Dario Russo
Remember ‘Italian Spiderman?’ In the winter of 2007, this expertly crafted bit of pop-parody took a then still pre-pubescent YouTube by storm. Blogs were written. GIFs were made. Eventually, the trailer became a full-fledged series. Hit a road-block. And ceased production.
The internet moved on.
That project did, however, give co-creators Dario Russo and David Ashby, now rebranded as Dinosaur, the clout to produce their next project: the cult-favorite ‘Danger 5’. That series would take Russo’s love of the 1960’s and apply its aesthetic to the second World War. By its second series, ‘Danger 5’ found itself in the 1980s, with a plot-line focused on a time-traveling Hitler. It is, for lack of a better term, art. And it was, much like Italian Spiderman, meticulously crafted to emulate its eras of inspiration.
However, before all that, it was the fall of 2008 and Dario agreed to jump on the phone with me and talk about the then-still-in-production, ‘Italian Spiderman’ series.
Where did the idea of spoofing foreign films through the lens of a superhero movie come from?
The idea was completely obtuse. One of our regular actors was complaining about never getting a lead role, and another one of our friends suggested that we make something called “Italian Spiderman” and he could be the lead in that. Ironically the actor in question didn’t get the lead role and was only in about two shots of the final film.
So, it didn’t actually come from this lust to parody American superheroes in an Italian context at all. It was a far more accidental process.
But once we had the idea, it was always intentionally, more of a spoof on 1960’s De Laurentiis cinema, than American superheroes.
In fact, we basically use no reference from any American superheroes bar a little bit of Adam West’s Batman.
But we never really looked at Spider-Man. I haven’t seen any of the Spider-Man movies. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Spider-Man comic.
So better not to read too much into the Spider-Man part then.
The Spider-Man factor is quite low. It’s enjoyable. People seem to tell that this character has absolutely nothing to do with the American conception of Spider-Man. He’s just an overweight dude, who smokes, drinks a lot of coffee, and could potentially be an alcoholic — except we haven’t delved into that yet.
We get heaps of comments on YouTube saying, (adopting pretentious tone) “Oh, this is way better than the American Spider-Man.” But otherwise, I think people tend to absorb the other elements a bit more than they do the comic book references.
What kind of research went into making the series feel authentically 1960s-ish?
Our main point of reference was 1968. That’s my favorite period of Italian cinema. Myself and the Director of Photography sat down and watched ridiculous amounts of Mario Bava movies, and Dario Argento stuff. And a lot more obscure things from the 60’s that are completely forgettable. I remember one we watched was called French Sex Murders, and that kind of stuck with us for some reason.
So, yeah, everybody on the team was pretty immersed in watching a lot of 60’s cinema. Our sound designer, Will, spent a hell of a lot of time digging through old film soundtracks. Looking for inspiration and excellent samples.
So it was basically just watching a hell of a lot of stuff. I mean, I’ve always been a fan of 1960’s cinema, as is everybody else in the group.
What brought you guys together and how long have you been making films?
We’ve all been making films since high school. We all went to high school together. I decided that filmmaking was the thing to do for the rest of my life. And then we just kept making films.
Then, I went to film school and the third year project ended up being a 16mm film exercise. And ended up became the Spiderman trailer. And, you know, the rest is the rest.
But yeah, we’ve been making films together — at least one serious film a year — for the last five-six years.
How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?
We’re all 21.
Oh, wow. I’m 25. What have I ben doing with my life?
(Laughs)
Italian Spiderman started as a trailer, now it’s a full film being released episodically. While watching the episodes, I got the sense that maybe you both had a larger sense of the narrative from the beginning. Am I wrong in assuming that?
You know… (clears throat) I’m not gonna say if it was intentional or not. We managed to weave in many sections of the trailer quite seamlessly.
But, I have to say that we didn’t actually contemplate making the full film to start off with. The trailer was the trailer for its own sake.
But the once it became so popular, we thought, ‘Hey, maybe people like this character enough that he can do a lot more things than just dance around and play a trumpet.’ And that turned out to be right.
It’s funny, because we had heaps and heaps of ideas that we didn’t put into the trailer and we actually got to realize a lot of them in the rest of it. For instance, in one of the latest episodes, Spiderman tortures a snake that comes out a toaster. That was supposed to be in the trailer but we literally just ran out of time.
The trailer is up to 2 million views now. Whenever a video goes viral like this, I think the question always is, ‘What did you do to bring this much attention to it?’
It’s a bizarre phenomenon, to say the least.
I mean, we put a ton of our older videos up, I think a year ago now. And I attempted to do this model with another one we made called, ‘Time that time forgot’ — which was longer, about 7 minutes. Really more of a short film, than a trailer. And that only got about 2,000 views in three months or something.
But Spiderman just ignited immediately. I was really shocked when it had gotten to 1,000 views three days after I posted it. Then within that week it was at 50,000, and then it kept snowballing.
I think in March it got featured on the front page. At that point it had done about 500,000, but that doubled in a period of three days.
I think its a combination of the fact that it had Spider-Man in the title — which may have gotten it into the bloodstream of the viewership — because that’s something that people are searching for. But we never thought about it that way, because that was just our concept: Italian Spiderman.
And then it got into the hands of the bloggers. People really did start sharing it furiously. It was just an idea that people connected with and thought was different. And also, the fact that many people actually believed it was from the 60’s helped us a lot too.
It was a real discovery. Lots of people felt they were discovering something amazing on the net.
I mean, there’s a lot of detail to appreciate. For instance, you guys really nailed the lighting from that era.
Thank you. Most of that is our Director of Photography, Sam King, who studied Mario Bava lightening techniques. We sat down and pretty much deconstructed how the hell they lit their films. And we shot it all with hot-wax. There were no sophisticated lighting rigs here. They were all 800 and 2000 W redheads and blondies. Pretty much the type of lighting they would have used in the 60's.
Essentially, it’s all about hair lights, back lights, inconsistent rim lights and colors. It’s kind of achieving as much of a technicolor, pastel-y color scheme as possible.
The color-schemes where pretty carefully monitored as well. Sam always made sure there was a certain amount of colors used per scene. I completely forbid the use of red and green at the same time because I think it looks stupid.
Are you still shooting on film, or have you moved to digital?
We shot the first ten episodes on HD. But the trailer was on 16mm, and we may be going back to 16mm for the rest of it.
Are you both paying for this out of pocket, or has the response opened up new avenues of financing?
After the trailer, we got funding from a government funding body called, the South Australian Film Corporation. So it was a tiny amount of money to do it. It was enough to get it on the screen, but none of us got paid. It was, like, seven months from pre-production to post-production. Now we’re talking about more money to do it, the production values are going to stay exactly the same, except we’re gonna be able to get paid to keep going, potentially.
Of course, there’ll be a lot more cocaine involved then. A lot more Peruvian pool girls wandering around on set.
Tell me more about the actor who plays Italian Spiderman?
Officially his name is Franco Fanchetti, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. You know, he’s one of Italy’s most respected performers. So, interviews with him are out of the question. But he’s spectacular.
Have you heard anything from Marvel yet?
No, nothing yet. Which is good. There’s no way they don’t know it exists, because I’m pretty sure they pay people to search out Spider-Man on the net and see what’s happening. There’s no way of searching Spider-Man and not ending up with this pretty rapidly. So we haven’t had any response from them yet, but again, we’re not making any money out of it yet.
Last few questions, how long does it take to write an episode?
It’s developed out of a sense of humor that we kind of just all have as a group of friends. Like, the original concept just grew out of a joke, and then we kinda snowballed it. We get together and we brainstorm stories, ya know? It’s basically just throwing around ridiculous ideas: Wouldn’t it be wicked if Spiderman did this. Wouldn’t it be ridiculously cool if he did that. And then, I take the script, and hammer it into a shootable format: joining the dots and add in the dialogue.
It’s an interesting process. It starts off with collaboration, basically sitting around and making jokes. And that’s the best way to start writing comedy, is if you’re all laughing about something at the beginning, you’ll probably be laughing about it in the end.
Are you guys working on anything beyond Italian Spiderman?
At the moment its pretty Spiderman centric, but we have other TV series ideas, other feature ideas that we’re itching to get out there. You can check out the videos on YouTube prior to Italian Spiderman, you might get some hints to the direction we’re going.
This interview was originally broadcast in August 2008. It has been edited and condensed.
