Dario Russo- Director, Writer, and Producer for Alrugo Films. We talk to this Aussie about his life, the full release of Italian Spiderman, likely the most racially sensitive take on Spiderman yet, and to round things out, sheep.

Chief Magazine: You're Australian. Italian Spiderman. What’s the idea behind it?

Dario Russo: Well it seemed the world needed a super hero who specialized in drinking coffee, hitting women and smoking...and it seems Italians are good at those things except for the hitting women part, that was our input.

The women are sexy! Do you speak Italian?

I speak Italian that makes my native Italian grandparents laugh at me. I did 5 years of Italian at school but have forgotten all about grammar and how to use it it seems.

So you basically set out to hit the funny/racist/absurd mark?

Well the concept was devised by Alrugo Entertainment, a local bunch of filmmakers including myself, Tait Wilson, David Ashby, Will Spartalis and Boris Repasky. We set out to make a ridiculous and absurd trailer called Italian Spiderman about...well an Italian Spiderman, we were never really trying to be racist though.

I was ball busting. The vintage angle is pretty great... the smoking on film, the clothes, the music and sound...

Smoking is wicked!!! On camera. Not in your face at your favorite dance establishment. Alrugo have been making films together since high school, so we have been developing our film making style for a long time. I graduated from film school last year and as a part of my third year project we got to shoot something on 16mm film. I thought this was a sweet opportunity to get Italian Spiderman to look authentically retro, so we shot the trailer as my third year project. The spider costume was created by our production designer Tait Wilson. if you want to make your own, go buy a red skivvy and draw a spider on it with permanent texta. That's the magic of cinema.

Amazing. Where did you find Franco Francetti, your Italian Spiderman?

He was washed up in a gutter, all boozed. He worked for cigarettes.

And hookah hits.

Damn straight. We have a hookah with THREE hoses in the real movie..damn I gave it away!

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Yeah thats kind of wack that i saw three minutes and theres a REAL movie? I want to see him wrestle the alligators and rubber snakes.  And the goblins. Franco Francetti is a good parallel to Robert Downey Jr starring as Ironman. Junkies are super too!

Well we will be releasing the first part of the full film starting May 22nd. We will be releasing a three minute chunk of the film every week on YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo. All free for the people to drink up.

1.6 million views on YouTube is not too shabby.

Better than Beethoven II

Any of you guys cameo in there?

There may well be snippets of the Alrugo team lurking around in the picture. They were paid in rice.

You're 21, you can do that stuff and its called ingenuity.

In Tibet it's called a Junta

I don't know anything about Tibet except I think Brad Pitt went there once.

He could have, he better have brought guns

Alrugos style is pretty particular... Why the 50s/60s vibe for your stuff?

Alrugo have always loved any other era other than our own.
Our culture now is too indistinct to make films about. For us.

A parody of current film might not be as charming.

You end up with Date Movie...

Ugh, Exactly. Where are you shooting these? Looks like it could be your mom's yard.

In the heady days of Laser Beetles from Venus and the Don Alrugo Thick Skin orange commercial, we were generally limited to paddocks we could trespass into. We have grown since then though. A whole new world of tresspassing.

Artists can't really be law abiding citizens in my opinion.

It is difficult to be true to your art form and abide by the law...but we did a concerning amount of law abiding during this project.