Italy has always been home to great artists: musicians, painters, writers, actors, in the beautiful country were born many talents renowned all over the world. Among the most famous is Dario Argento, director, screenwriter and producer who has left a remarkable mark on the scene of Italian thrillers and horror films. Here are some curiosities about the life of the great director!
Dario Argento, the birth of the master of Italian horror
Dario Argento was born in Rome in 1940 .His parents were Salvatore Argento, a film producer of Sicilian origins and Elda Luxardo, a Brazilian of Italian origins and the first post-war fashion and cinema photographer.
It is thanks to the work of his mother that the little Dario Argento has the opportunity to closely observe the female figure, the makeup, the magic of the lights and everything that characterizes a photographic set, the large and small details that in the future will be in his movies.
At a certain point in his life fate plays a dirty trick on the young Argento: a rheumatic fever forces him to bed for months and it is on this very occasion that he has the opportunity to read and become passionate about books related to cinema and thrillers.
He attends the high school for two years but suddenly decides to leave school and moves to Paris, where he lived for about a year doing many small jobs. Then in 1957, back to Italy, he moved to Rome where he began to deal with cinema, theater and music.
It is precisely in those years that he has the opportunity to understand what his path really is, namely cinema: thanks to his great passion for all kinds of films he manages to get hired by the well-known Roman newspaper Paese Sera.
Dario Argento thus began to make himself known to the general public as a film critic: in fact, his reviews are clearly in favor of genre cinema, including thrillers, horror, westerns and science fiction, unlike the official critics.
In 1966 he began his career collaborating in the writing of several genre films including «Comandamenti per un gangster», «La stagione dei sensi», and the most famous «C’era una volta il West», where he collaborated with Bertolucci and Leone on the writing of the subject.
In 1970, the now famous Dario Argento had the first chance to become a director: he directed the movie «L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo» with Enrico Maria Salerno, Tony Musante and Mario Adorf, that soon became a success thanks to the photography of Storaro and the music of Morricone.
From that moment on the path of the director seems to be marked, here are some events that have marked the life of Dario Argento:
- The production of the so-called «Trilogia degli animali», a still loved success
- The relationship with the actress Daria Nicolodi, from whom the daughter Asia Argento will be born, with whom the director creates a very strong bond
- The release of the cult film «Profondo Rosso«, one of the scariest horror ever produced
Dario Argento, a director with many surprises
The famous director, now over eighty, has lived a very interesting life and has a personality out of the box. He says that he has always had a passion for horror: it is said that he saw the first horror film «The Phantom of the Opera» of Lubin when he was ten years old, in a cinema in the Dolomites, in Monguelfo, where he was on vacation with his grandparents.
Another curiosity related to the figure of the famous director is that, together with his ex-wife, he was arrested for 48 hours. One evening he received a visit from three police officers while he was at dinner and thinking that it was a simple check made them enter. Instead, with great surprise he was arrested and taken to an isolation cell along with other people.
He later discovered that someone had delivered to his old house in Piazza Martiri Belfiore a letter from Peru containing 4 grams of cocaine, along with a note with several grammatical errors addressed to him, and he never knew who was playing this bad joke on him.
During an interview made several years ago Dario Argento said that for his films, characterized by female figures, psychology, dreamlike and anxiogenic atmospheres, he is inspired both by episodes happened in real life and dreams that then turns into real masterpieces. always characterized by the so-called whodunit (Who has done it?) fundamental feature of the deductive crime, both in thrillers and in horrors.
One thing few people know about the famous director is that, in all his movies, the hands of every killer are the hands of the same director. To conclude here is a famous phrase that summarizes the unique and inimitable personality of Dario Argento:
«I’m afraid of many things, like everyone else. I also experience unfounded fears. When I was writing one of the first movies, I was seized by a huge anxiety that I decided to leave the house in pyjamas and slippers, running away from I really don’t know what. I am also afraid of my fantasies that I often mistake for prophecies.»
Cover Image: Exame.com