Ferdinando Cito Filomarino on Making Beckett

Watching the director put Washington through his man-on-the-run paces, it’s tempting for those steeped in these kinds of movies to try to spot the self-described film-buff’s influences. (If you’re thinking of questioning his cinema-savant bonafides, think again: Filomarino’s great uncle was the Italian auteur Luchino Visconti.) Here’s what he had to say about the movies that made their way into his movie.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Sydney Pollack’s vise-tight conspiracy thriller is steeped in Watergate-era mistrust and skullduggery. Robert Redford stars as a C.I.A. researcher who accidentally uncovers a dirty company secret while running for his life with a hostage played by Faye Dunaway. “This is one of my favorite movies of all time,” says Filomarino. “I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen it, but I’ve been watching it since I was 11 or 12. Like Beckett, Redford’s character is passive at the start of the film, which is a very bad characteristic to have when someone is trying to kill you. And you never know if he’s got what it takes to stay alive.”

Frantic (1988)

“To prepare for Beckett, I asked different actors to watch different films, and this was one that I remember showing to John David,” says Filomarino of this underrated workout set in the seedier alleyways of Paris. Harrison Ford plays a doctor attending a conference in the French capital with his wife (Betty Buckley) who mysteriously vanishes from their hotel room. “When I first got the chance to speak to John David, he hadn’t done many movies,” says the director. “He’d done Monsters and Men and BlacKkKlansman. The combination of those two performances shocked me because they’re so different. Not just the characters, but the performances. Technically speaking, his approach is so passionate and refined while at the same time so powerful. That combination is what made him ideal to play someone who is both a dramatic character but is also going through a very violent adventure.”

Missing (1982)

“This was another film that I showed to John David,” Filomarino says of Greek-French director Costa-Gavras’s politically-charged drama about Chile’s 1973 coup and the many people who disappeared during it. Sissy Spacek stars as the wife of a young American writer who becomes one of the missing; she must then negotiate the bureaucratic red-tape of locating his whereabouts — or his body. “I still remember responding to this movie very much because it involves an American woman who was in a foreign country trying to deal with something incredibly complex and definitely much bigger than her. And, by the way, Costa-Gavras is a great director.”

Z (1969)

Another highly-charged political thriller from Costa-Gavras. This one, which is set in a country very much like Greece (but never directly named), concerns the assassination of a humanist leader (Yves Montand) in a country coming apart at the seams. “Z was a hundred percent an influence on my film,” says Filomarino, who found inspiration in Costa-Gavras’s ability to mix his European sensibility with Hollywood ideas of suspense and pacing. “I am a European filmmaker, and I worked on the Beckett script with Kevin Rice, who is an American. Because I wanted to play with elements of the genre that are very much from American cinema, we were able to merge our two personalities.” The director adds, “What has gone on in Greece in the last 10 years was key to me — the way people needed to engage in action and needed to occupy the streets and say what they felt.”

The Vanishing (1988)

It wasn’t just John David Washington who got a taste of Filomarino’s pre-production film school on Beckett; his female lead did as well. “This is a film I showed to Alicia Vikander before we started shooting,” he says of director George Sluizer’s taut, nightmarish Dutch kidnapping cat-and-mouse thriller. “It’s a movie where there is a very soulful, intense character in the beginning of the movie who vanishes. But her energy remains throughout the film, and I wanted to share that energy with Alicia.” Filomarino adds: “The first movie I saw Alicia in was The Danish Girl, and I remember thinking that she had this power to instantaneously fill a screen with metaphorical light with the smallest gestures. She makes everything look so effortless.”

The Man Who Knew Too Much 
(1934, 1956)

“I think you can say there’s a lot of Hitchcock in this film,” says Beckett’s director. “Of all of Hitchcock’s movies, I would say the biggest influence was The Man Who Knew Too Much — both the 1934 original and the 1956 remake.” Both versions feature kidnappings, spies, and exotic foreign locales, and both stay one step ahead of the audience until right before the end credits. “I’ve always been a fan of manhunt thrillers with a political background, and I always knew I wanted to make a movie within that umbrella. Staying in Britain, I would also point to 1941’s 49th Parallel by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.”

Bai Ri Yan Huo
(Black Coal, Thin Ice) (2014)

Writer-director Diao Yi’nan knows how to tighten the emotional screws on his audience in this menacing noir about an ex-cop shellshocked by a grisly murder. Ba ri yan hua (Black Coal, Thin Ice) won the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival, but it remains little known in America. Still, it’s just more proof that Filomarino’s tastes and inspirations run impressively wide and deep. “It’s a very different film from Beckett in terms of story, but the tone of it is amazing and a great inspiration,” Filomarino says. A very different film is putting it mildly. Yi’nan’s stylish, macabre import centers on a serial killer who chops up his victims and attaches ice skates to their lifeless feet. Laughs Filomarino, “It’s quite bleak. Yeah, I guess you can’t really see the link too directly in Beckett.” Perhaps that’s for the best.