Please introduce yourself as a filmmaker.

My family has films and filmmaking in its blood. My mother was an actress, my grandfather was an engineer who did 

experiments with color film and was awarded patents that he then proposed to the Technicolor company. 

My great grandfather was Antonio Machnich, one of the first to open a movie theatre in the cities of Trieste and Bucharest, 

where he called them the ‘Cinema Volta’, and he also opened what I believe was the first theatre in Dublin, where he

had the great writer James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, as a partner. 

I started out as a production assistant on a number of films, and then I wrote an encyclopedia of Italian horror and fantasy films 

entitled Spaghetti Nightmares, considered by many to be one of the best works in the field.

Finally, I studied directing and producing at the Los Angeles Film School, also

taking similar courses at the University of Southern California.

How did you become involved in filmmaking as a director and producer?

It had been a goal of mine since childhood. In the 90’s, Italian cinema went

into decline. The great directors, such as Sergio Leone, were no longer around, and funding was scarce. 

Television, with its censorship, started to play too much of a role, turning out films whose stories were dull and uninteresting, 

and Italy’s stellar tradition of horror films had seen its day. In Mexico, the great director and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky 

completed his "visionary journey"; entitled Santa Sangre, while the English filmmakers Richard Stanley and Phillip Ridley blazed 

new trails with their typical verve and venerable theatrical tradition. All of this convinced me that there was a way to turn out nnovative, 

visionary films which combined the different genres, giving meaning to the goal of being a director.

Give us more information about yourself and the films you have made so far.

At first, I was going to do a film based on a short story by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a story as bizarre as its author. 

I am a great admirer of his, and I would have made every effort to turn out the best film possible, only the story had no end, 

and so I could not make it work as a screenplay. After a number of failed attempts that produced endings which seemed forced and contrived, 

I regretfully had to give up the project and switch to a straightforward horror story, a tale that had won me over. It is written by Nicola Lombardi, 

a friend of mine, and offers an ironic take on an encounter between Santa Claus and the family of a child The ending ties things up 

as neatly as in the film, except while writing the screenplay I decided to remove much of the irony,

replacing it with the dramatic plot device of the illicit adoption, in order to keep the ending - which on film, 

as opposed to the page, was a bit too obvious -from falling flat with the spectators.