I had just moved to the top floor of a house in north Milan, at 64 Vallazze Street.

At that time I was an accumulator and most of the objects in the video I had with me were big boxes. The house was completely empty except for a mattress and these boxes. Federico Dragogna, guitarist and author of the Ministri, was my neighbor on the landing of the building, on the fifth floor with no elevator.

The proposal to make the video was definitely born out of mutual esteem, more, out of a friendship.  We wanted to make a video clip that would go in the opposite direction from the classic, somewhat licked representation of the rock band in Italian videos at the time, and that empty house seemed like a great location. So we bought dozens of meters of wallpaper and started applying them to the walls in order to create different environments.

Federico came up with the sentences in the overlay and that storyline, and so are many other things in the video, we did everything together, among friends, playing for days with what was in that empty house and lighting the sets with some old lamps taken from other apartments. 

The process of making a video for a major (Universal Music at the time) was always very different from the one applied by us in that situation, meaning everything was much more official. I think that’s why the video got noticed as we altered the process which drastically changed the outcome.

Once it came out, the Corriere della Sera asked us for information about the video and a mini biography. 

Finding our biographies uninteresting, we made up with a biography of this Danish film master, Sterven Jonger, a name taken from a pack of cigarettes I had on my room table at the time, which read precisely: rockers Sterven Jonger (Smoking kills the young). Sterven Jonger was a killer name for a Danish director with a punk and ruthless doctrine. 

The joking lie worked for some time. 

It is hard to define what is low budget as it depends on what you want to accomplish. For some things you need a lot of money, for others, you need only an idea, a room, and a little more. I’ve done a lot of crazy things over the years without money, I remember with a grin when I bought for a few euros a 1970s Ciao Piaggio in Barona, south of Milan, and then covered it with LEDs and, in my head, made it look like some kind of bright star wandering around the city. It was supposed to be a video of Costellazioni by Le Luci della Centrale Elettrica but it never came out.

As soon as I read street in your reply, automatically (since I practically know the text by heart) my brain thought of it as in the video Toys by Canemorto that you made with them for their eponymous exhibition held at Viafarini in Milan in 2016.

Besides some mythical beats (“An encyclopedia of style, call us Treccani” “Street art in Milan? Panettoni and penguins” “Sfatti a terra terra come il Cristo morto del Mantegna”), when I saw it I was struck by the relentless pace and crescendo of the first minute as well as that glowing effect on the appearance of Txakurra (by the way, how did you physically achieve that?). How did the script and the idea for that video come about in the scorching context of the exhibition Street Art – Banksy & Co. Art in the Urban State in Bologna? And in general what binds to Canemorto, so much so that then a couple of years later you also shot CANEMORTO X STUDIOCROMIE – Golden Age?

It was 2016, and I had long been intrigued by these dog heads that I was seeing on the walls of Milan and especially on those arterial roads that take you out of the city from Milan.

Toys were our first collaboration, at that time I was shooting my first documentary ‘The Man Who Stole Banksy’, which was about works made on the street illegally that were, in different ways, removed and stored or resold. 

In the research conducted with the help of Christian Omodeo, one day I entered the studio of a well-known restorer in Bologna and found this work by Canemorto. A mural had been removed from a very thin section containing one of their drawings by the technique of tearing. Camillo Tarozzi, the restorer, was highlighting the praises of the found work. 

This footage I had shot gave us a chance to interfere partially in that debate, albeit with their usual cynicism, but based on the real preceding events. Here was the short circuit that we liked and we were all rap fans so the people wanted to record during those late-night sessions, giving us lines/beats that have gone down in history, as you rightly mention.

The initial crescendo that you refer to was a tense atmosphere typical video writing that I felt worked in contrast to their personalities and what happens shortly after, where instead of action you see a kind of rap video clip shot candidly during movement.

In that case, Txakurra was the 3d experiment made with the young and talented Matteo Toffalori.

With Canemorto the collaboration has continued and continues, I think we are united by the attitude as well as the love for outdoor painting.

Since you prompted it, let’s come to the 2018 documentary The Man Who Stole Banksy directed by you and co-written by Christian Omodeo and Filippo Perfido, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Through the collection of footage from 2007 and footage shot in Palestine in 2012, 2015, and 2017, passing through London, Copenhagen, and Vienna until arriving in Bologna, the film takes as a pretext the detachment of Banksy’s very famous graffiti “The donkey with the soldier” to get to points of vital cultural importance for Western society and beyond. Indeed, the film in a prismatic sense stages multiple points of view from the art world insiders or otherwise, related to the sense of Memory and the preservation of heritage, or even what can be Art or Vandalism.

What memories do you hold of an adventure with such a long timeline? In terms of writing the script, at what point did you realize what direction the documentary would definitely take and in what terms did the two co-writers help you? Strategically, you once confided in me that documentaries’ beauty is that they can compete with giant Hollywood productions in the context of film festivals with a lower budget. Did you ever feel like making a film with actors that wasn’t a documentary?

The memories are many as the film’s production time lasted 6 years. 

Let’s say I fell into the story by accident, I met Walid, a Palestinian cab driver, on the street, not far from the turnstiles of the separation wall. He immediately asked me if I was interested in art and if I knew Banksy. He then told me that he had removed a wall of several tons, where there was a one-color stencil of a soldier checking the papers of a donkey. He showed it to me; what he had told me was true. Walid knew nothing about Banksy, he only knew that the piece was worth money “in our world.” And he was trying to sell it on eBay at $100,000.

From that moment and for 6 years I followed this huge chunk of concrete, trying to distinguish what seemed to me to be an interesting intersection involving vandalism, politics, auction houses, the Palestinian situation, and symbols that in different countries have different interpretations.

The 6 years that followed, was filled with backpacks, trains, delayed flights, rejections, bar talk, tear gas, and a very tight crew, usually 2 people. The two co-authors were critically important in different ways. Christian Omodeo was one of the first to take an interest in this story. In fact, he was literally the first one who wrote to me when I published the fake trailer for the documentary, which didn’t really exist yet. We immediately hit it off very well personally and professionally, and I really needed someone like him, who would baptize or conversely dismantle, with credibility and knowledge of the art world, parts of the storytelling and theses, the questions I was asking as I was filming this story.

Filippo Perfido, on the other hand, intervened at the end of the film and helped me decisively in the writing of the voice-over and its translation, as well as in the post-production and release of the film.

Of course, the documentary has rules with a wider mesh than filmmaking and evidently has much lower costs, but that’s not why I engage with it. Often stories like this would be impossible to script because they are full of details and contradictions, elements of reality that the working of a script could not consider in its entirety. Or, if you want to put it that way, the reality is often even more unbelievable than any higher fiction.