Vincere Special 2: Interview with Filippo Timi

Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere as a glowering, virile force of nature. Watching this and his other recent films, it was hard not to think of the Brando of the early 1950s. Timi, too, combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity - he's combustible and magnetic. I was still more sure he was someone special when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he's "almost blind. He can't see and can't speak - the two things an actor needs most," Salvatores said. "But he has an iron will."

In As God Commands, as the truly loving but volatile neo-Nazi father of an impressionable teenage boy, Timi boils with genuinely dangerous emotion. In the noir, slippery The Double Hour, meanwhile, he's a darkly handsome, gruff good man (Timi is pictured below in The Double Hour with co-star Kseniya Rappoport). What's more, Timi is a best-selling author in Italy, and a musician too, a sudden phenomenon at the age of 35 after 15 anonymous years in the theatre.

Salvatores elaborates to me on what Timi has had to overcome. "He not only has a stutter, he doesn't really focus on the centre of the image. He told me that he would try steps out before on the stage, to see how to move. It surely cannot have been easy. He's without one of the most important things, the voice, but the look is also very important and he doesn't have that either, because from a distance he doesn't really see what's in front of him, he has to imagine it. But he is a person with a huge heart. Filippo started in theatre, and music, so he is able to control his voice very well. It's like all the difficulties that he's had in his life have really pushed him to fight and to become who he is."

The Timi waiting for me at a distributor's office is unrecognisable from the actor on screen. Later I freeze-frame him in the monastery-set drama In Memory of Me, his only previous UK release, in which he assaults the timid certainties of the novitiate hero with a grander moral scheme. That sallow, accusing face seems wholly different from the wiry, warmly eager man I talk to. He has an attractively bohemian air, unshaven with longish hair and dark interested eyes, one of which twitches and wanders at times. Talking through a translator, he controls the stammer that disappears when he acts and sings.
Timi never plays Mussolini as a dictator in Vincere - Bellocchio uses real newsreels for that - but as the young left-wing firebrand of World War One (later, he also plays his disowned son Benito Albino in the film). What's the difference between Timi's Mussolini, and the later man in that footage? "I play the Mussolini who will become that image of Mussolini the dictator. The Mussolini who loves women profoundly with his body. He is a young man who has this ambition to achieve absolute power. It's as though the real Mussolini, the Mussolini of the documentaries, is a sort of mask which he is going to invent for himself in the future. You must remember that for a period he was a socialist, and espoused a good cause. He was a young man who did want to change Italy for the better. He wanted to act against the power of the church and the monarchy. But at a certain point something was triggered in him, that made him want to take that power into himself."

Watch Filippo Timi as the left-wing firebrand "who loves women profoundly" in this YouTube clip



Some Italians seem to have more ambiguous feelings for their late dictator than the Germans for theirs. I mention an old bronze of Mussolini I once saw casually for sale on the street in Naples. "Well, I think that in Italy there are still some people who are idealists of the fascist type. Unfortunately they're not so clearly in evidence - they haven't come out. But this is quite a different thing from buying an old statuette of Mussolini. The image of an historic figure, even of the worst sort like him, becomes transformed into something else once the time of that tragedy is past. That's folklore now. And Napoli is where folklore has its place in Italy. They make little statues for the Christmas nativity scenes, at the crib - and they put Obama in there, Mussolini, Berlusconi, Arnold Schwarzenegger - it's not important. It's folklore." (Below: Timi as Mussolini)

I refer to Salvatores' description of Timi as a great actor with an iron will "who can't see or speak". "Well, it's helped me," he considers, "because when I'm acting I don't stammer anymore, and that's very relaxing for my abdominal muscles, because I don't have the pain of them tensing up. The work is five times harder, if you like. But you put more into it and you get more out. And then, I don't believe in approaching life by placing a lot of ‘ifs' in front of me like obstacles. If I had done this, if I had that… I am this person that I am. And I think that this strength comes from the fundamental belief that life has immense value. And so you make the most of whatever possibility there is, because it's as though you think that something might finish tomorrow. You might go blind at any time. And so whatever is possible, you try."

Did his family help him? "No!" he barks, laughing. "My father is a worker, a philosopher. But he doesn't speak. I've maybe had three conversations with him. He's a very good man, but he doesn't express himself, he remains impassive. And my mother, several times she hit me because I spent money on books. Because we had little money, and to her it was completely unimaginable that you would spend money on something that wasn't food. And so I started to eat books, to consume books. I was very good at school, and I was very rebellious. I would really attack the headmaster and teachers, I was at odds with them. But they couldn't touch me because I was the best in the school. Then I started to study the theatre."

How did he manage to imagine that other life, that seemed so impossible to his parents? Did he feel a need to climb out of the life he was in? "Yes," he says heavily. "I lived in a small town, and at 18 I left. I didn't have a clear idea of what was going to happen then. There was a time when I used to dress in the morning before I went out" - he mimes putting on a smart shirt  -  "thinking to myself, ‘If I were to die today, I want them to find me like this'. So I really lived every day as it came." Does he still squeeze everything he can from each day, because he knows his life could be snuffed out? "Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course."

Timi's bullish physicality and sheer size on screen isn't obvious as he sits across from me. But it's fundamental to who he is. "For 15 years I only acted in the theatre, and the theatre is very much about the body, in every sense. What you think, your voice, your heart, everything has to be expressed through your body, whereas with film, it's enough for you to have those thoughts, and the camera picks them up. But for me, it was actually impossible to eliminate the body, because I'm very physical myself, and I believe more in the body than in the thought.

"If someone compliments me, I don't trust them unless they hug me, unless they have that need, that desire to touch me. And the same if someone's angry - I don't trust them unless they punch me. Probably because that's the way I'm made. If we were to have an argument, I'd have a huge conflict in myself not to beat you up."

"I'd be running," I say. Timi laughs kindly. "But if you produce something wonderful from this interview, one day when we meet again I'd probably kiss you…"

The tempestuous vitality of his movie roles is clearly for real. Does he have the simmering fury of his frustrated, dangerous dad in As God Commands - emotions he just has to get out? "No. In As God Commands, there was a scene where I had to become very cross with my son, and I kept wondering how I could find this anger, because every motivation I could dig up was too little. That rage anyway comes from love, and the awareness of not being able to love enough. It's your relationship with the infinite and all that love that you want to get and to give. It's that frustration, the same frustration the father has, in the knowledge of never being able to save his son." (Timi is pictured above with co-star Alvaro Caleca in the film.)

It's a metaphysical, deeply emotional response you don't get from many actors, making me wonder what Timi, the bestselling writer, is like? "I like contemporary philosophy - Michel Foucault, George Bataille," he says, misunderstanding the question and smiling at the very thought of the books he was once bashed for reading. "I study all the time. And it's really difficult for me, because I actually need a magnifying glass for books. And after a quarter of an hour, it's very tiring."

'You have to find your own moral level. Even if it's very low. To do that, you must write down and publish your secrets'

The three books he's written - are they philosophical too? "Ah, no!" he laughs. "They're about sex…the first is called In the Last Resort I'll Die. It's my own story, with real names, and my family, and my first sexual experience. It's very strong, and it's very amusing, but it's very true and kind of tragic. I read the secret diaries of Wittgenstein, and that gave me the idea. He says that recording something of the world, you have to discover your own moral strictures. And only then can you make a film, and have a child, and become the most important artist in your era, and find out your own moral level. Even if it's very low, it's your own. In order to do that, you have to write down your secrets and publish. And I did that."

It was the book, and Timi's TV appearances publicising it, that finally made his name; writing about his life made that life what he so longed for at last. Like other actors who made it in their thirties - Jack Nicholson or Michael Caine, say - it seems nothing will blow him off-course now. He's just made his Hollywood debut, in Anton Corbijn's Italian-set follow-up to Control, The American, starring George Clooney as an assassin and heading for release this autumn. "I've signed a contract where I can't say anything about it," he says apologetically. "I can say that George Clooney is among the nicest people I've ever met. He's very normal, very likeable, very human and real. And furthermore - he's George Clooney! Wow!"

After 30 minutes in his fearlessly emotional, intellectually freewheeling company, I can only say, "Filippo Timi! Wow!" He gives me a massive hug, not a punch, as I leave.

• Vincere opens in the UK on Friday
• Find Filippo Timi's other films on Amazon