Un annetto fa ho scritto questa lettera a (ehm) Daniel Day Lewis...
Milan, November 27, 2017
Dear Mr. Daniel Day Lewis, Sir,
my name is Paolo Bacilieri, I'm an
italian cartoonist, I've done some work(comic books, they call them graphic novels, nowadays), one was
recently translated in english,
Fun, it's about crossword puzzles...
Well,
this is NOT the reason I'm
bothering you, I'm writing you because I am, I always been since I
was a boy, a great, passionate
Hugo Pratt fan, as many others
in Italy and worldwide, and of course fan of the main character HP
created,
Corto Maltese.
Did you, by any chance, ever read
them comic stories? I know that they are now well published in UK/Eire/Usa too, even if maybe they aren't as well known in English
language as they are in french, spanish, italian, etc.
I'm writing to you this open letter with my poor, basic english for 2
reasons:
1- I had a vision.
2- I'm desperate.
The vision I had
some years ago was a terrific movie with you, Mr. Daniel Day Lewis as
Corto Maltese.
I'm well aware of
your decision to quit acting, but nevertheless I beg you, for this
time only, please reconsider, 'cause you're probably the one and only
who still can impersonate Corto Maltese in a movie.
Not an easy task. Who's Corto Maltese? A sailor man, a pirate (he prefers Gentleman of fortune), a business man, an outlaw, a hero? He surely is one of a kind, very much different from many superheroes-comics carachters (which I like too, by the way), he's,
yes, a kind of romantic hero, the way some Conrad's or London's carachters are, but, well, he's REAL, he, in some way, manages to keep a foot in the XIX century and the other in the modern XX century... and he often deals with real
historical people, like M. Von Richthofen, the Red Baron, Baron
Ungern-Sternberg, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Jack London, J.Stalin, Tamara
de Lempicka, Hypatia, etc.
You are perfect,
you're him, without the slightest effort.
I dream about a
movie who's not a mere transposition of this or that Corto Maltese
story, a movie who, combinig slices of different stories, digging into them, gives a
personal view, of Corto Maltese and his world, which is a wide, rich,
complex, unpredictable one.
About the
director, Mr. Paul T. Anderson, as he did in your last film togheter, the magnificent The Phantom thread, in There will be
blood, The Master, Inerent vice, even in Boogie
nights, the way he carefully recreates an historical background
without big things, with ideas, and suggestions, should be in my opinion the perfect director, for DDL/CortoMaltese, well, to say all
the truth, there are one more who is, (in my wildest dreams, always), up to this task,
Mr. Peter Weir, but PTA, for the reasons above and his special
commitment with you, is my first choice.
I'm desperate,
because, even if I know some of them, I've absolutely nothing to do
with the owners of the rights, publishers etc. of Hugo Pratt's
work. I'm writing to you, Sir, totally on my own, just because I
think about Corto Maltese as public domain, basic goods, just like
water or landscape, or Giotto's frescos.
I'm desperate,
because the chanches of seeing Daniel Day Lewis as CM are less and
less. And worse than that, someone will maybe someday do a movie
based on this beloved charachter and it will be a shitty, poor exploitation for deprived nerds, with nothing of the rare, subtile,
unconventional, revolutionary and always stunnung beauty of Hugo
Pratt's stories and drawings.
Best wishes.
Respectfully
yours,
pb
