Italian Spiderman is a certified internet phenomenon. Created by a core team of five friends with a whole lot of talent and a passion for 1960s cheese, the video project is closing in on 4 million hits and a deal with Italian TV. In the lead up to the next shoot, Merge caught up with the 21 year-old Director of this perfectly chaotic mess, Dario Russo.

 

Partially, yeah. I think there’s a shotgun spray of Italian lineage in the Team, but yeah officially I’m 50 per cent. My dad was a migrant. I could say I’m first generation Australian but my mum was born here… so does that mean that I can say I’m half first generation Australian?

 

I think I’m actually one and a half, one and a third… yeah one and a half 1^st generation Australian.

 

 

That’s pretty much what I can claim. I can say I do speak the language to a certain extent, a bastardised extent.

 

Let’s see, Franco Franchetti (Italian Spiderman), might not necessarily voice his own stuff…

 

There were a lot. Anything visual was generally scripted but our production designer, Tait Wilson added a hell of a lot to that as we went along by adding hilarious set items that were sourced from people’s grandparent’s houses.

 

Yeah, most of it was already there. We just found places that were so ridiculously 60s that we didn’t need to touch much. So we just took 60s stuff from other rooms and concentrated it until it was just like, “my God, this is the most 60s place ever.” Italian Spiderman’s house was a shack on Hindmarsh Island, which we filmed on the hottest day of our 15 day heat wave, here in Adelaide.

 

Is it difficult to find these locations in Adelaide? 

No. They’re around and luckily they were all in our team’s family. For instance, the opening scene was shot in my great uncle’s rumpus room for the card game, which was supposed to be shot in the Latvian RSL. I’m a quarter Latvian and a Quarter Estonian as well as my Italian heritage. 

So, 100 per cent Australian? 

Yeah, ostrayyan all round. Tait’s Grandparent’s house was involved. Will, the sound designer’s grandparent’s house was involved, my great aunt and uncle’s houses were involved. Invading old people was the key to getting great locations most of the time.

 

That was for a uni project. Everybody worked for free on that because it was a one day shoot. It was 50-something shots, shot on 16 mill for a uni assignment. And we whacked it together, it struck a chord, evidently, and the extra 37 minutes that we’ve done now, which are the first ten episodes, everybody worked for free again even though we did get funding from the SAFC it was only enough to get the film on-screen. So it was enormous commitment on behalf of everybody. It was like a war-zone it was just ridiculous. It was the hottest period of the one-in-five-thousand year heatwave we had to shoot through. We shot for 14 days and sometimes, we were shooting on Hindmarsh Island from midday until two in the morning. Once, I ran out of petrol in Mount Barker on the way home. So it was enormous. It was absolutely ridiculous, just the most intense shooting time that I’ve ever been in. And yeah everyone worked for nothing.

 

 

All the hot girls.

Three words: Other People’s Girlfriends.

 

So this grant you got from the South Australian Film Corp, it was for $10,000, how far did that actually go, do you have any of it left? 

Nup. No, well it got us 10 episodes and a massive launch party. It was a bargain for the SAFC pretty much. But they took a real gamble with us because they were chucking money at something that could potentially fall on its face.

 

Are they going to get money back from their investment in you guys? 

They can potentially because we’ve had interest from television stations and we’re currently talking about where we’re going to go with the project. I mean there’ll be a DVD release; there’ll be a thing at the end of the line pretty much. And so, there’s the potential to have returns now but at the stage where they funded us, all there was, was a trailer that had had about 500,000 views. It was only half way there. I applied for funding in about November or December of last year and so it had only gone about 500,000 but then in March it got featured on the front page of YouTube in the US and it doubled in about three days. And there was a huge spike and then it surged again when we first came out with the episodes.

 

Yeah I know, which was a real surprise because 1: we didn’t need to start a shonky old folks home, 2: abuse our neighbours, 3: evade tax.

 

But you did have to answer for the Italian toes you stepped on in creating Italian Spiderman. 

Yeah we did. Yeah that’s true because we’d had this mixed response from people that were writing to us saying: “youse guys are joking on Italians”. Which was funny because it was mostly Australo-Italians or American-Italians who took issue with it. And, I have to say, it was more the MySpace crowd than the YouTube crowd - the WTF? crowd. It’s usually the English-speaking Italians who take offence from it. The true Italians, who we have great reference from, generally love it. And the worse the Italian is, the more they love it!

 

 

Do you find a really strict demarcation between those who get it and those who don’t get it? 

Yeah you’re right. It’s love or hate… well it’s not actually love or hate but get or don’t get. Actually I had a good conversation with someone in a bar last night who didn’t get it at all. They’re a Big Brother watcher so… generally speaking Big Brother fans don’t get it. But yeah, it seems to be very much a get or don’t get thing and luckily there’s enough people who seem to get it and seem to like it intensely.

 

You switched from using film in the trailer to video for the next ten episodes. How difficult was it to get that authentic 60s look? 

On the day, our DOP Sam King, all he can do is shoot it well and we shoot it progressive scan opposed to interlace it, which does a fair bit for it. But yeah it took us a couple of weeks to get the look right, get it to match closely what the 16 mill looked like.

 

And what about the soundtrack, where does that come from? 

Well the majority of the series’ score is all Will Spartali’s work. It’s predominantly samples from extremely obscure films that he’s manipulated to such an extent that they no longer resemble the original samples. So it’s a really dense, pastiche thing.

 

 

 

Yeah it is. It’s a total mash-up, and that was kind of the concept, or that’s the way Will wanted to go with it, since the whole Italian Spiderman concept is a mash-up of retro ideas, he wanted to do the same thing with the soundtrack. But then there’s a few original musical tracks that we composed under the guise of Enzo Bontempi, that we got a vinyl released through an Italian record label.

 

Mario Bava? Mario Bava’s the biggest influence all the way through from a directorial standpoint but particularly for his cinematography. I like him, especially one film: Danger Diabolic. Which is about this anti-hero who just steals things from people to give to his women. The visual style of Italian Spiderman is basically a clean cross between Sean Connery Bond films and Mario Bava movies. Sean Connery Bond films have this kind of flat, bright spy aesthetic whereas Italian films in the 60s have a shit-load of colour – everywhere.

 

Why? I think it’s completely misrepresented for some reason, I believe there’s not enough of it. Women have been crying out for equality on the screen for years and if they’re not prepared to get punched as often as dudes…

 

Cop a harpoon in the neck? 

Cop a couple of harpoons in the neck and you know, general sort of abuse. You know Italian Spiderman is really a pioneering Feminist, I feel.

 

 

So where do you want to take the project? 

Well it’s the same motto exactly. We want to keep putting it on the net so people can look at it for free and enjoy the thing for what it is and increase our fan base. And at the end of it, there’ll be a DVD with more stuff on it that you don’t get on the internet. For instance, you’re never going to see the whole film on the internet. There’ll be at least another 10 instillations and then the whole thing joined up plus another half hour of story on the DVD and ridiculous amount of special features. You know… in the actor’s studio with Franco Franchetti and behind the scenes footage from 1964. We want to do a whole basically, doco-drama on the journey to discover the missing film cans on the bottom of the ocean.

With more than 2 million hits worldwide, what’s it like being an Internet Celebrity? 

Well, you know… last night when I was in a pool of cocaine and Brazilian pool-boys, you know, getting my toes sucked by a Madagascan exchange student, it didn’t cross my mind at any point what the benefits of Internet stardom were. I don’t know, I’ve got absolutely no concept of what it’s like. Italian Spiderman is the star. I’m just one of the guys pulling some levers behind it - like the Wizard of Oz. No, I haven’t even looked at it like that. I’m completely content to be able to make more of it.

Why do you think that his project has latched on? 

Besides everybody always wanting to see a superhero that smokes, drinks coffee and punches women… he’s a huggable character in general. I don’t know, I think he’s got a bit of a universal sparkle to him, I think lots of people find an appeal about him. I don’t know, there’s just something about Italian Spiderman.

 

What do you think of working in Adelaide? Would you move interstate if you had the opportunity? 

I love Melbourne because I can buy good pants in Melbourne. I can’t buy good pants in Adelaide. But Adelaide is an excellent place to make stuff because it has an extremely close film community, and if you’ve gotten into it, and done a lot of work, people are willing to help each other out. It’s a heavily resourced environment and there are lots of people to help you get any type of film you want to get made here. I think production in Adelaide is a very promising thing.

 

Check out more Italian Spiderman.