I just get up every morning silently asking myself – What’s my mission today?- A few slow steps from the bed to the toilet and already question two, three and four arise in front of the mirror reflecting countless eyes from faraway worlds, all staring at me: the Italian Fixer.
Living a Fixer’s life requires a big effort, a great experience, a huge passion and a deep love renewed every time a new project is put into my hands.
That’s how it starts, what I can be paid for, what the world needs, what I am good at, what I love and what the Japanese world would call Ikigai: my reason for being.
You’ll never hear “unknown” from an Italian fixer
Working as a Fixer means that I will never say –unknown- ‘cause every step I take makes a footprint that others are following right after me. And I have to know, to be careful and to care. About them, my clients. And everything else. Fixer, production and location manager all in me to make a project come true and to find the perfect hosting place my client is dreaming of. A fixer is a dream maker never deceiving, never giving up, always supporting.
Travelling so many places, meeting so many different people, cultures, places, I am finally leaded into a heaven called Wonderland. The part which I like the most in Wonderland is the unexpected magic of a cherry tree along the way with people sitting under it: that’s Beauty recalling echoes of Happiness. I like filming in tiny hamlets and small villages where I can wake up in the morning with people gazing at me with crystal eyes confused by a world unknown and a gentle smile hiding into some long beards, wild figures unaware of all the places I have walked through.
Delight and fullness of a fixer: when the ring bells as the sound man puts his headphones on
I like filming in the small squares of the tiny villages where always some free rays of sun come to spread their light all around the benches, around the crew and all around me. There, as the sound man puts his headphones on, suddenly the sound of a church bell starts. Silence. Sound on. Recording. How many sounds we hold? How many time frames and movie scenes in our invisible mind archives? Delight and fullness of a Fixer, fixing what the world needs and filling what he longs for.
Though, sometimes it can be so hard to stand fiercely and avoid the subtle fear of failing or falling, no mistake is allowed. Feeling sometimes just like a tightrope walker whose effort is to make an amount of difficult steps look easy. The ground below the wire. Walking more on tiptoes than on my shoes, trying to change gravity, I just hold my breath and walk to the end with an extravagant concentration and an only thought in my mind: to make it a successful one.
Working with a fixer means you turn work into magic!
Working as a Fixer in the world of production implies that you play a role yourself, your role played in a positive and productive way, shifting your mindset and transforming your work into the same magic of a star turning a solid but empty stage into a play full of life. It’s hard, breathtaking, days filled with sleepless nights and a mind full of restless thoughts with an endless passion above all. It definitely happens to me every time a new project is put into my hands.
A busy life arranging interviews, location permits, transport, hotel, meals and all the small parts needed to make a beautiful story happen. The moment the effort is done, suddenly an enthralling beauty is unveiled and the story revealed.
Stories never belong to the Fixer, that’s the rule. They never belong to me. Though, just like a stealer I selfishly steal echoes, sounds, enchanted images of a magic sunset or a mystic dawn.
It’s a kind of story where an old man slowly walking in a narrow street and a curious cat unaware of me turn this production world, my world, into a tale that anyone could call Wonderland: a land where nothing is under the rules of the space, where time has no beginning and no end, the place where you happily find your reason for being.
Story telling by
Ariel in the Clouds (Francesca)