bourgeois people. And somehow, thanks to his friends and also thanks to the type of life he planned to live, at some point he encountered books. Based on what they found in his last hideout, he was quite a good reader. He was reading “Open” by [Andre] Agassi, he was reading Vargas Llosa, he was reading Baudelaire, he was reading Dostoyevsky.

Talk to me about working with two of Italy’s top actors, Elio Germano and Toni Servillo.

They have very different ways of approaching their characters. Toni is very much into the written material. Elio wants to embody the character. Elio, as we see him, is very much a classic method actor. He wants to inhabit the character. Toni always wanted to talk to us [about the character] while we were working on the script. But Elio, at a certain point, he just vanished. He moved to Sicily. He stayed among real people in the real places where Matteo lived his life. And he came back with a proper [Sicilian] accent, and some physical quirks.

In terms of references, I think you’ve mentioned Pietro Germi, whose “In the Name of the Law” is considered the first Italian film to depict Cosa Nostra.

Definitely. We had that kind of world in mind because we love Germi. We think what he did was great because his films were strongly political, but at the same time they played with genre. And that was super interesting for us, because we also wanted to tell a relevant story for Italian public opinion, about a very famous criminal who was recently arrested. So having this kind of reference really helped us. When you use genre to approach this kind of story you always enter the realm of grotesque absurdity. And this is something that you can feel and smell in our world, in the Sicilian world that we brought to the screen.

The film’s original music is composed by Sicilian singer-songwriter Colapesce and you’ve said it is inspired by Italian soundtracks of the 1960s. What was it like working with him to develop that?

He’s a great musician who comes from our region, so he has lots of dark irony. At first we talked with him, we sent him the script and we discussed some film and music references. Then, when he started watching the daily rushes, Colapesce immediately realized that we were going in a wrong direction. So he went back to work through the rushes all the way through to the first edit of the film. The magical thing is that at first he was a little shy because by watching our previous film, he knew that we didn’t use that much music. But then little by little, he got more involved in the process and so he proposed more musical material and we watched it with him and we said, “OK, it’s not too much. For us, it’s perfect. Go home and continue.” And then, right at the end of the editing process, when we were really close to the mix, Colapesce gave us this incredible gift of the final song, that on a thematic level was able to address the essence of the film. The song’s refrain is “La malvagità serve al mondo intero,” or “evil serves a purpose for the entire world.” It’s obviously very connected to what we are saying about Matteo Messina Denaro, which is that as a fugitive, he was at the center of an entire world that was using him for their own purposes.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.