The 2013 Italian film Il capitale umano / Human Capital represents the fortuitous meeting of two complementary sensibilities. One belongs to novelist Stephen Amidon (above), on whose 2004 novel (also titled Human Capital) it was based; the other to the film’s director and co-writer, Paolo Virzi. Both the novel and the film are political thrillers consistent with concerns evident in their creators’ other work.
Amidon (who’s also reviewed films for The Sunday Times and The Financial Times) is the author of eight novels – Human Capital was the fifth – as well as two collections of short stories, the second of which, Echolocation, is due for publication later this year [see the author's website]. Most of his work deals with the ways in which social forces frame the trajectory of our lives. Underpinning the noirish thrust of The Primitive (1996), Security (2009) and The Real Justine (2015) is an empathetic humanist impulse that believes that everyone has their reasons. That assessing life simply on the basis of surface appearances is never enough. And the same concern pervades the gripping social drama of novels such as The New City (2000) and his latest, Locust Lane (2023).
It’s a theme that also runs through Peter Chelsom’s 2020 adaptation of Security, which transfers the Connecticut setting of Amidon’s novel to the Italian seaside town of Forte dei Marmi. The film was made for an Italian company (Indiana Production), shot in Italian and subsequently picked up by Netflix for an international release (and can still be found there). As Chelsom put it in Variety, “It’s a kind of companion piece to Human Capital in that it’s both the same novelist and the same producers. Similarly, it starts with a crime that takes the duration of the film to solve. And while Human Capital asks the question ‘What is the price of a human life?’ Security asks, ‘What is the price we pay for security in an ever-threatened world?’”
Now in his mid-60s, like Amidon, writer-director Virzi (above) has made 17 films to date. Human Capital is the eleventh and his most recent is Cinque Secondi/Five Seconds (2025), which is likely to turn up at this year’s Italian Film Festival. As is evident in films such as Caterina in the City (2003), which pivots on the chasm between those who live within the circle of power in Italian society and those who exist outside it, and the family saga, The First Beautiful Thing (2010), Virzi shares Amidon’s commitment to his characters’ humanity and view of their social circumstances.
As the filmmaker explains in Part 2 of this feature, in the following interview, the pair never met in person until after the movie was finished. But they got on, leading to Amidon collaborating (with several other screenwriters, even if not especially successfully) on the screenplay for Virzi’s first English-language feature, The Leisure Seekers (2017), starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.
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Amidon’s Human Capital takes place in a superficially comfortable Connecticut in the spring of 2001 (the date becomes significant). A compelling story of our times, it winds together the experiences of three families implicated in the hit-and-run killing of a cyclist. As it does so, it also paints a savagely sardonic portrait of the workings of contemporary capitalism.
Virzi’s Human Capital shifts the setting to the wealthy Brianza region in northern Italy, changes the names of the characters, rearranges the chronology of the plot – the cyclist’s death happens at the start rather than a third of the way in – and adjusts the dramatic emphases accordingly.
Intriguingly, the respectable 2019 remake of Human Capital, (available for rental on Amazon Prime) written by Oren Moverman and directed in the US by Marc Meyers, returns the drama to Amidon’s Connecticut setting. But, acknowledging the writers of Virzi’s film in the closing credits, it also begins with the cyclist’s death, its subsequent withholding of information about who was behind the wheel of the car lending the film a whodunnit thread.
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I interviewed Amidon by email and Virzi by Skype late in 2013, for a feature I was writing about Human Capital for the arts pages of The Australian.
Interview with Stephen Amidon
“I think Stephen must be genetically Italian.”
(Peter Chelsom, Variety, June 22, 2020)
“I sometimes feel I should borrow Trollope's How We Live Now as the title for all my books.” (Stephen Amidon)
TR: Why does it take an Italian production to adapt your novel to the screen?
Stephen Amidon: Well you might ask. My books have always done pretty well in Italy for reasons I do not fully understand, so it was not entirely surprising. But, still, the fact that Paolo Virzi was able to make a successful adaptation of this very American story remains a source of great surprise to me. I think the fact that the book's themes – money, greed, the often-crippling love for our children – are universal might explain a lot. But I also put it down to plain old serendipity.
When did the filmmakers approach you? What promises did they make to persuade you to release the rights?
I received a call from an Italian writer/journalist named Antonio Monda in the summer of 2011 saying that Paolo wanted to talk to me. Antonio is something of a celebrity in America – he is a real rainmaker who runs an actual salon in his New York City apartment, where famous people gather every Sunday. (I've never been). Anyway, Paolo wrote me a charming and intelligent letter with his take on the story, and that was all it took. He got it. I'd seen two of his movies already so I knew he was good. I must confess, the idea intrigued me more than worried me.
You must feel gratified by the film’s nomination for the best foreign film Oscar?
Very gratified, especially for Paolo, the actors and screenwriters Francesco Bruni and Francesco Piccolo. They really worked very hard and with great inspiration, so any recognition they can get is well-deserved. I am also pleased that they were able to win the Davide di Donatello award – Italy's Oscar – over stiff competition that included Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013), which won last year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Do you see all of the characters as victims in one way or another?
Absolutely. I believe that capitalism in its current iteration really does have a tendency to distort human behaviour and relationships. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out, all these technological breakthroughs of the past 100 years should be decreasing the amount or work and stress we are experiencing, and yet it seems to be having the opposite effect, with crippling debt and longer work weeks and ever- expanding material aspiration. It's crazy. And then there is the notion of false needs. Drew [Dino in the film] has a perfectly good life which he almost destroys because he wants more; Quint [Giovanni] is a multi-millionaire and yet he works himself nearly to death to accumulate more wealth. It’s like they are bewitched by money.
What do you feel about the changes Paolo Virzi and his co-writers have made?
For example, the different ending?
I really don't have a strong opinion about this, though I know others do. To be honest, though, I sort of liked it. I feel like I can be somewhat brutal with my poor characters – it's nice to see someone else cutting them some slack.
And the shift of the accident from Chapter 10 to the film’s opening?
I think one of the master strokes of the screenplay is the way it re-arranges certain plot elements to make the story more coherent as a filmed drama. The relocation of the accident to the opening scene is one of these inspired changes.
The variation to your structuring of the story? [While the novel moves back and forth between four characters, with occasional temporal overlaps, the film rewinds events through the experiences of three of them before, like the book, bringing them together for the “Final Chapter”]
I actually wrote a screenplay of Human Capital for an American producer many years ago, and I feel that I was in some ways defeated by my own narrative structure. The changes made by Paolo, Bruni and Piccolo had me slapping my forehead. Of course!
The transformation of Carla’s project from a cinema one to a theatre one?
I was so taken with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's performance that I hardly noticed it. It didn't really change the plot at all, so I was fine with it.
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| Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Human Capital |
The reduction of Luca’s uncle/your David to a peripheral character?
This was disappointing, and I know Paolo would have liked to do more with David. He was one of the book's main characters, and also one of my favourite ones. To be honest, I think it was simply a matter of fitting him into the running-time.
The film, I think, makes the adult characters in the film, especially the male ones, much harder-edged, less sympathetic than they are in the way you flesh them out in the novel. Are you comfortable with this?
I’m not being coy, but that's a very difficult question for me to answer. I've always been fond of this book and its characters, so when I saw the movie I was sort of like a child sitting in wonder, rather than a film critic (a job I held in London for several years, as it happens).
My point is I brought so much knowledge about them to my experience that I felt very sympathetic toward them. But I see your point. People talk about film and novels in the same breath, but they are such incredibly different media. I believe a lot of the very astute points you are making have more to do with the demands of producing a movie rather than deep aesthetic choices. Characters have to be more vivid, more external. Their dramas are performed, rather than inwardly felt. This can lead to them becoming more extreme.
I see your novel as “a story of our times”. How does that sit with your feelings about it?
My main comment is thank you – that was my intent. I've always tried to follow Tom Wolfe's suggestion that novelists need to provide a snapshot of the times in which they find themselves trapped. I sometimes feel I should borrow Trollope's The Way We Live Now [1875] as the title for all my books.
In terms of its ironic function, do you think the film changes anything by replacing 9/11 with a downturn in the Italian economy?
My American editor once remarked that Human Capital is the only novel he knows that uses 9/11 as a deus ex machina – a hedge-fund manager bets on markets to fall and benefits mightily when the Twin Towers tumble, allowing him to save his career and rescue his family.
But, yes, I think that the film might lose a little not having this hugely ironic signpost, but makes up for it by having Valeria deliver that incredible money line (which I did not write) to her husband as they prepare for their victory party: "You bet on the downfall of this country, and you won."
If you’d been directing the film, what would you have done differently?
I would have failed!
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Part Two - Tom's conversation with Paolo Virzi will be published shortly
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