A counter-guide to leadership

Carlo Cresto-Dina is one of the most important producers in Italian cinema. I met him in Turin for a conversation for the column I curate for Perimetro, exploring independent and auteur cinema.

In 2009 he founded Tempesta, the production company through which he built one of the most recognizable catalogues in European auteur cinema. He has produced all of Alice Rohrwacher's films, from Corpo Celeste to Le meraviglie, from Happy as Lazzaro to La Chimera.

This year he published È un'impresa fare un film with Einaudi, a book that overturns the common idea of the producer as a money man and tries to give language to a craft rarely talked about: the work of managing a collective creative process.

Very idealistically, he says himself. But almost twenty years have passed and Tempesta is still there.

This hope, this collective vision, resonated deeply with me. Especially now, when AI is pushing creative work more and more into the hands of a single person. Visions and voices tend to unify, to standardize.

It's a statement about who decides what gets told, and about how few people are left to decide it.

This reflection on collective work isn't only about how a film gets made. Some directors arrive with the idea of finding human tools to realize their own dream and their own vision. Others, on the opposite side, carry the idea of a collective dream they want to see happen.

The greatest directors Carlo has worked with belonged to the second category. It's a small detail, almost a quirk: Tempesta has never once granted the credit "a film by" on any of its films.

My own projects are born this way too. Not from an idea I need someone else to execute, but from a dream I want to see happen together with whoever produces it with me.

Find the full interview with Carlo Cresto-Dina here.

Photos by Fabio Gueli.