Malcolm McDowell & David Grieco Speak About Evilenko 2004

Malcolm McDowell is Evilenko
by Vital Alessandra

Rome - He was communist and he ate children. Andrej Romanovic Chikatilo was his name, known as "the monster of Rostov", or "the monster of the forest strip". He was a university professor of history and literature in a college. In twelve years, by the end of the 80s, he had killed more than fifty children and adolescents in the former Soviet Union, between Russia and the Ukraine. Then he was captured and executed. The history of one of cruelest serial killer of the 1900's arrives on the screen with Evilenko (opening on the 16th, distributed by Mikado), written and directed from David Grieco. In the role of the pedophile cannibal, is an actor who justifies the interpretation of the Evil is a celebrity: Malcolm McDowell, who played Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
    The story is of the "monster", and a young magistrate in charge of stanarlo (actor Marton Csokas). But above all it is a metaphor. To David Grieco it was enough just to see an image of that man on TV in order for him to fly to Rostov, years ago, and write a book, 'The Communist who ate Children'. It has become his film. "I had identified myself with this Soviet communist intellectual," the director explains, "that sense of his own identity. The history to me seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to tell of the end of communism. And also the neglect of infants. A film, therefore, on the annihilation of personality."
    Evilenko suffers from schizophrenia. He lives with a son who does not see the dark side (in real life Chikatilo had two sons), and whom he feels a level of adoration. He is communist, and wants to die communist. He changes the channel when he sees Gorbachov on TV. "These flags - it explains its small pupils - diffuse the wonderful ideas of the Lenin companion". But by now they are in little to use "the similar" word.
    Therefore as the utopia crumbled, its yields also already shaking psychological scaffolding. He goes to pieces. It kills the idea that the young magistrate had perceived: "Inasmuch as the lunatics asylum are used to lock up the dissidents, the true ones are still all here outside". To the magistrate, the hunting to the man from the deformed smile and the magnetic look will serve in order to discover that heart and brain beyond the scythe and hammer exist. In order to unmask the monster it must enter in his mind. And to comprise that it is intolerable to only think.
    There is blood in the film, but that isn't enough to tell the horror. Nothing from a butcher shop, neither something to that to see with Hannibal Lecter. "Anthony Hopkins has given a great interpretation," says McDowell, "but that one was a psychopath of fantasy, with a sense of the humor. Here more it is complicated." Grieco has intentional made it for three precise reasons: "We have been friends for many years," the director explains, "I consider him an enormous actor and... he costs little! But do not believe that we speak about one 'star performance': Malcolm has lived his own career, without the pretension to wait for a new Clockwork Orange to happen".
    Of that McDowell experience it is a far away memory: "Thirty years have passed, I'm another man. I've had many wives, children, I'm a professional. I never bring my characters home with me. And if you want to talk about someone being a genius in ACO, this label should be given to Anthony Burgess, who wrote the book, not to Stanley Kubrick who merely put it into images."
    Chikatilo was executed in 1994. But Grieco insinuates a doubt. In the novel, and the final scene of the film, that the death sentence was executed in February (before the process of appeal for a long time come to an agreement) to Novocerkassk, a compound of four houses. Not one photo was taken. The next day, the body was shipping to Rostov. But the only qualified prison to perform executions was the penitentiary of Moscow. In the NATO of 1993, Der Spiegel published the news that two institutes of research, European and one American, had offered a huge sum of money for getting Chikatilo alive.
    That man therefore could have been sold? "Beats me", the director says ,"he was an exceptional person, choosing the victims, made themselves to follow from they and, at many years later, he was still able to tell the investigators every detail of his crimes. This is a history that exceeds the fantasy by far. Some think that the son of Chikatilo is a serial killer. This is the first case of a serial killer's son being a serial killer in history."