15/11/2024 - The Italian director, who is being celebrated at Finland’s Night Visions, talks about Dario Argento, sci-fi and his very own little shop of horrors

(© Juho Liukkonen)

Born in 1947 and now being celebrated at the Finnish festival Night Visions, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi made Starcrash with Caroline Munro and David Hasselhoff, and 1983’s Hercules. He has also collaborated with Dario Argento. Following a break from directing, he’s at it again, and his love for sci-fi is stronger than ever.

Cineuropa: Why did you stop directing for a while after The Black Cat? Were you getting frustrated?
Luigi Cozzi: When Dario Argento and I were shooting Two Evil Eyes, we decided to open a shop in Rome, dedicated to horror, fantasy and sci-fi fans. We would offer them VHS tapes, masks, books, essays, costumes, toys and anything else connected to the cinema of the fantastic. We opened in September 1989, and it became a hit. I loved running it, and I devoted myself to it completely. Meanwhile, the Italian movie industry was collapsing owing to the TV “boom”, so I decided to stick to the store, which was becoming an international attraction, also thanks to Dario Argento’s museum of horrors, Profondo Rosso. I started a publishing house, so I kept myself busy, until some French friends convinced me to start directing again. I did three films in a row: Blood on Méliès' Moon, The Little Wizards of Oz and The Battle of Rome 1849. Then the pandemic stopped me again.

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How did your collaboration with Argento even start?
I met him in 1970. I was supposed to just interview him, but we immediately became friends. We shared the same ideas and passion for genre cinema. We wrote his third movie, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and kept on working together. Over the years, I’ve been his screenwriter, 2nd unit director, assistant director and special effects supervisor. In many ways, Dario’s been my teacher, my “maestro”. I love his style, but my main influence as a director comes from Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock and especially from sci-fi movies. With a bit of the French New Wave, especially Truffaut.

You’ve always loved sci-fi, but after Star Wars, everyone was interested in these films. Starcrash is still fondly remembered, so what are your thoughts on that film now?
I’ve always thought that time is the only way of judging whether a movie is good, bad or useless. You may like many movies, but if you watch them again after a few years, you might not like them any more. If you do, it means they’re really good and have a lasting power. Every time I started making a new film, I wanted to make sure people would like it even ten or 20 years later. Many still do, after multiple viewings, and that pleases me.

I saw Starcrash as a sci-fi fantasy or a space fairy tale, and not as a poor man’s imitation of Star Wars. Sci-fi is not really a genre, because when you go and see a sci-fi movie, you don’t know what it may be about. Godzilla is sci-fi, so is Star Wars, Cowboys & Aliens, Resnais’ I Love You, I Love You, Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Charly and Bicentennial Man. Sci-fi can be everything and every kind of story. That’s why I love it: it gives you full freedom to create, write or shoot.

There was an entire podcast episode dedicated to the film. I can’t forget the story about Caroline Munro knitting on set between takes.
Starcrash is still being shown around the world and has a cult following in the USA. I started writing it in 1977 – it was released in 1979. When it comes to the technical side, it was an incredibly difficult film to make. No one had tried to do anything similar here in Italy before, and no one has tried to repeat it since. During production, almost everyone thought I was totally crazy, but time has shown that I was right and they were wrong.

The idea of referencing successful films is nothing new, but in the past, European cinema was very open to it. What was your take on it, as many projects you were offered followed that trend, like Contamination?
Most producers considered my sci-fi project proposals as silly, uncommercial stuff. Then Star Wars showed that sci-fi can be more than commercial. It was a billion-dollar treasure trove, so I finally found people who were willing to let me make them: as long as they were imitations of the US blockbusters. I made movies that at least looked like Star Wars or Alien, as was the case with Contamination, although they were actually very different and leaning more towards sci-fi from the 1950s.

I’ve always tried to make different genre movies, infusing them with my personal vision and style. The ones that did best at the box office were The Last Concert from 1976, Starcrash and Hercules, but I’m proud of the rest, too. They might not be good movies, but they are my small, personal movie experiments.

Do you think European genre cinema is in a good place right now?
It has been taken over by TV movies, at least in Italy. I think that most of today’s films are not real movies – they are industrial products coming straight from factories, just like canned foods. But this doesn’t worry me, because I can still go on making movies independently. As long as my health holds out.