Benito Montorio

Montorio's a man who seems to end up in difficult spaces - his documentary work has variously seen him sandwiched between the Mafia and secret services; blindfolded in the Bolivian jungle and undercover with a fascist footie mob. But, as he tells Tim Cumming, his favourite space is that elusive area between the real and the cinematic

"The one where I thought it was too much was in São Paulo, in a favela, in the back of an ambulance truck with an anti-kidnapping squad. All these guys with M16s. The one in charge, a great, gung-ho character called Wagner, was throwing up outside the window because he was so nervous. And at that point I thought, 'this is a little bit too much', but there was no going back. We hit the favela and they opened the doors and just ran out and there was me and a cameraman running behind them with a camera. We didn't have a choice. If we'd stayed by the ambulance we would've been dead."

Benito Montorio is one of those directors who can relive his career behind the camera with the kind of rear-view, car-crash clarity that people get in moments of great danger. As it is, thankfully, the Italian-British director behind a clutch of award-winning campaigns, and a veteran of several hard-hitting undercover documentaries for the BBC, remains very much
alive and planning for the future.

The man's most recent work has rung up the gongs. At this year's BTAA awards, Imagine, his celebrated spot for Robinsons Barley Water, picked up gold for best soft drinks and a silver for best 30-60 second, while The Feeling for John Lewis, garnered a gold for best retail and a silver for best 60-90 seconds. He's about to head off to Barcelona for a month, working with BBH via Blink on a spot for Zurich Insurance. "And I'm developing a couple of features, based on documentaries I made, and half fictionalising them and drawing on real experiences and characters."

Keeping it real may be an urban cliché but it's the driving force in Montorio's work. For his first documentary film, Hooligans (shortlisted for the Greisens Best Documentary Series Award 2003), he spent a year undercover with football hooligans from Italy's Lazio region. Other documentaries include Ransom City, which followed the kidnapping gangs of São Paulo's favelas; and a number of films for the BBC's This World strand - The Real Godfather, about the Sicilian head of the Mafia faction Corleonesi, and The 12-year-old Cocaine Smuggler, which bagged the One World Media Award in 2007.

It was football - minus the hooliganism - that got him into the business. After studying politics and modern history at Manchester, the Napoli-born Montorio pursued his obsession with Italian football to its logical conclusion.

"I saw this guy in Italy interviewing all these footballers and drinking cappuccinos on Channel 4 and I wanted to do that job," he laughs. He got in touch with the producer, "absolutely hounded and hounded him, and he said, there's no budget to take me on, and I said I'd work for free." Being fluent in Italian and English probably helped. He was soon jetting over to Italy with a 16mm Bolex and filming his own 40-second sequences. "I'd had no training at all. The Bolex was my training.

It was pretty extravagant, looking back - you're 20 years old and someone gives you a film camera and sends you off to Milan to shoot what you want." It was after making the piece about Lazio's football hooligans that the BBC called asking him to penetrate the gang for a documentary about hooliganism worldwide.

"The hooligans were quite hardcore - the guys who ran it are in prison now," he reveals. "I had undercover equipment so that I could get the pictures when anything happened without anyone noticing, otherwise the police would have arrested me and taken the footage." After Hooligans, his reputation grew for films about the edgier side of life, but which displayed a strikingly cinematic approach. "I spend a lot of time getting to know the people," he says of his technique. "I'll shoot stuff with them myself so I know what it is they can give me and what's there, and then shoot properly with a crew, so that the visuals become more cinematic.


There's that fine line between the real and the performance - there's nothing worse than getting a great performance but not shooting it the way you'd like. And vice versa. I really like that space in between where it feels too real to be set up, but it looks like film. It's the hardest thing, in a way."

But not, perhaps, as hard as some of the edgier shoots. The Bolivian cocaine smuggling film saw him being blindfolded for a trip through the jungle to a factory some five hours drive from the nearest town, while his last documentary, probing the shadowy innards of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, he describes as his toughest assignment to date.

"I'd got access to the sons of the boss who'd never ever spoken to journalists before. Or since. That was a hard interview. I had to ask hard questions. Journalistically there are big demands on you. And they got really pissed off with me for asking the hard questions." It was a cat-and-mouse shoot that even Jason Bourne might've balked at - fi lming with the secret services on one side, and the Cosa Nostra on another - neither of them particularly cosy company.

"And then they both found out, and the secret services didn't want to be fi lmed anymore," he recalls. "If you walk in those lines it gets… very complicated." He pauses and sips at - what else? - an espresso. "There's this thing in Sicily where you're never quite sure, there's all these double meanings. A lot of paranoia."

It was an almost perfect contrast, then, that his fi rst commercial after The Real Godfather was for Dove soap - a world away from Mafi a dons and Sicilian intrigue. "It was weird, totally out of my usual experience," he remembers. "I just sort of did it."

Though it wasn't aired for six months, it did bag him a BTAA award, and brought in more work, culminating in the award-winning campaigns for John Lewis and Robinsons. But the learning curve has been steep. "The biggest thing was getting used to having this big machinery around, and how that machinery slows you down. I've become used to the benefi ts of it. Commercials by nature grow and grow and grow, and the bigger they are the more people you need and the slower it gets. From going around in a minibus in Brazil with fi ve of you doing what you want, to doing that, is quite a step."

Montorio's trademark mix of a cinematic aesthetic and in-the-moment realism, along with an ability to bring out the best from real people in front of lights, cameras and crew, has been the key to the success of his campaigns for Robinsons, with its focus on tension before victory and the passion of expectancy, and The Feeling for John Lewis, which features children fi lmed in a colour-rich, dreamily retrospective style.


"I shot that on reversal film and old lenses and with my Bolex 16mm, which straight away gives you a magical, dreamy, retrospective quality." And for both adverts he used real people, rather than actors. "For Robinsons, the little girl who's got the Barley Water was found in a tennis club. She'd never been on camera before, but there was just something about her, and it was great because the agency could see it and I could see it."

It's a way of working that draws parallels with his documentary fi lms. "It's getting people used to the camera - workshopping them, basically - and getting them to be natural. So that whatever happens, you want to believe it. You need to create an atmosphere that makes something totally believable when you watch it. That's what you're after. You want to believe the moment.

If it feels acted or not believable you've failed." Montorio admits to being picky about his scripts, and only making three commercials in the last year. His other work has ranged from a series of Guinness idents for Film4 to another award winner, the cleverly inverted BBC Riot spot for News 24, with its imagery of police holding the line against a sea of rioting bankers. "It was hard, shooting in the City after the riots where the newspaper seller was killed. The police didn't want us to shoot anything about bankers… there were lots of limitations."

As well as working with Blink, he's just signed to Furlined in the US, and will be shooting commercials for the American market as well as developing feature projects and his commercials career in Europe.

But as far as documentaries go, Montorio's going to call it day. "After The Real Godfather, that was the end," he says. "It was very hard work. With documentaries you want to tell these hard-hitting stories but there are so many barriers because it's real."

Though the two areas of wish-fulfi lling advertising and gritty documentary film may be worlds apart, it's the process behind them that fascinates Montorio and gives the unity to his work.

"The bit I really like is when you get a moment when the performance leaps out and crosses that barrier, and you know it feels magical or genuine, and you know you're shooting it in the right way to tell that story. That's a really good feeling. Whether it's a kidnapping or the moment when the kid gives you that magic look and the light's hitting it in the perfect way. It's the same feeling."