italian suspiria 25th anniversary vhs transcript

This is a translation of Dario's monologue to camera that appears on the 25th Anniversary Italian VHS release of SUSPIRIA. Thanks to Francesco for his hard work.

"This is my film Suspiria, which I made right after Deep Red, a long time ago. Deep Red is a sort of giallo, a bit frenzied, but it had too many realistic connotations. I thought it was time for me to change, to give my films a big shake. So I thought to clash with horror cinema, which I've always been interested in and by which I've always been fascinated, especially the American and English ones.

Before finding which sort of story I would have made… I knew I wanted to make this sort of voyage through this world, but it was not so clear inside of me. I understood that witchcraft interested me, and magic also, but especially witchcraft. And the witches, not the sorcerers, or something like them. So I went around Europe for some months to search for inspirations, themes and characters. I've went to Northern Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland… I went travelling a lot; I visited many places supposed to be famous witchcraft sites, full of witches.

When I arrived in a place in Switzerland near Basil, I found a group of very interesting people, who told me about the so-called-witches, and about their way of living: what they do, where they go to, how they eat, about their ideals (if they have any). Then I begun to write the film, setting it in an academy of ballet because in the world of witchcraft dancing is one of the main ways to express yourself, one of the arts that witches are more interested in, as some movements can be transcendent and esoteric. So I thought that a dance academy would be an interesting setting.

Afterwards I went to Germany where I found the right places for making the film, especially in Fribourg. My mind is fixed on houses, in my movies there are always these houses, and I don't know what they mean. The psychoanalysts say the house represents the woman or the mother, or many other things. Anyway, there was a very interesting house, in which Erasmus of Rotterdam lived, the great philosopher, and I tried to make the film in that house. In part I succeeded in that, and you can see the house in the film, but suddenly they chased us away, as the house now is a bank, there are some offices. So we shot there some little pieces of the film, the rest has been reconstructed. I shot also on location, in other places such as the Black Forest, Munich, and so on. This is how the film was born, but it was one of the most complicated films I have ever made; it has a lot of dark sides for me too.

With the cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, we tried to find out the method to get the same chromatic results used by Walt Disney and by all the cinema of the thirties and forties using Technicolor, with a high density of colour. This is not possible nowadays, as there are no more machines to do that. There were three machines, in which the three films ran simultaneously, for the three fundamental colours. Then the films were superimposed to obtain a sort of tape with the definitive film. This machine does not exist anymore. We obtained that asking the Kodak for a film of 30-40 ASA, with a very low sensibility and a very thick layer of gelatine, if you think that the film used nowadays has 500 ASA. The film we used wanted a lot of light, but it gave a greater film depth, more of a 3D effect. And it gave also the possibility to give some colours such as the golds and the blacks a unique brightness.

This film was a sort of challenge, as I, before starting, said that I didn't want a shot to be the same as another. Every shot must be different and thought out, but not in an easy way... just to change the lenses, or to change the camera position or to make a travelling or a dolly shot. It had to have meaning in the story. So I spent a lot of time in studying the storyboard and the shooting list. When I saw the final product it seemed a strange and bizarre film. To begin with, I imagined the story set in a childrens school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl's age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.

The protagonist of Suspiria was Jessica Harper. I had seen her in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. It has been a pleasant meeting in Los Angeles. She looked like a child, with her big eyes like a Japanese manga character, her child face, and a beautiful voice, a soprano voice. She comes from musicals; she was in the first edition of Hair. So she came to Italy, and we made the film together. Well, she actually came to Germany, as the film was mainly shot there. There were many other interesting actors in it. In that trip I made to the USA I met also other actresses: I was searching for an actress to play the head of the academy. So I met Joan Bennet, a very famous actress of the forties. She was Fritz Lang's woman: it seemed to me that going to bed with Fritz Lang a lot of time was already something important that she had done in her life. When we met, we talked about Fritz Lang, but, although she had been with him for ten years, she was not very pleased talking about that topic. What a pity! There were other actresses: Alida Valli, an icon of our cinema.

I spent very little time editing it, at that time editing was done with the old machines. Editing a film used to take months, there was the film, it had to be cut, and put together with tape, crazy work. But it took me ten days, as I shot it scene by scene, one shot after another. If I had failed, the film would have been impossible to be edited. Fortunately I kept it compact. It was the second film where I worked with Goblin. They did excellent work. The main instrument is a Greek string instrument, the bozouki, which I discovered a few months before shooting in a trip I made to Greece. I was listening to traditional music near Athens when I saw this instrument, with a very interesting and gloomy sound. So I bought it and brought it to Rome and Goblin used it for the soundtrack.

The film was quickly edited, and then released. I was very excited; I was in a car near the cinema Metropolitan. It was the last but one show. When the audience came out they were very noisy, everybody was shouting that the film was terrible, horrible, there were the witches, they said not to go and see it, too much fear. This also upset the audience that was going into the cinema. Maybe this kind of cinema was too futuristic for Italy: indeed it was not my biggest hit in Italy. The worldwide distribution was by 20th Century Fox. I was already thinking about another film, when they called me for the French premiere. It was already famous in Paris, as they had some screenings, and when I arrived it was a big success. From that my success spread worldwide. In Japan the film was shown in a big stadium, with a powerful stereo system made by Sony, with huge amplifiers, for 30,000 people. And in America too,it was one of the biggest hits of the year. I understood that a film that is not so successful in Italy has the same fate abroad. In Italy I'm very well known for Deep Red, while abroad I'm known for Suspiria, considered my most frenzied, strangest and finest film.

After we started to shoot, the rumours were that dealing with witchcraft was bringing bad luck. Of course I didn't believe in that, but some members of the troupe and some friends were sure of that. Indeed, some strange things happened, and the script girl kept a sort of diary of weird and inconceivable facts happening every day. Fortunately nothing terrible or dramatic…marvellous and perfect clocks that suddenly stopped, cameras stopped shooting without reason...we shot some scenes with no impression on the film! I cannot count them, there were dozens. I think they were all coincidences, nothing to do with witches and witchcraft, I don't believe in them. But the theme we were dealing with lead us to make those coincidences bigger and to give them a meaning they didn't have. Maybe, because we cannot be so drastic and made of stone, repeating "I don't believe in that". Who knows? Personally I don't, but if someone one day demonstrates to me that witchcraft is something concrete, a concrete philosophy, I am ready to believe in that.

For the part of the old woman… There was no CGI at that time, so every effect you see in the film is made on the spot, with nothing, no blueback, nothing. So you can imagine how difficult some sequences were to shoot, for example the one of the eagles flight I shot in one of the main squares in Munich, the so called "Three Temple" square. I wanted to simulate the flight of the eagle with the camera, this eagle flying all over the square to this blind man who opposed the witches and was cursed. Doing that today would not be so difficult. At that time we had to use a very old method, with pulleys, 150 meters of steel cable suspended in the air on which ran a little dolly on which the camera, looking down, was fixed. Then for the part of the very old woman, the main witch… Nowadays you can use digital effects to create it, but we found a really very old woman. It was so difficult for her to stay in the light. We found her in a hospice 100-km away from Rome. She's the oldest person I've worked with, she was 90, although she was not a proper actress, she was a woman. Anyway, it was a beautiful experience, her remembrances. She was like a child, all excited by the wonderful things on the set, the lights… What an experience!"

Dario Argento 2002

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