EXCLUSIVE: Marco Calvani, who most recently starred in Netflix‘s The Four Seasons, is set to co-write and direct his second feature film, Capitana.
Co-written with ‘The Vagina Monologues’ playwright, V, Capitana is based on a memoir by Pia Klemp, a German biologist who was working with Sea Shepherd on marine conservation efforts. She later directed ships to rescue thousands of migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, but later faced charges for assisting with illegal immigration in 2017 and a potential 20-year prison sentence. After seven years, charges were dropped against Klemp.
Production for Capitana is expected to take place some time in the “late winter or spring” next year, as Calvani will be on set for the second season of Netflix’s The Four Seasons sometime between September to December this year.
Capitana will feature an international cast, with the shoot taking place in multiple countries — Malta, Italy, Serbia and Germany are among the locations currently under consideration.
Calvani was in Cannes last week, and he previously wrote and directed debut feature High Tide, which premiered at SXSW in 2024. The film was distributed by Strand Releasing.
“I am generally drawn to stories that put people who are at the margins, in the forefront,” Calvani tells Deadline. ““As a playwright first, and now as a filmmaker, I always try to use my voice for people who don’t really have a voice in the world, in the current landscape. Maybe because I’m an immigrant myself, I’ve always been drawn to stories of people who are displaced, people who are trying to belong to a place, to something, to someone, to a community. These stories are so timely.”
Calling Klemp a “modern day hero,” Calvani says that the subject of refugees is “the biggest issue of our current societies.
“No matter where you are, if you’re not a refugee, your ancestors were refugees in the past. And we will most likely be refugees again. If you look at the way the world is changing, the way the planet is suffering and the population rising… In the current scenario, at this specific time in history, where there’s a rise of fascist and autocratic regimes all around the world, I think this story couldn’t be more important and inspiring too,” adds Calvani.
The inspiration for Capitana
Calvani says that the conversation about adapting Klemp’s memoir first started after he met V at her home in upstate New York, when Calvani was in the middle of writing another feature film script, after High Tide.
“The day I arrived, she had just had a conversation with Pia herself,” says Calvani. “They were communicating over some political and social interventions.
“That day, while they were talking, Pia said that she has a book and that it would be amazing to do it as a movie. The day I walked in, V looked at me and she was like, ‘You’re the right person to do this.’ So we acquired the rights of the book and we wrote the script,” adds Calvani.
Calvani says that it was his first time co-writing a script.
“I had always prided myself on writing being such a personal and intimate experience — and for her too, so we were quite scared because we love each other so much and you never know how it is, but it was a very riveting experience.
“It’s really a journey of Pia, who was trying to survive this world, trying to fight against the ignorance, the hypocrisy, trying to do the right thing, to help those in need, and institutions then getting in the way,” says Calvani.
From acting to directing and back to acting again
Before Four Seasons, Calvani had not acted in film and television in over ten years. Calvani was steadily building a thriving career as a playwright and theater director in both his native Italy and in the U.S., helming original plays like ‘Oil,’ ‘I am Dracula,’ and ‘Nails.’ He has penned around 20 plays in both English and Italian, with many of them translated into other languages and presented across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
However, with cinema, Calvani found a new way to express his ideas more visually.
“I was a playwright but I was still writing in Italian, and when I moved to New York, I had to start writing in English, and that was a huge challenge,” says Calvani. “With playwriting, it’s all about words. You can do a lot with the stage, but first and foremost as a playwright, it’s dialogue, and it was tough.
“When I was given the opportunity to tell a story with a camera, I discovered what was there all along for me, which is telling a story not just with words but with images, and then of course the editing, the score,” adds Calvani. “That was quite liberating and empowering. It gave me a lot of freedom to tell the stories I wanted to tell.”
He counts Andrea Arnold, Ashgar Farhadi, Chloe Zhao and Eliza Hittman among his filmmaking inspirations, alongside Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams for theater.
However, a call from Colman Domingo — who was already attached to The Four Seasons — kickstarted Calvani’s journey back to acting again.
“Colman Domingo called me one morning asking me, ‘Are you still an actor?’ I genuinely said no, because I didn’t intend to be, and I wasn’t trying to be an actor,” says Calvani. “He asked, ‘Would you put yourself on tape?’ Honestly, I thought Colman, being a director and producer too, that he just needed someone Italian passing by, in one of his projects.”
However, just before sending in an audition tape for the role of Claude for The Four Seasons, Calvani found himself questioning if returning to acting was the next best step — or if his artistic vocation truly lay elsewhere, in writing and directing.
“I was quite frightened, not just because it was quite a big role,” says Calvani. “It was also because I had just premiered my film at SXSW and we were touring around festivals quite successfully. We were closing a deal for distribution with Strand Releasing. It just felt like: Why this, why now? I was finally able to make my first feature and I’m about to put it out there and share it with the world. Going back to acting felt like an obstacle, a detour from what I believed I had built for myself all those years.
“After I got the part, it took me a minute to accept the gift, and to see that it was actually a beautiful opportunity and blessing — that it wasn’t a detour, it was actually a shortcut,” adds Calvani.
On his time filming The Four Seasons alongside co-stars Tina Fey, Will Forte, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Erika Henningsen, Domingo and Steve Carel, Calvani says that it was a “beautiful set with beautiful people.
“Although the first day, I was nervous, like ‘what am I doing here?’, sitting down at a dinner table for a scene with Colman, Tina, Steve, Kerri, Erika and Will. You know, major imposter syndrome. But in the end, I knew that I was welcome there and that I had earned my place at the table — literally, because the first scene was a dinner scene.”
On his writing routine, Calvani says that he is an early riser, usually getting up at 5:30am or 6am, which he describes as the “most fertile time of the day” for writing.
“I usually write in the morning non-stop, with no music. I do my meditation,” says Calvani. “Picture this: 6am, a candle is lit. When I’m able to travel, usually it’s in the middle of nature, so there is a silence and a beauty outside the window.
“It needs to be a kind of sanctuary because as a writer, you’re a vessel for information, for stories, for people’s thoughts and words and they already exist up there, so you need to open yourself to receive all of them. You need to be in a state that is able to receive this information,” adds Calvani.
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