Tale of Tales

Once upon a time there was a kingdom… or rather, three timeless, neighbouring kingdoms where kings and queens, princes and princesses lived in their castles.
A libertine and lustful king. A princess married off to a hideous ogre. A queen obsessed with having a child. Alongside them, wizards, witches and grotesque monsters, acrobats, courtesans and old washerwomen are the heroes of this loose interpretation based on Giambattista Basile’s celebrated fairy tales.
The Queen of Selvascura is desperate because she can’t conceive a child and the King’s attempts to distract her by inviting street artists and circus performers to their castle are to no avail. One night, a necromancer suggests a very risky solution: by eating the heart of a sea dragon, cooked by a virgin, the Queen will get pregnant. The King manages to kill the dragon but dies in his endeavour. The Queen, however, goes about completing the wizard’s advice and gives birth to a much desired son, Elias. At the same time, another boy is born, Jonah, the child of the kitchen maid who cooked the dragon’s heart for the Queen and got pregnant when breathing in the steam from the pot… Elias and Jonah grow up, identical as twins, united by a profound friendship that the Queen tries to break in every way because she is jealous of the bond that her son feels for the “bastard”…
In constant search for new pleasures, the King of Roccaforte hears a sweet voice coming from a rundown house outside the walls of the castle. Believing it could only come from a beautiful, young woman, he is immediately enraptured. He calls to the girl and pleads in vain to show herself. He sends her a precious gift convinced that this will win her over. What the King doesn’t know is that the house is not inhabited by a young woman, but rather two old sisters, washerwomen: Imma, naïve and with a virginal voice, and her shrewd sister, Dora, who wants to take advantage of the King’s infatuation. But how?
One day, the King of Altomonte captures a flea and secretly makes a pet out of it. He plays with it, talks to it, and watches it grow excessively, fed on blood and steaks, until it is as big as a pig. When the insect dies, the grieving King has it skinned. He has an idea: his daughter Viola can’t wait to leave the castle so he will give her hand in marriage to whomever can guess what animal the skin was taken from. The King believes that no one will be able to guess, therefore his daughter will stay by his side forever. In fact, all the suitors fail, one after another. Then an Ogre steps up and using his perfect sense of smell, guesses that the skin is that of a flea. Horrified, the young girl begs her father to save her but the edict of the King does not allow for exceptions: Viola is forced to leave with the monster…

The decision to revisit Basile
I decided to explore Basile’s world because I find the mixture between reality and fantasy in his tales is what has always characterized my own artistic research. The stories told in the Cunto de li cunti (Tale of Tales) recall the opposites in life: the ordinary and the extraordinary; the magical and the everyday; the regal and the dark; the simple and the imagined; the sublime and the filth; the terrible and the sweet; scraps of mythology and torrents of popular wisdom. The tales narrate human emotions pushed to extremes.

Working on the tales: reality and fantasy 
When I and the other screenwriters read the fifty tales for the first time, we had many choices to make. We had to choose the stories we liked the most and then make them credible, factual, as if we were seeing them unfold before our eyes. Our course of action was to find something powerful, physical, common and truthful even in the stories where the imagination was more overwhelmingly vivid. Basile takes great pleasure in telling a tale and this should also be a prerogative for cinema.
In my previous films, I used real stories and adapted them until they bordered on an almost imaginary world. In this case, we did the reverse; we took inspiration from fairy-tale situations and, through a process of elimination, turned them into something realistic, factual and credible so that the audience can at any moment feel part of the tale and identify with the adventures of our characters.

The modernity of fairy tales
The process of elimination I was talking about earlier did not subtract from the fundamental themes and emotions of the book, proving their truly startling modernity. We were the first to be amazed. For example, we didn’t add any of the horror to Basile’s original tales. At the end of a long process of selection, once we had chosen and intertwined the three stories, we realized to our great astonishment, that there was an invisible but very powerful thread that tied them all together: the stories are all about women of different ages. But what struck us even more was the capacity that these tales have in capturing contemporary obsessions: the longing for youth and beauty – where Basile describes an almost hyperrealist satirical account of modern-day plastic surgery four centuries in advance – the obsession of a mother who would do anything to have a child, and the generational and violent conflicts a young woman has to face to become an adult. 

Language
We chose to make the film in English because we saw it as a way to offer Lo cunto de li cunti, the book that is the origin of some of the most famous fairy tales in the world, to the largest audience possible. The imagination in fairy tales goes beyond all boundaries and as such Basile is truly a universal author. Moreover, by using English, the landscapes in the background of our tale aren’t a giveaway to any location and so we didn’t have to use a specific dialect to paint the characters.