Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown: Rome
What a show! 
From: https://medium.com/parts-unknown/mamma-roma-2362271634cc#.n9g8fphiv
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*****
You should know right now, if you didn’t know already, that what drives the team behind PARTS UNKNOWN is not to do what we did last week or last month — or ever. We are delighted when our viewers like an episode and even more delighted when they love one. But we are compelled, just the same, to avoid repeating what we’ve done before. If we fail — we want to fail outrageously, foolishly, gloriously — giving it everything we’ve got in the cause of making something new and strange and hopefully, awesome. Our latest Rome episode is perhaps, the most ambitious example of that compulsion.
My long time team have for years discussed the possibility of shooting an episode entirely in wide screen, letterbox anamorphic format — like so many of the movies we admire. And for this episode, we finally got our way. This was necessarily a mammoth undertaking. Networks don’t like it — as it makes distribution to countries where they might still have square TV sets difficult. To do it right requires additional equipment, lighting, expense — and, in this case, the addition of a sizable Italian film crew. Working within the Italian filmmaking system presents….challenges of its own. The kinds of images we anticipated capturing required music adequate to the scale and subject. Which meant we needed an actual score — in this case, a beautiful collection of related pieces on a theme by our long time music director Michael Ruffino. And I was adamant about acquiring rights to an existing piece of music — the song “Spiral Waltz” from the wonderful 60’s sci-fi satire, “The 10th Victim”.
And though we intended from the beginning to make the most beautiful looking show we had ever done, there was one important thematic constraint: We would shoot NO classical Rome. The entire episode would feature ONLY the architecture of Mussolini and post-Mussolini era Rome: brutalist, futurist and rationalist structures, mid-century housing blocks, suburbs, the decidedly downscale and not particularly romantic seaside community of Ostia.
*****
The episode would not have been possible — or be anything like it is without the truly magnificent Asia Argento. She’s spent a lifetime in films — mostly in front of the cameras, but also — and quite notably — behind, directing most recently the remarkable and beautiful “Incompresa (Misunderstood)”. She told us about “stornello”, the bawdy, profane Roman folk songs we feature at various times during the episode. She introduced us to the batshit crazy boxing club where we ate pasta ringside as gladiators pounded one another and the crowd hooted and roared. She allowed us to shoot at her favorite little restaurants, where she takes her kids on the weekends for homemade fettuccine and polpetti. Introduced us to the lovely and outrageous trans ladies who live in her neighborhood — and arranged for them to wander, choreographed, like exotic birds, through her local Quicky Mart while we shopped for dinner. She arranged for her sister Fiore to cook for me at her home — with her delightful children, daughter Ana and son Nicola (who pretty much steals the show as he struggles with his tripe). She convinced the notorious Abel Ferrara to appear in the episode — and explain how the maddest and baddest of American film directors could find himself living an ordinary life as a husband and father in Rome.
*****
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Kind of like ascending a tower and kissing the ring.
