During the Q&A for the Italian feature Heads or Tails?, which had its Asian Premiere on October 29 as part of the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival Competition section, the two directors, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, stressed that their aim was to “deconstruct the cinema genre of the Western.” Since they are Italian, one might assume they are following in the footsteps of the great Sergio Leone, but while the movie has all the basic elements of a Western, it is actually set in Italy. As it turns out, the country has its own native cowboys.
 
As Zoppis explained, the duo’s films “are based on oral tales and how the passage of time changes local legends.” The legend they address in Heads or Tails? is the second visit of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to Rome, when, supposedly, his band of cowboys was challenged to a rodeo by a group of Italian cowpokes.
“Since it was the Italians who wrote down the history,” said Zoppis, “of course the Italians won.”
 
But that’s only the jumping-off point. In the movie, Buffalo Bill, played with theatrical flair by John C. Reilly, takes the bet of an arrogant oligarch that the Americans will beat the Italians, not knowing that the oligarch has placed a bet against his own countrymen. However, the head Italian cowboy, Santino (Alessandro Borghi), is too proud to throw the contest and comes out triumphant, a move that enrages his boss, who takes it out on his young French wife, Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who promptly shoots him dead in the stable in front of Santino. Thus a pair of desperate fugitives is born.
 
“The original idea was to make an anti-Western,” said de Righi. “The difference is the emancipation of Rosa from her brutal husband. She is the central character rather than Santino, who would be the hero in a conventional Western.”
 
And the difference is striking, mainly due to Santino’s unfortunate fate, which is gruesomely comic. Along the way, the would-be lovers encounter a band of violent anarchists who, believing the wanted posters that say it was Santino who killed the oligarch, celebrate him as one of their own, a fiction that Santino goes along with to massage his ego, even though at heart he’s an apolitical opportunist.
 
They also run into Buffalo Bill again, and he’s not only looking to drum up good publicity by capturing Santino—Bill is nothing if not an expert on show biz PR—but also wants to be part of a story, which is the real theme of Heads or Tails?: the fine line between fantasy and reality when it comes to how you present yourself to the world. Thus the directors desperately wanted Reilly, since they thought he could perfectly convey Buffalo Bill’s poetic way of inflating a tale.
 
“When we cast him, we talked to him through Zoom,” said de Righi. “It was funny because he thought he was auditioning, but we had already decided on him. The next day he sent us a video of himself singing in Italian.”
 
Music, in fact, figures centrally in the movie as a means of moving the story along. “We’ve worked with the same composer, Vittorio Giampietro, on all four of our films,” said Zoppis. “The songs sort of narrate the story, and when we cast Borghi we asked him if he could sing, He said, ‘No, but I can whistle.’ Nevertheless, Borghi turns into a nice old canzone, and also helped Reilly write a folk ditty that Bill sings while strumming a guitar by a campfire.
 
One audience member wanted to know why the directors cast the French actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Rosa. “We knew we wanted an outsider in this role,” said de Righi. “She didn’t have to be French, but she had to come from outside into this abusive marriage. Nadia is very expressive, and was able to convey this woman’s strange journey.”
 
Zoppis added that in real life Tereszkiewicz is blonde and has very white skin. They darkened both her skin and her hair as an homage to Julie Christie’s brothel madame in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a title that at first threw off TIFF Programming Director Ichiyama Shozo, who was moderating the session, since the movie had a totally different title when it was released in Japan.
 
And like Altman’s film, Heads or Tails? completely wrecks the whole foundation of the classic Western, in which, as Zoppis pointed out, “the hero is always a cowboy.” In that regard the directors really pulled a fast one by casting Borghi as the central cow puncher, since he is “one of the most famous and popular actors in Italy.” In the end, however, it’s Rosa who emerges as the hero, mainly because she isn’t squeamish about killing men.
 
This last point made an impression on one audience member, who said he was surprised when the two directors showed up for the Q&A. “I was convinced that at least one of them had to be female,” he told them.
 
Q&A Session: Competition
Heads or Tails?
Guests: Alessio Rigo de Righi (Director/Screenplay), Matteo Zoppis (Director/Screenplay)