Sicilia

Sicily, 2018 or How I Learned to Love Volcanoes More Than People (for a while)

Right before Etna decided to remind everyone who’s boss in 2018, I spent a month shooting in Sicily. We went up to the top four times. The view? Absurdly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes you forget things. Which, in retrospect, was less poetry and more psychological self-defense.

The wind up there was so violent that holding the camera steady became almost and imposibility. The noise was a continuous roar that drowned out everything else. I couldn’t hear a single word anyone said. The volcano, in its infinite wisdom, had given me the gift of silence.

Because unlike most projects I’ve worked on, where you develop a certain fondness for your collaborators, or at least a tolerable working relationship built on the radical concept of mutual respect and basic human decency, this one was a masterclass in creative sadism, what happens when you give deeply unpleasant people a little bit of power and a lot of… “energy.”

We had a small army of producers whose primary function appeared to be watching us like we were smuggling state secrets instead of, you know, organizing footage. Downloading camera cards? Supervised. Backing up drives? Supervised. Organizing files in our hotel rooms after 17-hour days? YAS, supervised.

Terrible job. Terrifying people. The kind of people who mistake cruelty for professionalism and anxiety for productivity. Sixteen-hour days that felt like endurance tests designed by someone who genuinely enjoys watching others suffer.

And what was all this surveillance theater protecting? What priceless cinematic treasure required this level of paranoid security? A commercial. A bad one. The kind of soulless, micro-managed, focus-grouped garbage that manages to make even Sicily look boring. Which, let me be clear, is a genuinely impressive achievement.

Sicily, however, is so breathtakingly stunning that I somehow still have good memories. Thank you, Sicily, you deserved better than to host whatever that was.

I’m contractually forbidden from showing a single frame of footage. Not one. But honestly the work is exactly as lifeless as the people who strangled it into existence, a monument to what happens when paranoia, ego, and questionable life choices converge on a film set.

So these personal snapshots, stolen moments between takes, lunch breaks on the edge of a caldera, and other parts of the island, brief windows where I could take some images without someone breathing down my neck.

The volcano was better company.