Ruggero Deodato (7 May 1939) moves to Rome at the age of 14 from Potenza, Basilicata—more precisely he moves to Parioli, an upper-class area of the capital, which will have a crucial influence on his work. He begins his career in film at a very young age, as an actor, usually in small roles or bit parts.

“I participated in the early to mid-fifties in a handful of films and I was even called by Federico Fellini to audition for a role—I don’t remember for which one—but in the meantime I had gone through puberty and had lost my boyish charm; I wore glasses, had a bad skin, and was discarded immediately. That was my very last attempt at acting, but the experience had fully convinced me that cinema was the way for me. I knew I was going to make films…just that it had to be behind the camera, and not in front of it!”

During his teenage years, his parents will become increasingly close to the Rossellini family and Deodato will build a lasting friendship with Renzo, son of the famous father of neorealism, Roberto, and actress Ingrid Bergman. It is thanks to this fruitful and deep intertwining of families that a still young Deodato has a chance to really start working in cinema. Throughout the sixties, once separated from the Rossellinis, Deodato becomes omnivorous, participating in the most varied projects without any kind of distinction: “I was famished for cinema. I would do anything that gave me the possibility of moving around, being on a set, meeting new people. Having worked with Roberto I had built a solid reputation for myself in just a few years, so finding work wasn’t difficult.”

Between 1960 and 1967 Deodato works side by side with many of the leading genre directors in circulation, with whom he will, more often than not, initiate long term collaborations, touching all the most popular genres: science fiction, gothic horrors, and peplums with Antonio Margheriti; mostly Westerns, including the cult classic Django (1966), with Sergio Corbucci; Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet, 1964) with Riccardo Freda; comedies with Mario Amendola and Bruno Corbucci; a peplum and a war movie with Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia; and Wanted (1967) with Giorgio Ferroni. Apart from the films with Roberto Rossellini, which include Anima nera (Black Soul, 1962), Deodato collaborates with another of Italy’s leading auteurs, Mauro Bolognini.

“Rossellini and Bolognini are my two masters. Roberto taught me about the truth, how to look for it, while from the latter I got the elegance, the smoothness of the image, the softness of camera movements. The poetry of truth and beauty are the essence of these two masters. But I was lucky enough to have been exposed to many different directors and each one of them has been essential to my growth: Margheriti taught me a lot about special effects, while from Sergio Corbucci I inherited a certain taste for violence and brutality.”

In fact, it will be precisely violence and brutality which will establish and shape Deodato’s worldwide reputation, though his name is not associated with the ancestral and paranormal but with horror spectacles very much tied to the real cries and pain of humans violated by other humans.  

“People call me a horror director but actually I have only directed a couple of horror films, and I’m not referring to the usual titles of mine I’m associated with. Cannibal Holocaust is not a horror film, it’s just a depiction of reality. It’s not my fault the world we live in is so violent and dark.” 

If, in their period of decline, “serious” genres like the peplum and the Western tended toward the parodic, it is equally true that, conversely, some of the lighter ones drifted toward the grotesque and monstrous, locating themselves on that thin border between the tragic and the weird. So it was, in its small way, for the Italian adventure film, which in the late seventies and early eighties spawned a subgenre: the cannibal one. A possible model of reference for this subgenre can be traced to the so-called “mondo movies” of the sixties and their various by-products, at least at the level of the (im)moral thematic setting, the ridiculous ostentation of quibbling, socio-anthropological cogitations, and an unhealthy, erratic look upon the world. But it must also be said that the architectural narrative, the rhythm, and the dynamics that bind the characters together are typical of the adventure stories that had been told by Italian cinema over the previous decades. In the case of this cannibalistic current, one enters the heart of darkness of adventure, and the wonderful becomes repellent, the fantastic discolors into the obscene, the imaginative vulgarizes itself touching turpitude.

The heritage of “mondo movies” is blatant in the savageries of the cannibal current, apparent not only in the exotic locations and related tribal contexts, but particularly in the continuous exchange between reality and fiction, though with a difference in intention: while directors such as Jacopetti and Prosperi fused fictional elements with documentary footage in a perverse distortion of reality, Deodato, in his most famous film, Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—which sits at the pinnacle of the subgenre—inserts in the diegetic narration a true “film within a film”, creating a short circuit. In fact, Cannibal Holocaust can be read as both a condemnation of and a homage to the “fathers of mondo”. In so doing, he creates one of the most influential films of the last forty years. 

Of course, a director like Ruggero Deodato has, as he himself has often stated, a path littered with projects and ideas that never got made, but none of them leaves us wondering quite as much as his “zombie project”, firmly wanted by producer Fausto Saraceni, who went after Deodato determined to have him direct it. The following interview covers the whole of the making of Cannibal Holocaust, its difficulties and downfalls, and for the very first time Deodato goes on record regarding what was supposed to be his next film, subsequent to The House on the Edge of the Park.  

Cannibal Holocaust is your most famous film. How did this project germinate and where from?

In that period there was a serious problem with terrorism, and my seven-year-old son would watch the news on TV showing corpses and violence and this infuriated me. When we made our films, they censored them, cut them, and in some cases even wanted to burn the copies, whereas journalists had a free pass on everything. This made me think, and I proposed the idea to Gianfranco Clerici: a film with cannibals in which the journalists were the real enemy. Initially I wanted to make a documentary, but then I realized that was Jacopetti’s domain, so we embarked on this adventure using real actors. We started off with a vague outline, a general scenario, a series of elements and ideas which I expanded on during the making.

The search for a location went on for quite a while, didn’t it? 

We went to Leticia, which is a small town 100 meters from the Brazilian border and 100 meters from the Peruvian border. It’s the extreme point of a triangle that reaches the Amazon River. It’s beautiful, with this majestic river and a port that has remained untouched since the 19th century, but it was also full of drug trafficking, so it was quite a dangerous place. Before going there, I went to Cartagena. A producer had told me to check it out: “Go there… They shot Queimada (Burn!, 1969) and a lot of Italian films. It’s wonderful!” I went there and didn’t like it at all. There was nothing… yes, there was the Rio Negro, but the vegetation was all wrong, there wasn’t a real jungle, so I said, “No, we’re not going to film it here… I’d rather go back to Malaysia where we did Last Cannibal World.” We went to Bogotá but due to technical problems with the plane we were stuck three days at the airport. In addition, Franco Palaggi, the producer, was pissed off because I had rejected Cartagena. Generally, when I find myself in an airport, I always move around, and during these three days of being stuck in one I started talking to people, in particular to a young man with a camera, a Colombian with a rugged look, and he suggested we go to Leticia. “You have to go there, it’s only an hour and a half from here!” So, I went to the producer, “We’re leaving for Leticia.” “You’re out of your mind! I’m gonna sue you when we get back to Rome! You keep changing everything! You’re crazy!” “Come on, they say it’s wonderful…” And since he was a true professional, he said, “OK, let’s get the tickets for this bloody Leticia!”

As soon as I reached Leticia, I loved the atmosphere. It was full of boats, trafficking, people, and general chaos, small planes landing on the river—it was perfect. Plus, I had an obsession with filming these great rivers, because when you put them on film they transform into thin threads, wonderful torrents surrounded by the jungle. I needed a boat to go scouting. Palaggi went nuts: “I’m not giving you anything! Forget about it!” So I went to a fisherman and arranged the trip. The next morning I reached the river and saw Palaggi arrive on a motorboat. “Come on board!” He was a terrific professional, used to working with Sergio Leone; he was grumpy but knew how to work. The problem with the jungle was the high tide, because that’s when you’re going to find more snakes. With a low tide you can go through the jungle clapping and the snakes would move away. Everything was very simple, the crew was never hostile in any way, everything went wonderfully. I was able to communicate with the Indios as well as with the Spanish-speaking crew because I speak the language. I had rejected the Peruvian and Colombian Indios, preferring the Brazilian ones who lived as actual primitives and were extremely intelligent. They were slim, unlike the Peruvian and the Colombian Indios who had been spoiled by the presence of the white people. They had food and modern medicines whereas the tribes I chose still used natural herbal remedies and they were really intelligent. I especially used this head tribesman, Atunche; he did most of the scenes and was extraordinary…

What about the casting process?

One of the first decisions we made was to film in English; consequently, we did the casting in New York. We put ourselves in the hands of an important casting agency that had just worked with Ridley Scott. I asked for unknowns, as long as they were good, so we picked elements from the Actors Studio. In order for the film to be Italian, we needed at least two Italian actors, but luckily at the Actors Studio we found Luca Barbareschi and in Rome I found the girl. That was a stroke of genius. I did some auditions but there was this friend of my sister’s, an upper-class girl who liked to play hard to get, but who was also adventurous and curious. “Francesca, would you like to make a film in the Amazon?” and she went, “Yes! Absolutely! When? Where? Why? Immediately!” For all four of these actors we had a clause in their contracts that obligated them to not work on anything else for one year. “The fact is, you’re dead, and I’m going to present the film as an authentic event.”

Robert Kerman/Richard Bolla and his past as a porn actor?

This is something that made me really angry when I was told about it. I wouldn’t have chosen a porn actor, but I do have a justification: on The Concorde Affair the casting director was the same, and he had provided me with a lot of actors, among which James Franciscus, and as you can see in the film, in the control tower, there’s also Kerman, who is one of the characters who moves around the most. I met Kerman many years after the film, at a convention in the States, and he seemed irritated by my presence. Maybe it was because he could tell I looked at him differently, knowing he made porn…

What was the atmosphere like on set?  

The great thing was that we invented things as we went along. For example, one day I called Antonello Geleng, the production designer, and I said, “Tomorrow we’re impaling the girl… we’ve already shot the rape scene.” “How are we going to do it?” “That’s what you have to figure out!” The next morning, at dawn, Geleng knocks at my door: “I have something to show you…” He takes out a pole with a bike seat attached to it and a metal bar welded onto the back. “What am I supposed to do with this?” “You stick it in the ground, the girl sits on it and she holds a stick of balsa wood in her mouth, you cover her in blood, and you’re done!” When I explained this special effect to Tarantino, he asked me, “How much did you spend?” “Ten dollars.” “Naaah!” So, it was a very stimulating atmosphere. 

Was there a lot of drug use during the making of the film?

When we stopped shooting, everybody would vanish in a matter of minutes. “Where the fuck is everyone?” One day, the DOP and I followed them to the 1st AD’s room and found everybody fucked up on drugs. Geleng was in the bathroom, butt naked, standing in front of the mirror, with the script supervisor next to him, kneeling on the ground. He was bleeding copiously from one hand. He had smashed the mirror in front of him. “What the fuck happened?” I asked. He doesn’t even look at me and goes, “I entered the mirror.” The next day the script supervisor came to me saying that Geleng had left her. I went to ask him why. I found him lying on the floor, next to his bed. He stared at me. “Because she made me go inside the mirror.” 

Who is the woman during the “adulteress scene”? 

We had to use a girl from the costume department because nobody wanted to do it. I had to call her during the trial to prove that she hadn’t been killed. They wanted to condemn me to thirty years in jail for having made a snuff movie.   

What happened to the infamous “piranha sequence”?

My fans have always asked me about the piranha scene, and I really don’t understand where they got this news. We used to eat piranhas; the make-up artist used to fish for them, and they were very tasty when cooked on the grill. One day I had the idea of using these piranhas for a scene. In Last Cannibal World there’s a moment in which ants cover and bite a man’s arm so I thought we could do something similar in Cannibal Holocaust, attaching real piranhas to the costume and submerging the actor in the water. Of course, we hadn’t brought rubber piranhas from Rome, so we had to use the real thing. We tried the scene various times but the result was pathetic: the fish seemed dead-like, and it was discarded. The set photographer must have sold the photo she took of this moment, and so I imagine this is the origin of all the curiosity.

An incredibly important element of the film is the music. 

I knew I wanted very sweet music for the film, and my ambition was to get to Riz Ortolani though I didn’t have the prestige yet, but Palaggi did, having worked with Leone, and got him to attend a screening. Ortolani arrived and he was nice, a funny man. I was trembling, imagining what his reaction might be. Once the film was finished, Ortolani turned to me and said, “You’re a genius, this is an extraordinary film.”

The film was supposed to be called “I figli della luna” (“Sons of the Moon”).

The “Sons of the Moon” are the cannibals who see the moon through the branches of a tree. In a way, that’s their only light source, even more so than the sun itself. Gianfranco Clerici didn’t like the change in title, which was a choice made by the distributors. With Clerici I’ve always had an excellent relationship. He had already written other films for me, so he had so much trust in me that he would leave me a lot of freedom. More than a script, it was an outline… let’s say that the outline of The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the one we had, and basing it on that, I would add and extend ideas, also stimulated by the producer who would call me from MIFED saying, “Continue to do whatever you’re doing, the scenes you’ve sent me are fantastic, everybody wants a chunk of this film… tomorrow kill whoever you want.” And this gave birth to the impaling scene, the rape… I had a lot of fun and it was a lot less difficult than Last Cannibal World. But the main idea was fantastic; you couldn’t get it wrong with an idea like that.

Let’s talk about the aftermath of the film, once it was released.  

I was in Bogotá and there were queues, kilometers long, to see the film. I was at a party in the city with a girlfriend of mine. All sorts of journalists and members of the Colombian cultural scene were present. My friend introduced me: “This is the director of Cannibal Holocaust.” I was pushed and pulled out of the building. Once back in my hotel, I received telephone calls… I was afraid, so I called my 1st AD, Salvo Basile, who lived in Cartagena and through him I managed to gain the protection of a local mobster who brought me to the Rosario Islands. I stayed there in exile for a week and then I left for Miami. I didn’t think the reaction would have been so disastrous for the Italian critics and all the legal problems that followed. We made the film in a relatively short time, thinking we were making an entertaining product. I never expected such a reaction. After Cannibal Holocaust, I made The House on the Edge of the Park, which I considered even tougher, and my worry was, “What are they going to do to me now, condemn me to death?” Because in my opinion it was even more violent. After what happened, I started changing genres… lighter stuff. They called me for I predatori di Atlantide (The Raiders of Atlantis, a.k.a. Atlantis Interceptors, 1983). I continued doing publicity, documentaries, but I started getting softer and in particular I refused to do any kind of sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, which wouldn’t have made any sense. I got close to making one when they offered me Inferno in diretta (Cut and Run, 1985) which was supposed to be directed by Wes Craven, who, maybe at the time, was less of a box office draw than myself. He would later become much bigger than me but at the time my name was a little more appealing to producers. I changed that script very much as well, and then I worked a lot for TV. I changed continuously and I didn’t want to fall into the clutches of the board of censors. Basically, I did everything to get rid of Cannibal Holocaust. Now it might seem like a ludicrous thing to say but believe me, the heritage was very heavy.

But wait, weren’t you supposed to direct Schiave bianche – violenza in Amazzonia (White Slave, a.k.a. Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story, 1985) which was later directed by Mario Gariazzo? 

Yes, what happened there was that I asked ninety million lira for the film, which I thought I deserved seeing the box office results of Cannibal Holocaust. The producer answered that I had gone crazy, and success had gone to my head. But when they gave me 120 million for Cut and Run, he came to me and said, “But we could have given you the same amount for our film…” “Yeah, but you didn’t.” These were bandits who thought directors were interchangeable. After me, they called Castellari, but the foreign distributors wanted me as the director, so they cut the budget, let Castellari go, and got Gariazzo to do it. 

What is, in your mind, the heritage of Cannibal Holocaust? 

The heritage can be divided into good and bad: the young directors tried to imitate Cannibal Holocaust, shooting with a handheld camera and moving around a lot, but without having any real narrative dimension. I moved around a lot too, but in front of the camera there was a story, and you need the marvel of cinema. Nowadays I see a lot of confusion. It’s the same thing with long tracking shots, you have to know when and how to use certain techniques. So, this is the negative aspect. I can speak well about a lot of films, like for example 15 Minutes (2001) with Robert De Niro, with the two killers that shoot everything they see and die in the style of Cannibal Holocaust. I don’t like seeing monsters… I was disappointed by Cloverfield (2008), which seemed like an excellent film but then when I saw the monster appear, my interest dropped; even [REC] (2008) disappointed me because of its monsters. So, when you start using zombies and creatures, it violates the real nature of my film.

We mentioned this previously, but the time has come to talk about the animals that were killed in the film.  

The animal problem… I know, it’s ascribed to me, but I always say, “I didn’t kill those animals, it was the four journalists.” The story is about four journalists who shoot the second half of the film… I shot the first. Sergio Leone, when he saw the film, said, “The first half is OK, an adventure film, the second half is a masterpiece. You will get into a lot of trouble.” What could I do, kill people? That wasn’t possible. So, what I did was just wait patiently, maybe like Jacopetti did, to see what I could film. The guide would tell me, “Tomorrow there is an Indio wedding, you can kill a tortoise.” The natives eat rodents, they even burn the forest to catch them and I didn’t think a mouse would be scandalous. The piglet… the costume assistant came to me and asked me if we could kill a pig: “We’re fed up of eating all this fish, fish, fish…” So, there are four elements, and after 30 years the film was screened in Britain, praised as a cult, with a wonderful premiere. Everybody was there, Vanessa Redgrave… and the only thing that remained cut was the mouse. Therefore, I don’t think there’s anything indecent. Alberto Sordi used to go and see horses being slaughtered. I believe that the slaughterhouse is much worse than anything we’ve shown. All I did was ask what the locals ate.

Let’s talk about the zombie movie you never got to make. Many people might not be aware of this, but you were supposed to direct a zombie film. Everything was set up and ready. Why wasn’t the film ever made?   

As you know I made Cannibal Holocaust and The House on the Edge of the Park practically back to back, not quite but nearly. During all the rumble that came after the release of Cannibal, that caused producers to be afraid of approaching me with projects: the only one, or one of the few that did, was Fausto Saraceni. I had met him while I was an AD with Rossellini in the offices of Documento Films. Saraceni, together with a new partner of his, some guy I had once crossed at Cortina, a rich man who owned a jeans factory, started insisting on having me for a film. They brought me this first treatment, which I don’t know where they got from or who wrote it—a zombie film. I was not very much aware of what zombies were and I hadn’t seen anything Romero had done, or Fulci—he had already done something with zombies, hadn’t he? I’m not a horror fan and I don’t consider my films horror, but the story intrigued me… it was supposed to be shot in Mexico. You reminded me that Antonello Geleng had started working on some drawings, because I had completely forgotten. I don’t remember if we had started the casting process but what I do remember is that I was supposed to leave for South America to scout for locations when my father fell sick. He lived in Spoleto and a week before I was supposed to leave I jumped in my car and went to visit him. When I got there I found my mother, brothers, and various relatives there at his bedside. The situation was more serious than I had thought. I remained there with him for the following days, while the producer would call me and very politely, but worried, ask me if I was going to be ready to leave. I bought time but my father was getting increasingly worse… but wouldn’t die. After some time the politeness vanished and the producers starting getting pushy, until one day they told me they would send their lawyers if I didn’t get back to Rome immediately. That’s when I told them to fuck themselves. They ended up not being able to leave, not having a director, and my father died the day after. I never heard from them again and when I went back to Rome, after the funeral, I received no telephone call. Though, the other day I was thinking back… you know the only thing missing in my filmography is a zombie film. When I met George Romero at conventions, he had massive queues, kilometers of people waiting to meet him and I have many, many fans but not kilometers like he had. Just think if I had made cannibal movies and a zombie film!

Do you remember anything about the storyline?

Absolutely nothing. Well, except what is visible in Geleng’s sketches, that they were water zombies. They were soggy and all over the place, humid and soft. But I believe there were various kinds of living dead. But consider that I would invent a lot on set so God knows what would have come out of a film like this one. Now I wouldn’t make one though, I mean a zombie film. There is an inflation that is frankly ridiculous. Plus, maybe if I had done a zombie film I would have lost credibility. I’m not a splatter director, I’m a realist. In this I’m very much “Rossellinian”.

If you want to read more interviews, learn more about Ruggero Deodato, the cannibal genre and popular Italian cinema, make sure to a grab a copy of Eugenio Ercolani’s book, Darkening the Italian Screen, published by McFarland. Available in paperback and e-book.