After his first experience as a director seen in “The Brave” in 1997, Johnny Depp has returned to take up the camera, giving life to a dream kept in the drawer for many years. Having definitively abandoned the legal disputes with his ex-wife Amber Heard and returned to the scene after his involvement in foreign productions such as “Jeanne du Barry”, the dark star participated in the recent edition of the Rome Film Festival to launch the preview of his “Modi - Three Days on the Wings of Madness” , an extremely personal and long-gestation project, centered on the last days of the life of the Livorno painter Amedeo Modigliani.

Boasting a cast of big names like Al Pacino, as well as the surprising involvement of Riccardo Scamarcio in the role of leading actor, the film was born thanks to the words spent by the New York maestro towards Depp, convincing him to take on the role of director again after a long time.

During the press conference at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, the star revealed the following: «I got a very strange phone call from Al Pacino asking me if I remembered a project about Modigliani, telling me that I should direct it. For some reason, Al saw me driving this strange car. And when Pacino talks, you listen, so I decided to dive in. But I had no idea what it was going to be until the pieces of the puzzle came together».

Producer Barry Navidi is equally convinced that Depp was the right person for the project, as he stated in an interview with Variety where he praised his artistic skills and confirmed Pacino's decisive influence in choosing him: "I think Johnny is a very sensitive artist. He's a painter, a musician, an actor and a very active director, which I was able to observe closely. I was quite impressed and I loved the way he worked on the set. Obviously we thought of many other directors before Johnny, since the project has been around for so long, but Al Pacino recognized that he was the right director because he has the sensitivity of an artist. In the end, Johnny was totally in control of it. He said from the beginning: I'm going to find my vision when I start directing this film. And that's exactly what happened with the writers and then with the actors who were constantly working and reworking the dialogues and rewriting."

Honored last October 26 with a lifetime achievement award, Depp showed during the preview in Rome a very specific and non-biographical vision of the controversial Italian artist : inspired by the comedy "Modigliani" by Dennis McIntyre, the film focuses on the three days of the painter's life spent in Paris in 1916, torn between the desire to escape from the police by abandoning the city and that of continuing to create works, supported by his muse Beatrice Hastings and his friends Utrillo and Soutine.

During his stay in Rome, Depp was welcomed the following Sunday as a special guest on the television show hosted by Fabio Fazio “Che tempo che fa”, alongside Riccardo Scamarcio and Antonia Desplat.

An entirely exclusive meeting with the star allowed us to focus on some behind-the-scenes details that remained unknown to both the general public of television viewers and to the most informed cinephiles. When asked what would have convinced him to return to directing after almost thirty years from his first experience, he declared: «If you don't enjoy something, it's not even worth doing». And on the alleged affinities with the figure of Modigliani, he added: «I could never compare myself to him. But I understand his evolution. Like him, I also left home very young, I had to make do to survive, I was always broke. I used those memories to try to understand Modigliani. Some wonderful interpreters helped me».

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