“It’s not a movie I ever knew well, I just stumbled across it on the Criterion Channel. But we knew we were doing a movie about a sort of ’50s Euro tycoon, and I had this idea that he was like somebody who had stepped out of an Antonioni movie. We knew it was Benicio del Toro, should he agree to do it, but when I saw this film, I saw this man who was, first of all, involved in negotiations between government and business, and who was kind of a middleman mediator, a role that our character was beginning to take in our story. The Mattei Affair is one of those movies with a guy right in the middle of it, and we’re with him from start to finish across all these meetings. In our movie, we know Benicio was taking us through this story, and we’re never going to leave him.
And a real fact about Mattei, he traveled by fighter jet. He could get from Palermo to Milan in 45 minutes or something—I’d never heard of that—and he had his own jet pilot with a helmet, but then he was killed. The links with our story were apparent immediately, but interestingly, what maybe most prominently inspired us was the look and the music. For a significant period of time, we were using the score as our temp music. So it wasn’t just thematic, but also in the style of the movie that we found an inspiration.”
