Dario Argento on Mixing Horror With Tenderness in ‘Dark Glasses’ (EXCLUSIVE)

At 81, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is busier than ever.

The director of a string of cult chiller classics beginning within the Seventies, together with “The Chook With the Crystal Plumage,” “Suspiria” and “Deep Pink,” was at Cannes final July together with his performing debut in Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex,” a couple of pair of previous lovers. Argento was additionally celebrated final yr with a brand new e-book by Italian critic Steve Della Casa and a retro at New York’s Lincoln Heart. This spring he’s set to be honored with an enormous present at Italy’s Nationwide Museum of Cinema in Turin.

Extra considerably, having returned to the director’s chair after a decade, Argento is again with “Darkish Glasses,” which he describes as a basic thriller, or giallo, because the violent crime style is understood in Italy.

“Darkish Glasses,” which is about in present-day Rome, screens on Feb. 11 as a Berlinale Particular Gala, marking Argento’s first time in Berlin as a director, although he was on the fest’s competitors jury panel in 2001.

The pic is a couple of serial killer who strangles prostitutes with cello strings and is pursuing a luxurious escort named Diana. However there’s a twist. Diana is blinded by a automobile crash with the killer and will get assist from an orphaned Chinese language boy. A social employee performed by Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento, additionally involves the rescue.

It was Asia who made “Darkish Glasses” occur, 20 years after its inception.

Argento was alleged to make the movie in 2002, produced by Italo mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, who went bust whereas they had been doing location scouting. So he put the screenplay in a drawer.

Then in the future Asia was searching for materials for her autobiography, the helmer recounts. “She was wanting round my home for some papers and notebooks and she or he discovered this screenplay that she hadn’t actually heard of.”

Asia learn it, liked it, and stated: “Dad, you’ve obtained to make this movie,” and introduced France’s Wild Bunch on board, particularly its co-founder Vincent Maraval, who entrusted its bodily manufacturing to Italy’s Conchita Airoldi and Laurentina Guidotti.

Apart from starring within the pic in a secondary function, Asia serves as its affiliate producer. However she was additionally instrumental, together with Noe, in getting French techno composer Arnaud Rebotini (“BPM (Beats Per Minute),” “Blair Witch”) to attain the movie after Daft Punk allegedly dropped out as a result of they broke up.

Twenty years later, “Darkish Glasses” is “a bit totally different from the unique, but it surely has the identical wild and loopy spirit,” stated Argento, who reworked the script and in addition shot the movie through the pandemic.

As its protagonist, Argento solid Ilenia Pastorelli, who had a breakout function broke in Gabriele Mainetti’s genre-bender “They Name Me Jeeg.”

Casting a Chinese language boy to play Chin, the orphan who turns into the blind Diana’s eyes, was extra difficult. Finally the manufacturing discovered a “very mature” boy named Xinyu Zhang (pictured above with the maestro) in Milan, house to the second-largest Chinese language inhabitants in Europe.

The tender rapport between Diana and Chin in “Darkish Glasses,” which options loads of Argento’s trademark blood, gore and trauma, marks a departure of types.

“The motherly relationship with the kid, who protects her and turns into her information; it’s a novelty,” stated Argento, including that this dynamic “pushed me to make a greater movie.”

When it comes to visuals, the director selected younger Berlin-based Italian cinematographer Matteo Cocco, winner of Italy’s David di Donatello prize for lensing Giorgio Diritti’s “Hidden Away,” which premiered at Berlin in 2020.

And Sergio Stivaletti, who has labored on each Argento movie because the 1985 Jennifer Connelly-starrer “Phenomena,” dealt with the “Darkish Glasses” particular results.

“Darkish Glasses,” which is being bought by Wild Bunch, will likely be launched in Italian theaters by Imaginative and prescient Distribution Feb. 24.

However now Argento simply needs to benefit from the Berlin in-person premiere of his new giallo.

Nonetheless a insurgent, he’s even hoping that Rebotini will handle to discover a Berlin evening membership the place he and a few German musicians can play a few of the movie’s tracks throughout an after get together, although events usually are not formally allowed by the fest this yr.