By Andrew Dansby
Film director Roberto Minervini wants to disappear. He casts nonactors, who often play some variation of their real lives. He uses natural lighting. He runs a skeleton crew. And he doesn't do multiple takes of any scene.
Though many directors are stylistic auteurs or purveyors of commercial entertainment (or both), Minervini tells his stories while drawing as little attention to his craft as possible.
Minervini's new movie, "Stop the Pounding Heart," is the final one in a trilogy the Italian director shot in Texas. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year and makes its Texas premiere Friday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
"I try to go for something autogenic during the shooting phase," Minervini says. "My approach is observation. Pure observation. Even the parts that are staged are observational. Because of this, I think they unfold in a spontaneous way. I try to film little stories and find a story by putting them together. A picture will be born of those stories. It's like a self-narrative. And I have to trust the process. That's why we do one take, no repetitions, no matter what the issue may be."
Minervini's approach to the trilogy - which includes "The Passage" (2011) and "Low Tide" (2012) - results in a style that's quietly gripping and subtly neo-realistic. The director left his native country to study media theory at the New School in New York. He was teaching in the Philippines when his mother-in-law became ill. Minervini and his wife moved to Houston to be closer to her; they've been living here since 2007.
"The journey in the trilogy is my own personal journey through Texas," Minervini says. "This attempt to get a grasp on the culture, the people, the accents. And it was a long journey. I realized I hadn't moved to a city or a state but rather a different country with Texas. It was a different reality. A different America."
His experiences inspired him to make "The Passage," a story about an unlikely road trip from Houston to Marfa with a terminally ill woman, a recently released convict and an aspiring artist.
Minervini's characters overlap in his films. A family of goat farmers that briefly appears in "The Passage" became the focal point in "Stop the Pounding Heart."
Minervini, 44, met the Carlson family at a farmer's market, where they were selling goats' milk. As he spent time with the family, his interest focused on young daughter Sarah, who has been home-schooled and raised for a subservient future. But she connects with Colby, a young bull rider who lives nearby.
"My original concept was to work with the theme of becoming a man in the South," Minervini says. "But then it switched to Sarah and this concept of faith and love."
The family, which avoids television and other electronic media, allowed Minervini to shoot for two months in Waller.
"They came at this in a very honest and transparent way, and we related to each other," he says. "But it became a more complicated issue when Sarah became involved because she's still young and emotionally fragile. But they were open to the unknown. They took a leap of faith."
Minervini's affinity for his subjects comes through. He says he deliberately avoided "this cliché way, this grotesque way of representing the South. There's something about the landscape in Texas that's hostile. It's swampy, and it's dry. And the same can be said of some of the people, in a way, but there's a warmth and hospitality that can be a little rough around the edges. It's not postcard ready, it's not mainstream-film ready. But it's something worth exploring. If you explore it, you come to love it."
Minervini's films do have scripts. But the characters' names are the same as the actors', and many of the themes are drawn from their daily existence. Minervini traffics in fiction, but he tiptoes as close to documentary as possible in his execution.
Taken together, the three films are full of long meditations on themes including life, love, loss, fear, hope, discovery, holding on and letting go.
Minervini has already moved on to his next project. He has again immersed himself in the daily life of a family, this time the Trichells - the bull riders from "Stop the Pounding Heart" - who live in West Monroe, La., a once quiet town that is now famed as the home of the Robertson family of "Duck Dynasty."
That popular TV show tries to present a reality embellished with comedic contrivance.
Minervini's aspirations are quite different. He's trying to use as much reality as possible to tell a fictional story.
"It's definitely more politically charged," he says. "It's about some of the struggles people go through to make ends meet. But it's still about this journey of becoming. And it was shot as part of the community where it was being filmed.
"I'm not an outsider with an insider's look. I'm trying to be part of the community, who tells a story from inside of it."
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