tiff50 BELOW THE CLOUDS: An Interview with Director Gianfranco Rosi

 

Why did you choose Naples as the protagonist, as it were, of Below The Clouds? What attracted you to making a documentary about the city?

Naples, the Phlegraean Fields and Mount Vesuvius form an immense basin of stories. It is a place that moves continuously between surface and depth: ruins, subterranean spaces, clouds, fumaroles, tremors of the earth. But it is equally shaped by the everyday glances that pass between its people: children, archaeologists, firefighters, teachers, sailors. In this territory, there are areas of passage between what is and what could be. There are those who investigate, like the prosecutor; those who preserve fragments of memory, like Mary, the curator at the museum; and many anonymous faces that together draw an affective and moral map. Below The Clouds passes over a world that prefers to hide rather than show itself. It shows characters suspended between past and present, between light and shadow.

Can you tell us about your artistic process? How do you find your stories and protagonists? And how do you go about capturing your images?

Making my films is always a drawn-out process during which indispensable bonds are born. I actively looked for stories and people, but at the same time, I let myself be guided by what I found. The camera becomes a tool for meeting people, and mutual trust grows with the time we spend together. Only then does the time come to film, when the relationship has become alive and authentic.

Naples is usually seen as a city of Mediterranean light and color. Why did you choose to film in black and white?

Cocteau wrote that Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world. Those clouds led me to the title and the look of the film. Below the clouds, light changes its nature: there are no shadows, and everything shows itself in another form. Black and white has allowed me to give a different definition, to look for a deeper truth in the image than the places, bodies, gestures themselves. Black and white opens up the imagination, it engages you to look at things in a different way. I can't imagine this film in color.

Your films rely exclusively on your images to make their meanings clear, without extraneous explanations. What does that mean for the way you edit your material?

I already started to edit while I was filming. Places, people and actions met in front of the camera and immediately afterwards in the editing room. Editing was not a separate task, but a rewrite that accompanied the film as it took shape. For three years, filming and editing walked hand in hand, day after day, until they became Below The Clouds.

How did your  collaboration with Daniel Blumberg (winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score 2025 for The Brutalist come about? What did he add to the texture of the film?

I have known Daniel for more than 14 years and I really love his experimental music. When I thought of the music for the final scene of the film I could only think of him. My need was not to have a soundtrack, but rather to imagine a soundscape capable of creating a suspended space in certain moments of the film. A fabric of traces, sounds, music where the instruments themselves become unrecognizable while drawing a sonic landscape.

You seem to be especially interested in transitions - between the Ganges and the city of Benares in BOATMAN; between Rome and its surroundings in Sacro Gra; the movement of refugees in Fuocoammare; the borderlands of Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon in Notturno. The Naples of Below The Clouds is also a city of peripheries. What interests you about working in the margins?

For me, the margin is a passage, a contact area. Documenting these places of connection and transition means asking questions and imagining a space in which the paths that intersect become the very form of the film.

All your films, while tied to a specific locale, are informed by global politics. Below The Clouds, among other things, shows the unexpected traces in the city’s fabric of the wars in Syria and Ukraine, for example. Did you consider these links in your original idea for the film, or did it emerge while filming?

Naples and the Vesuvius territory are imbued with the histories of thousands of years: peoples, eruptions, domination. This history continues to live in underground tunnels, museums, buildings. The film tells everyday stories and lives in a time that seems to have little of the ordinary, as the news constantly proves. In a planet that is becoming smaller and smaller, great history is intertwined with the daily events of men and women, generating anxiety, fragility, but also a new awareness.

The present bursts in everywhere: in a port city, for example, you encounter routes of people and goods, events near and far that intertwine. Wars, exploitation, past and present conflicts: filming the present means allowing yourself to be challenged by it all.