Canadian-born commercial director and artist Cosmo Cavallaro is set to helm his first feature film. Called Slap, it is currently in preproduction and slated to begin filming in Montreal and New York next March. Based on a screenplay penned by Cavallaro, Slap was inspired by his relationship with his father.
Cavallaro—who co-owns Montreal-based commercial production company Figaro Films, while being repped in the U.S. through Emerald Films, New York—explained that the film’s title is derived from an Italian game called Slap. In it, one man faces a wall and is slapped by another in the group. The "slapee" the turns around and must correctly guess which man hit him.
"Slap is a story about a father and son who battle for the love of their wife and mother respectively," recounted Cavallaro. "When she dies, the boy is left alone to discover the truth between himself and his father, but they are too far apart to even take that step, because they have battled their whole life."
While he isn’t yet at liberty to release the actors’ names, casting has been completed, with an American actor playing the father and two Canadian performers cast as the mother and son.
Slap will be made with assistance from Telefilm Canada, a Canadian government initiative to help local filmmakers. Producer on the film is Claudio Luca, and the production company is Tele-Action, Montreal.
Luca was the producer on feature films including Boys of St. Vincent (1994), about a group of boys who revisit their childhood at the St. Vincent orphanage where they endured horrific sexual and emotional abuse by the priests; and Margaret’s Museum (’95), about a woman’s struggle to protect her family and friends from the ravages of the coal-mining industry in a 1940s Nova Scotia town of Scot-Irish immigrants.
Cavallaro is thrilled that Luca—who, like Cavallaro, is an Italian Canadian—will produce his film. Yet, while directing his first feature excites him, Cavallaro maintains that there’s a certain amount of trepidation attached to stepping into uncharted territory.
"I’m very afraid of doing this movie, for many reasons: for what it says, for how it will be interpreted—not just from an artistic perspective, but from the perspective of my relationship with my parents, my friends and my family. It’s like getting up and saying something that everyone knows and yet everyone fears to say," he explains.
Slap is also Cavallaro’s first screenplay. He began it following the death of a close friend. "I just started writing this incredibly nonjudgmental draft of whatever I was feeling at the time. I realized 60 pages later that I had nothing left to say, and I put it away," he recalls. "Four months later, I took it up again and realized I could turn it into a film script."
Cavallaro studied fine arts at various Canadian colleges and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, becoming a sculptor before drifting into commercial production in ’88, when he joined the now defunct Boardwalk Pictures in Toronto. Stints followed at various Canadian production companies, including the now defunct Derek Van Lint & Associates, and then Toronto-based Spy Films. In ’92 he started Figaro Films with partner Michèl Sarao. He relocated to New York in ’95, where he has been represented for commercial work through Emerald Films, since ’91.
His most recent credits include spots for Vicks via DMB&B, New York (since renamed D’Arcy); Tampax via BBDO New York; and Handy Bag via DMB&B, Paris. While he has scaled back his commercial work to concentrate on his art, he is also about to helm a campaign for the National Bank of Canada via LG2, Montreal, through Figaro.
Cavallaro has found that the process he is going through with his film has little in common with his experiences as a spot director. "What I’ve tried to do in my advertising—which has been a very difficult experience for me, and for the people in the industry working with me—is to put some element of truth into advertising. And my most successful ads are the ones where I was able to do that."
CHEESY IDEA
Cavallaro has another passion, which has given him a certain degree of offbeat notoriety—cheese. Or more specifically the notion of covering objects in cheese to create installation art. It started with a chair, a remnant of his childhood that he kept as a self-described "security blanket."
His next project was a room in the Washington Jefferson Hotel, New York, where he covered everything—including the furniture and ceiling fan—in 1,000 pounds of Appenzeller, Gruyère and Emmenthaler cheese. Microwaved to malleability in a process that also kills potential rodent-attracting bacteria, the cheese was donated by Switzerland Cheese Marketing, a trade organization dedicated to raising the profile of Swiss cheese stateside. Titled "Room 114," the project was widely reported by a bemused press.
Then, in objection to the outlandish prices paid in pursuing fashion, he poured cheese on one of his expensive jackets. The jacket incident inspired his next project: covering a gown belonging to Twiggy in Easy Squeeze canned cheddar. His next planned art installation project: Covering a house in Powell, Wyo., in cheese. Cavallaro needs 10,000 pounds of cheese, which he hopes will come in the form of donations.
What propels him to do his cheese thing? "I don’t know why I’ve got to do this—maybe to satisfy my child-life, my dream, but if I can cover as many objects as I feel like in cheese, then that’s a good thing, and it’s fun," he said. "It’s my gift to the world, so someday, somebody can say, ‘There was a cheese house, and a cheese building, and cheese plane.’ And it is absolutely beautiful to be able to have no reason other than that."
