The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Diciannove.

What were your conversations with the editor like? In some scenes, you insert shots of things that feel almost violent and expressionistic.
Giovanni Tortorici: I talked about the visual style before the editing began with my editor, Marco Costa, but that was more about the shots that I took. In general, I was very aware of the shots and angles I wanted in the film.  

I heard your first cut was three hours.
It was a little bit more, three hours and thirteen minutes. Because the part where he’s at the University of Siena is very long with a lot of scenes. For that it was very important to work with Marco, because the Siena part didn’t feel very smooth. We cut a lot. It was a bit difficult to calculate the length of the movie because there were a lot of silent scenes in the script. We were calculating from the page, but sometimes there were five scenes on a page because they were all without dialogue, so that complicated the anticipated length. 

he finds a morality that defends him from all these instincts

What was it like working with Luca Guadagnino as a producer, and as a mentor? Did you ever have to defend your choices?
No, it was totally the opposite because as a director, he understood all my artistic needs. He protected me from anything that took away from artistic needs. It was fantastic; he gave me total freedom in my choices.

You shot in the same apartment that you lived in as a student. Did that feel weird, going back there?
Yeah, I remember doing scoutings for an apartment, and of course none of them were exactly the same. At a certain point I thought that maybe we could have tried to reach the old apartment where I lived in Siena and we found it. It felt very weird at the beginning because I was twenty-seven when I was shooting, so it had been like eight years since I was in there. It was very strange to re-live those emotions and feelings in that apartment.

With the writing, do you try to stick close to reality or is there a point where you intentionally try to fictionalize it to create distance?
In general, I love when it’s super close to reality. That was my goal. There were some narrative bits I had to change, but when I felt like we were fulfilling the realism of the original past, I was delighted.

What was the process like casting an actor to essentially play yourself?
It was a long process. I worked with the casting director to audition all around Italy, because I love the realism. I was hoping that we could find a person from Palermo because I’m from Palermo. In the end, the guy we loved the most of all was Manfredi [Marini], and it was lucky that he was from Palermo. So I was very happy. From the first time that we saw him, we knew he was super good, sensitive, and very open-minded. It was a big pleasure to work with him.

As a new actor, how did you get him ready for his first shoot?
He was a little bit shy, and I’m very sensitive to that. But that happened more in the rehearsals. When he was in front of the actual cameras, he worked perfectly. I was trustful and patient and waited until we were on set, and he did very well.

I’m curious as to how you balanced the contemporary music and classical music used in the film?
Again, I really wanted to be realistic. I put in music that I was listening to, and in general, I really liked the idea of this contrast between the classical music that was more in touch with his sensitivity, along with the contemporary music of their era, 2015. I think that there is this contrast even inside himself, because he’s very attracted to the past, but at the same time, even if he’s in denial, he’s also very attracted to the contemporary. I felt the music was reflecting this a bit.

Why do you think he had this obsession with an older time period?
For this character, I think it’s kind of neurosis because he’s a very repressed person, and he’s scared of his instincts and sexuality. In the past, in this literature, he finds a morality that defends him from all these instincts.

I know you studied literature and there are fascinating montages and images and also a lot of visual text in the film. I’m curious about how those were written into the screenplay?
I knew it was going to be a challenge to represent literature in the movie, but I still wanted to be very realistic and I was just thinking about the images that I was having while writing the script. I thought animation would be good to represent that. I worked with this animator and I told her what I was imagining and she reproduced it with these animations. In general, I think it was all planned ahead of time because I knew it would be a little bit tricky.

You spoke before about realism and the importance of realism and that really comes across to the audience. I’m wondering when you were thinking about the film and designing it, were there any shots or particular elements that you thought were really important to evoke that feeling of realism with the audience?
In general, I was imagining a lot of the images of the movie, but I deeply love to go on set and feel free to do whatever I want. I want to be inspired by the location, by the faces, by the light, by the very moment. I don’t like to do storyboards. I deeply love to go on set and rehearse with the actors, see the scenes, and then decide all the shots.