Magazzino Italian Art is pleased to present an interview realized by Domenico Palma, with artist and filmmaker Andrea Mastrovito about his career and process in creating the movie I Am Not Legend.

Andrea Mastrovito’s new film I Am Not Legend builds on the artist’s interest in the genre of horror and his ongoing practice of recombining found elements from films, artworks, literature and music to enlightening results. Using George Romero’s cult classic, and unlicensed, film, Night of the Living Dead as a point of departure, Mastrovito developed a new screenplay composed entirely of quotes from famous films, books and other sources. Using his unique technique of drawing, painting, and physically ripping paper by hand, the artist augmented the film’s original frames to create a completely new story arc. His characters use the words and gestures of others to propel his narrative forward, which Mastrovito likens to how people communicate today via social media and memes – reusing and recycling quotes and images from other sources to comment on their own experiences. I Am Not Legend investigates concepts of identity of our contemporary moment – advanced by the existential threat of zombies at the doorstep. This project is supported by the Italian Council (6th Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

In the interview, Andrea Mastrovito discusses his inspiration in wanting to recreate the classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and what distinguishes his film from the original. Diving deep into his process for creating hand-drawn animation, Mastrovito outlines the labor intensive journey of creating thousands of drawings and how it influences his thinking and production of the work. The interview also elaborated on the film’s concepts of denial and memory, and the cyclical nature these take in recent history, in all of history.