Bravado Directors Unpack 'Turducken' Meta Thriller Structure
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Alex Hanno directed "Bravado," which premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival in April before its West Coast debut at Dances With Films: LA, where festival director Lindsey Smith-Sands called it a "turducken of a movie"
- Luca Malacrino co-wrote the script with Hanno and stars as Patrick Lombardi, a once-successful director who browbeats aspiring screenwriter Amy Erickson (Caitlin Morris) — a mentor-mentee dynamic the filmmakers compared to Whiplash
- Malacrino also plays the mafioso Giovanni in the "movie within a movie" — versions 2 and 3 — while his real father Giovanni Malacrino plays the same character in version 1; all three iterations were shot in Cardiff, Wales
- Caitlin Morris said the hardest part of playing Amy was the montage sequences showing her rewriting, describing montages as "so fun to watch and so painful to do" because of rapid costume and emotional changes across five-second moments
- Hanno flagged the central structural risk: each nested version of the mafioso scene must be demonstrably better than the last, or "the entire structure of the film falls apart"
- The film threads in direct-to-camera interviews with working screenwriters — a device that evolved from an earlier concept where Malacrino and Hanno themselves would have been interviewed
Why it matters: The film's conceit hinges on three nested versions of one mafioso scene each visibly improving — Hanno conceded that if any version fails, "the entire structure of the film falls apart." The father-son casting (Giovanni Malacrino Sr. and Luca) doubles down on Bravado's inherited-craft theme.
