The Most Controversial Movie Director Of All Time Has Died
Ruggero Deodato, director of Cannibal Holocaust, has died at the age of 83.
Controversial film director, Ruggero Deodato has reportedly passed away (via The Sun). Deodato was 83 years of age and no cause of death has been given at this time. Deodato is best known for his film Cannibal Holocaust, which is considered one of the most controversial films of all time.
Along with directing Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato directed over 30 movies as a solo director. He also started his career as an assistant director for Roberto Rossellini and served as an assistant director for the film Django alongside Sergio Corbucci.
Ruggero Deodato’s brutal and controversial works have provided inspiration for several modern directors, with Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, and Oliver Stone being notable examples. Roth has paid homage to Deodato in his own film The Green Inferno and included Deodato as a cameo in his film Hostel II.
To this day, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is considered highly controversial, and the movie even earned him jail time at the time of its release. The 1980 film follows an academic who ventures to the Amazon to discover the fate of a missing documentary crew who sought out a cannibalistic tribe. The film has a ‘found footage’ quality and the recordings found by the academic show the deaths of the documentary crew at the hands of the tribe.
Along with being highly controversial, Cannibal Holocaust is also considered a pioneer in the found footage genre. Ruggero Deodato even utilized a marketing campaign where he convinced the actors in the film to disappear from the public eye for a year to make the film more authentic. The film premiered in Italy in 1980 and the outcry was immediate.
Police seized all copies of Cannibal Holocaust after the premiere and prosecuted Ruggero Deodato for murdering his actors. Deodato was to be sentenced to 30 years of jail, so he called his actors out of hiding to appear in court and avoid his sentence. Deodato received a much shorter four-month jail sentence for charges of obscenity.
Although Ruggero Deodato didn’t kill any humans in the making of Cannibal Holocaust, there were real animals killed in the making of the film. Notable examples from the film included tribe members eating a monkey’s brain and the documentary crew disemboweling a turtle, causing an actor to break down in tears. Deodato maintained that the animals were eaten and not just slaughtered for film scenes.
Cannibal Holocaust remained banned for many years from several countries before finally getting a UK censor certificate in 2001. After a controversial run of films, Ruggero Deodato returned to the world of TV in the 1990s to direct projects like I Ragazzi del Muretto and Padre Speranza. In 2016, Ruggero appeared at the Lucca Film Festival to premiere his film Ballad in Blood.
Ruggero Deodato was born on May 7, 1939, in the commune Potenza in the region of Basilicata. The director and screenwriter was in Rome at the time of his passing. Deodato will be remembered for his contributions to Italian cinema and his influence on controversial tactics in cinema.
