A pursuit of real emotion

It makes perfect sense that an iPod’s shuffle function played a brief but crucial behind-the-scenes role in the film “My Brother Is an Only Child.” From plot to performances to camerawork, structured serendipity was the guiding principle for writer-director Daniele Luchetti. For his ninth feature he bucked a number of conventional moviemaking strategies -- and in the process discovered an invigorating method of storytelling that he says he’ll never give up.

Adapting Antonio Pennacchi’s 2003 novel “Il Fasciocomunista,” Luchetti set out to turn a chronicle of Italy’s tumultuous 1960s and ‘70s into a personal experience, the period’s polarities playing out through a tale of sibling love and rivalry. A hit on home turf, the film just opened in Los Angeles.

“I believe this can be seen as a story of a young man who’s in search of his own identity,” Luchetti said recently through a translator by phone from his home near Rome. “In this sense, it’s a universal story. It’s not a political film; it’s a film about human beings who are involved in politics.”

The central character, Accio, is the youngest of three children in a struggling working-class family. When he embraces fascism, it’s less a matter of political conviction than a need to belong -- and to escape the shadow of his charismatic older brother, Manrico, who happens to be a left-wing labor organizer. Working with screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli -- who explored some of the same late-20th-century history in “The Best of Youth” -- Luchetti brought a fair share of invention to the source material, expanding the fraternal relationship and adding the character of a spirited woman whom both brothers love.

The casting of Elio Germano, whose lead performance as Accio reaped one of the film’s five David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s top film honors, is a prime example of how Luchetti transformed the material. Whippet-thin and burning with intellectual energy, Germano is about as far as you can get from the novel’s muscular, violent and somewhat dim protagonist.

“I decided to choose an actor who’s the opposite of the character that was described in the book,” Luchetti said. “I think it’s too obvious and simplistic to show a stupid person who does stupid things.”

The director saw many actors before casting Germano and heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio, who portrays the less conflicted Manrico. Aiming to make a film that would be “more emotional” than his previous work, he sought to shake things up on the acting front and needed performers who would be open to the experiment.

“I teach [acting] seminars in Rome, both at the university and in the school of cinema,” Luchetti said. “The main issue with young actors is that they want to show that they can perform in the right way, that they can use all of the style elements and formal elements that a good actor is supposed to master. That’s exactly what I didn’t want. So I chose my cast based, specifically, on their ability to shed themselves of this.”

In the cause of authenticity and naturalness, Luchetti adopted an unusual tactic, a sort of reverse Pavlovian system of deconditioning: During rehearsals, whenever an actor used what Luchetti refers to as a “trick of the trade,” he’d ring a bell.

“Actors think that they’re safe when they are applying the tricks of the trade and they act in a formal way, when they play the good actors,” the filmmaker noted. “But actually, they have much less fun. When they do whatever feels natural, it’s very liberating. They feel free, and there’s a much higher energy.”

That emphasis on in-the-moment vitality extended to the director’s relationship with his director of photography, Claudio Collepiccolo. Rather than discussing blocking and angles beforehand, he essentially let the camera loose on the action. “I wanted this kind of documentary approach. I wanted the cameraman to be surprised by the scene and to follow it, to go where his eye wanted to go.”

In these ways, the period drama takes on a striking immediacy. Luchetti also allowed himself and the cast room to take the story in different directions, exploring various versions of scenes -- “trying to betray the script so that I could represent it better.”

The period in question, Luchetti, said, is a charged one for Italian filmmakers, in part because of its powerful artistic legacy. “In terms of cinema, it’s really hard for us to deal with those years because they were years with an incredible vitality, when the level of Italian filmmaking was extremely high. It was a time when the Italian cultural scene had a very strong identity.

“Maybe it’s because it was right after the war, there was a lot of prosperity, and there was a very, very conservative government. All the cultural world was reacting against this type of government. Or maybe it’s because these things happen just once per century. So for us, it’s really, really hard to deal with it -- it’s sort of a big weight. It’s as if we wanted to try to forget about that so that we’re able to come up with our own new things.”

Name that tune/movie

Developing his own new thing as he made this film, Luchetti looked at both sides of the political equation with “great affection towards those people who were sort of seduced by ideology in those years.”

The fascist/communist divide might seem extreme to American audiences used to a much narrower political spectrum, but Luchetti believes that “every country, not just Italy, has within itself a division in two blocs of one type or another.”

Still, he knew that “Il Fasciocomunista” would be a “loaded and scary” movie title, even for Italians. That’s where the iPod came in.

“We were in a production meeting, and the producer said, ‘Nobody’s leaving this room until we come up with a title.’ ” The hour was late, and Luchetti was eager to head out -- where else, but to the cinema -- so he got out his portable music player and put it on shuffle mode.

The first song that popped up was Rino Gaetano’s 1976 “Mio fratello e figlio unico” (My Brother Is an Only Child) -- as apt a title as you could find for a story of the fierce push-pull between siblings.

And although Mussolini and Mao play second fiddle to Accio and Manrico in the film, it might be worth noting the second song to play that night on Luchetti’s iPod, which he divulges with a delighted laugh: “Power to the People.”