'Heads or Tails?' reflects on the evocative power of the word to tell the desire for freedom of the human being.
Taxi Drivers
By Carlo Cerofolini
October 12, 2025
The story of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis
We said at the beginning of the pleasure of telling. Heads or Tails? reflects on how to tell great stories it is not always necessary to resort to the truth. After all, Buffalo Bill's show is based on a great story.
The Wild West Show was a collection of stories from the American frontier that Buffalo Bill reinterpreted and elevated to legend. He was first and foremost a great showman, capable of inventing the myth of the western by telling stories that were not necessarily true.
The theme of storytelling has always fascinated us. We
have explored it in all our films to question how important truth is in a
story. The stories of our first films, in fact, were born from listening to
real testimonies that we then transformed into cinematic narration, with
inevitable elements of mystification. Cinema, especially through editing,
modifies and manipulates reality, partly altering the truth of the facts In
this sense, we too have found ourselves mystifying reality as a working method,
and Heads or Tails? is perhaps the most direct result of this reflection.
Some elements
Speaking of the relationship between reality and fiction, the West Wild Show is staged betraying every principle of reality, starting with the use of black and white and the use of a frame reminiscent of that of the television screen, thus signaling the spectacular and non-real matrix of what we see.
The idea was to stage a mystified staging. There is actually also the research work we carried out together with Rachele Meliadò, the film's set designer. We saw a lot of photos, we found a lot of references to the Wilde West Show and the era in which it is set. All of this inspired us in how to bring it back to the screen. The synthesis of this idea is that large canvas that depicts a western landscape that was born from the desire to recreate a distant mythical world, and it seemed perfect to us to convey this dimension.
Even the voice-over changes seem to have the purpose of not making the viewer forget the importance of the act of narrating because then the film tells that too. Heads or Tails? Buffalo Bill is the first to do it but after him the other protagonists will also have the opportunity and pleasure to comment on what is happening to him.
Yes, this mechanism was also the way to deepen Rosa's conflict, forced to live in a male world in which everyone tells her what to do. At the same time, it allowed us to strengthen his path of search for freedom and to compare it with what each of us faces in the society in which we live.
Indoor and outdoor
The relationship between the interior and exterior of the story is also defined by the framework within which the story takes place. After what we have said, the signs presenting the chapters into which the film is divided suggest that the story we are watching could be the one told orally in an Italian square by one of the many traveling shows to which your films often allude.
I like what you said because it is what I was trying to say before talking about the staging of a staging mystified by someone. We have always liked matryoshka structures with stories within stories.
In Heads or Tails? The process of deconstruction also affects the myth of the American dream questioned by the somewhat scoundrel presence of those like Buffalo Bill who should somehow strengthen it.
Rosa’s character watches the Wild West Show and imagines a different and more adventurous life in America. He projects his need for freedom into the American dream but it is a dream destined to be shattered, just as it happens to us today.
Contamination
We mentioned earlier how Heads or Tails? is contaminated by different film genres. Considering that Rosa and Santino's is a journey of two characters forced to share the same journey, I think first of all of the road movie but also of the Buddy movie.
Rosa and Santino love each other at first to the point of running away together but they are two very different characters forced to share a great journey. We liked the idea of love as an illusion and therefore of carrying on this great love that was a bit deceptive. In this sense, there is certainly something of the road movie in the film. Just think, at the beginning, we said we wanted to do a sort of Bonnie & Clyde on a real Mustang.
Here too, as in other films, the Italian landscape is the protagonist. For the way you filmed it, the film remains a scenario with a recognizability far from American westerns, starting with the way of filming the horizon that in your film is never loaded with the meanings linked to the concept of the new frontier. And then by the presence of dreamlike and surreal parts.
The idea was precisely to make an Italian-style western, shot in our country, which would also tell it through the scenographic and landscape dimension. We liked to overturn the pattern of spaghetti westerns shot in Mexico or Spain where they tried to imitate the American landscape.
Instead, we were interested in working on a new idea of landscape, reinventing the genre by setting it here in Italy and proposing places little explored by cinema.
With respect to the use of the landscape, in the film we tell an almost realistic geographical path, in the sense that the story begins in Rome, then, with the escape, moves to the Pontine plains, at the time not yet reclaimed, to continue towards Southern Italy. In the second part, however, this realism cracks.
The more they go on, the more dreamlike and surreal the story becomes.
Yes, because the landscape at that point partly reflects Rosa's state of mind, becoming, as you rightly said, dreamlike, surreal and even a little psychedelic.
Santino's subjective
Among the most beautiful scenes is Santino's subjective view that is produced in a sort of ode to the harmony of the clouds that stand out above him.
On the one hand, that is a paradoxical moment in which the character of Rosa realizes that she doesn't need anyone to be free and that that is the last thing that binds her to her past. That scene, which I also like very much, is also emblematic of the work done with the actors, in particular with Alessandro Borghi and Nadia Tereszkiewicz. We were very lucky to work with them not only because of their talent, but also because of the sensitivity they were able to convey through their characters.
Instead of widening the shots to show the town where the film begins, you preferred to create claustrophobic scenes shot almost all indoors. Was it a precise aesthetic choice or was it also a way to optimize financial resources?
That kind of shot reflects the idea we wanted to give of Rosa's past. Shots and sets had to recreate the sense of restriction and claustrophobia from which she wants to escape. As independent filmmakers there is always the ability to adapt to circumstances in us but in this film we didn't necessarily think in those terms.
We decided to represent the locations of the first part of the film in a claustrophobic way to feel more of the sense of freedom when the narrative opens up to the outside.
The cast of the film by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis
In my opinion, one of the winning points of the film is the diversity of moods that arises from having amalgamated actors of different nationalities. Alongside Alessandro Borghi in the part of Santino there are Nadia Tereszkiewicz who plays Rosa and John C. Reilly in the part of Buffalo Bill. How did you choose them?
We thought of Alessandro Borghi for the role of Santino from the beginning. He joined the film at a very early stage, several years ago, and he was fundamental for us, because he gave us the basis to build the film also from a production point of view. Moreover, Alessandro entered with a lot of enthusiasm also from a creative point of view bringing many ideas. This is something we really like because in the transition from writing to reality, the people or things that happen help you improve what you had planned.
Even for the character of Rosa we were very lucky to meet Nadia because she was able to give a special depth and sensitivity to the character. She is a great actress and, as soon as we met her, we realized that only she could be Rosa.
We also worked in a similar way with John C. Reilly, together we deepened the tone of his character, the way he speaks and rewrote a lot of dialogue.
Since we were dealing with actors who acted in different languages or sometimes even with scenes between non-professional actors and performers, we worked a lot on the tone, sometimes trying to amalgamate them, other times to make them feel the differences.
Let's talk about the cinema you like.
We've talked a lot about Monte Hellman's films. We focused on Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller as well as Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, all belonging to the American cinema of the seventies that we love very much. The two of us exchange many film references to then understand what direction we want to take.
We also did it together with the director of photography Simone D'Arcangelo and also with Vittorio Giampietro, author of the film's music. We have a very long path of collaboration with them, we have made many films and we have grown together. Simone often participates in our meetings on the script, so we develop the discourse on photography for a long time, discussing the mise-en-scène and the image.
With Vittorio the work is similar. From the beginning we
wanted the film to be in the form of a ballad. His songs, written specially,
are sung by the characters and become an integral part of the story.
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