Between personal anecdotes and passion born at school, Fantoni tells the myth that revolutionized the Italian language
“Strange but true, the idea of bringing Fantozzi to the theater had never occurred to anyone.”
It starts like this Gianni Fantonitelling us “Fantozzi alone against everyone”the show he is bringing to Italian theaters, directed by Massimo Navoni.
“Ten years ago I conceived this project – initially thought of as a musical but then conceptualized in a different way – and I brought Fantozzi to the theater for the first time.”
Gianni is alone on the stage with his monologue. He talks about how the idea for the show was born, about the meeting with Paolo Villaggio, reeling off a series of curiosities about their friendship (there are so many anecdotes that he even wrote a book about them, “Operazione Fantozzi”). Fantoni involves the audience in a whirlwind of memories which, despite belonging to another era, remain surprisingly current.
“A story telling about the life of Villaggio, because we still love him; because his characters, sixty years after his creation, still give us something, explaining why it is necessary to revive them. I am the only one entitled at the moment to be able to do it in the theater. Also because, I can sign it candidly, I have officially acquired the rights at a very high price!”
Gianni, how did you approach Fantozzi, how did this passion of yours arise?
“It started in middle school, I had an Italian teacher, who also vaguely resembled Paolo Villaggio, who enjoyed doing his imitation to let us know him, even during class hours. I admit that until then Paolo Villaggio hadn’t told me much: he probably hadn’t yet attracted the attention of a kid than the averages of a provincial town. However, this professor insisted, he offered us all his characters: Fantozzi, Fracchia, Otto von Kranz. Eventually, I grew fond of it and it slowly became a true passion. I went from being unaware to being a spectator first, a fan, then an imitator, then a colleague and now being the only one able to embody it in the theatre. I would say that I have gone through all the possible steps of the state of the art on the Fantozzi accountant.”
When did you first meet him?
“It was 1991 on Paperissima: I had just started being on television and for me it meant meeting my absolute idol. The impact was good, even if I must confess, he wasn’t so available to everyone. It depended on the occasion. During the next thirty years he always tried to kill me good-naturedly, as he did with everyone. He tried to find your limit, if he didn’t find it, if you didn’t break yourself, then he started to respect you. I also had the opportunity to participate to Fantozzi’s latest film and share the set with him, managing to gather other curiosities!
You talk about Fantozzi’s depth. Paolo Villaggio was extremely intelligent, an acumen that however is often not perceived. How would you explain the depth of his comedy?
“We are fortunate that Villaggio, in addition to being a great comic actor, was a great writer; so we have the opportunity to still read Fantozzi written in his own hand. And the first two books of the saga are absolute masterpieces, absolutely unmissable. They still make us laugh almost sixty years later. Rediscovering Paolo Villaggio as a writer, even before being a comedian, is a way of finding ourselves faced with a written language that is still very modern. Hyperbole that we usually use come from him. When we say: “it was a monstrous match”, or when we mention “the mega galactic director on the human skin sofa”, we owe it to him. The younger ones may not know where these sayings come from, but they are all expressions coined by him.”
In addition to the comedian, a writer capable of influencing the vocabulary
“Finding a writer who is able to change a lexicon is in itself an enormity; for me he would have deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. The model that Fantozzi represents is not only that of an employee of the seventies, but of a desperate loser who knows he is a loser, knows he is desperate, but does not give up. This is the depth that lives not only in the comic environment, but in the dramatic environment. It is so dramatic that in the end it makes you laugh. And Villaggio does this with Fanozzi: he tells us his misfortunes with the detachment of the medium to laugh at them.
The first two Fantozzis are true masterpieces, also thanks to the direction of Luciano Salce who not only gave us the direct comedy of the Villaggio books – so much so that many episodes are taken directly from the books without having to change anything – but gave them incredible imagery. There was a very favorable astral conjunction with Luciano Salce. From the third film onwards we went in a different direction, watering down that depth a bit, pushing more towards a comic gag dimension.”
What did Paolo Villaggio think of this project?
“Next year it will be ten years since the death of Paolo Villaggio and he told me that he was really enthusiastic about this show of mine, because for him it was a way to live again. This comment touched me a lot: he was a myth, and for me to hear him like this, between melancholy and hopeful, as if he were a boy setting out to discover a new idea, was very exciting.
Doing this show, playing the accountant Ugo Fantozzi and Paolo Villaggio’s famous characters is my way of bringing it back to life.
A little spoiler about the show?
“Rereading Fantozzi’s books I discovered some unpublished episodes: one in particular has never been performed at the cinema and with great satisfaction I accompany him to the theater for the first time. I’m just saying that Fantozzi will discover that he knows how to fly.”
