In their entrancing historical novel, The Silver Book, English writer Olivia Laing immerses us in the febrile world of 70s Italian filmmaking through the eyes of the legendary set-and-costume designer Danilo Donati. They focus on 1975, when he juggled creative duties on Federico Fellini’s Casanova at Cinecittà and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò in Mantua. Laing embraces Donati the way Hilary Mantel embraced Thomas Cromwell, thoroughly inhabiting his gift for eye-popping design and his deft handling of the two contrasting virtuosic directors—the mercurial, dictatorial Fellini and the controlled, hyper-focused Pasolini.
Laing’s Donati has a rare talent for the art of living, and for making everyone in his orbit feel valued, especially Nicholas Wade, the lost young Englishman he’s taken on as his apprentice and paramour. Donati schools him on pre-C.G.I. movie magic, using mundane objects like hard candy to simulate mosaics, Parmesan cheese for snow, black plastic sheeting for waves on the sea. “It’s not like looking with your own eyes,” Donati explains. “You can’t just film a bowl of cherries and expect them to look like cherries on the screen.”
