Pardo 08.08

OFFICIAL LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL GUIDE 2024 DAY 2 8.8.2024 ●

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“The Uphill Battles Are the Ones Worth Fighting”

STACEY SHER Legendary Indie Producer Takes Home the Raimondo Rezzonico Award

Tarsem Talks the Restoration of THE FALL in 4K Klaudia Reynicke on REINAS in Piazza Grande In Conversation: Radu Jude x Edgar Pêra x Christian Ferencz-Flatz Jury Member Tim Blake Nelson Speaks BANG BANG

Bastian Baker: “On stage, I’m always in the moment” Swiss pop maverick Bastian Baker will grace the stage of la Rotonda by la Mobiliare tomorrow night with a solo set that’s as intimate as it is energizing. “It almost feels like I’m a DJ, matching the energy of the crowd and giving them what they want.”

A PRINT OF YOUR HANDS IS IMMORTALIZED ON THE LOCARNO WALK OF FAME. WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS CITY? Locarno is one of my happy places, so I get extra excited every time I play here. Ticino in general is one of my favorite spots on earth. When you’re touring, you pass a lot of places, and at some of them, you want to stay. Locarno is one of those places for me. The last show I had here in 2019 was one of the best I ever did.

YOU’RE PLAYING A SOLO SET AT LA ROTONDA, DOES THAT MAKE IT MORE VULNERABLE AND INTIMATE? Well, it’s intimate, but I try to be smart about it. I’m not coming here just to play ballads. You have to keep the energy up, and I’m used to playing huge venues alone. For example, I opened for Shania Twain in 2019.

I had half an hour to get the crowd going, with just me and my guitar. That usually works out pretty nicely.

SINCE WE’RE AT A FILM FESTIVAL, CAN YOU SHARE A FILM THAT MADE A HUGE IMPRESSION ON YOU? I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but when I watched Titanic for the first time, it was one of those traumatizing experiences. I had never seen a film in which a catastrophe was so vividly experienced. I was completely overwhelmed, it felt like I was there, too.

La Mobiliare is Main Partner of the Locarno Film Festival mobiliare.ch/locarnofestival

DO YOU DRAW INSPIRATION FROM FILMS WHEN WRITING MUSIC? Absolutely! I have a very specific technique of songwriting that I really like. When I watch something that I find beautiful or inspiring, I’ll mute the sound and try writing the soundtrack to it. A couple of my songs have been written using that technique. Also, one of the songs from my first album is called “Nobody Should Die Alone”. I wrote it after walking into the living room at my family’s house and seeing my sisters watching the series One Tree Hill. I overheard a character saying that line and just immediately went back to my room to write that song.

IF YOU COULD PICK A TYPE OF FILM TO DO THE MUSIC FOR, WHAT WOULD IT BE? One of my favorite composers is Hans Zimmer. I think this guy is just ridiculously good. So, if I were to score a film, I would definitely be the guy in a room with a philharmonic orchestra, leading those strings to an explosion of emotions. That would definitely be my style.

SUSTAINABILITY IS AN IMPORTANT SUBJECT AT LOCARNO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR YOU AS A POPULAR MUSICIAN TO WORK IN A SUSTAINABLE WAY? I think the best part about the whole sustainability conversation right now is the improvements that are resulting from it. If you see what they do at Coldplay shows, where parts of the lightshow are literally powered by the energy of people jumping and dancing in the venue, that just amazes me.

ESTABLISHING SHOTS Giona A. Nazzaro

THU/GIO 8

HIGHLIGHTS PIAZZA GRANDE 21:30 REINAS by Klaudia Reynicke 105’ | o.v. Spanish | s.t. English, German Piazza Grande

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Il cinema è una questione di immagini immesse nel tempo che creano una traccia. Una “cosa” è stata vista, filmata (registrata) e quindi esiste. Quando si studiava cinema, questa relazione fondamentale era identificata come “il patto ontologico”.

Come dire che il cinema esiste perché vede e trasmette. Oggi questa relazione essenziale del cinema va ripensata. Il digitale prima, ossia l’immagine di sintesi, quella che non deve essere vista per esistere, e le cosiddette intelligenze artificiali odierne, rimettono in discussione il nostro rapporto con le immagini. Il cinema, o meglio ciò che abbiamo imparato a conoscere come “il cinema”, oggi si trova a un bivio. E a questo bivio troviamo, per esempio, cineasti, o meglio filosofi dell’immagine in

WHAT’S ON TODAY

movimento, come Edgar Pêra che esplorano con audacia territori completamente nuovi. Il Locarno Film Festival è anche questo: rimettere tutto in discussione. Invitare il futuro a svelarsi, leggere – meglio: imparare a leggere – la corrispondenza telepatica (mai esistita, sottolineamolo…) fra Fernando Pessoa e H.P. Lovecraft. A volte il futuro ci spaventa, ma forse si tratta solo – per modo di dire… – di cambiare approccio. Imparare a giocare con il futuro, quindi. Sfidarlo sui suoi stessi giochi. Il Locarno Film Festival oggi è anche questo. E siamo solo all’inizio.

Buon cinema, ci si vede come sempre in Piazza Grande!

THE FALL (RESTORED CUT) by Tarsem 119’ | o.v. English | s.t. French Piazza Grande – SECOND SCREENING CONCORSO INTERNAZIONALE 14:00 Palexpo (FEVI) SALVE MARIA by Mar Coll 111’ | o.v. Spanish, Catalan | s.t. English, French 16:45

Palexpo (FEVI) LA MORT VIENDRA by Christoph Hochhäusler 101’ | o.v. French | s.t. English, Italian

10:30

Forum @Spazio Cinema CONVERSATION WITH MÉLANIE LAURENT & GUILLAUME CANET Excellence Award Davide Campari

14:00

GranRex MON GARÇON by Christian Carion 84’ I o.v. French Histoire(s) du Cinéma Excellence Award Davide Campari Mélanie Laurent & Guillaume Canet

17:15

GranRex ERIN BROCKOVICH by Steven Soderbergh 131’ | o.v. English | s.t. German, French Histoire(s) du Cinéma Raimondo Rezzonico Award Stacey Sher

RETROSPETTIVA 09:30 GranRex WALL STREET by Roy William Neill 68’ | o.v. English 11:30

GranRex MAN’S CASTLE by Frank Borzage 79’ | o.v. English

20:15

GranRex LET US LIVE by John Brahm 68’ | o.v. English

22:00

GranRex THE TALK OF THE TOWN by George Stevens 118’ | o.v. English

FUORI CONCORSO 11:00 La Sala BANG BANG by Vincent Grashaw 103’ | o.v. English | s.t. French 15:45

Teatro Kursaal DRAGON DILATATION by Bertrand Mandico 114’ | o.v. French, English, Japanese | s.t.English

18:45

Teatro Kursaal CARTAS TELEPÁTICAS by Edgar Pêra 70’ | o.v. English | s.t. French

14:30

La Sala LA FILLE QUI EXPLOSE by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel 19’ | o.v. French | s.t. English, Italian PARDI DI DOMANI – Concorso Corti d’Autore.

21:15

PalaCinema 2 SPECIAL EVENT: LOCARNO RESIDENCY AND SPRING ACADEMY Passo a due, Body of Water (Free admission)

5,500 people came together beneath the Piazza Grande screen for the Prefestival world premiere of Paolo Cognetti’s Fiore Mio. From above: Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press, Alessandro de Bon

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Christopher Small LEAD EDITOR: Leonardo Goi DEPUTY EDITORS: Hugo Emmerzael, Maria Giovanna Vagenas, Keva York STAFF WRITERS: Laurine Chiarini, Savina Petkova CONTRIBUTORS: Mathilde Henrot, Christina Newland, Julia Scrive-Loyer TRANSLATORS: Tessa Cattaneo, Anna Rusconi

PROGRAM (EN)

PROGRAMMA (IT)

LOCARNO BRAND, EDITORIAL & MEDIA: Oliver Osborne DESIGN: Joshua Althaus, Nadine Curanz, Alex Furgiuele PHOTOGRAPHERS: Elia Bianchi, Julie Mucchiut, Ti-Press COVER PHOTO: Davide Padovan PARTNERSHIPS: Marco Cantergiani, Laura Heggemann, Nicolò Martire, Fabienne Merlet CROSSWORD DESIGNER: Nicholas Henriquez

MORNING

AFTERNOON

EVENING

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31°

Forecast accurate as of previous evening

Stacey Sher

Le battaglie più difficili sono quelle che vale la pena combattere di Christopher Small tradotto da Tessa Cattaneo

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tacey Sher è stata la produttrice di alcuni dei film più iconici degli anni Novanta e Duemila. Tra le personalità con le quali ha collaborato si annoverano Quentin Tarantino, Ben Stiller, Steven Soderbergh, Danny DeVito, George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson. Oggi è a Locarno per ricevere il Raimondo Rezzonico Award, assegnatole per i traguardi raggiunti in quanto produttrice visionaria. L’abbiamo incontrata per parlare della sua vita trascorsa nel mondo del cinema.

Christopher Small: Agli Academy Awards di quest’anno lo sceneggiatore Cord Jefferson, reduce della sua vittoria con American Fiction (2023), ha implorato Hollywood di prendere rischi, di girare, per esempio, 20 film da 10 milioni di dollari o, ancor meglio, 50 da 4 milioni invece di spendere 200 milioni per un singolo blockbuster.

Penso che quest’affermazione sia un buon punto di partenza per parlare della tua carriera.

Stacey Sher: Sì, le sue parole sono di grande ispirazione, ma mi piacerebbe estendere la sfida anche ai registi. Sono i cineasti emergenti a rinnovare il business dopotutto – nuove voci, nuovi punti di vista – e sono loro a portare un nuovo pubblico. Pensiamo solo ad A24 e a come sia diventato un brand che conta. O a quanto fatto da Universal quest’anno. Ha vinto miglior film con una pellicola d’autore, Oppenheimer (2023), un film che inaspettatamente ha fatto quasi un miliardo di incassi, per non parlare di tutti gli altri da loro prodotti, l’uno sempre diverso dall’altro. Non sto cercando di sminuire i film di supereroi, ma per un certo periodo di tempo abbiamo visto registi passare da film indie a film di supereroi, e poi più nulla. Bisogna prendere rischi. Citando il grande William Goldman: “Nessuno sa niente.” Chi avrebbe mai potuto predire lo scorso anno che un film da 100 milioni di dollari sul padre della bomba atomica o l’adattamento cinematografico della bambola Barbie (qualcosa che la gente cerca di fare da 25 anni) sarebbero diventati dei grandissimi successi? Povere creature!

(Poor Things, 2023) ha incassato 100 milioni di dollari.

I registi devono essere coraggiosi nell’esprimere l’originalità delle loro voci.

CS: Sono curioso di sapere come tu, una produttrice, vivi con l’incertezza del prendere rischi. L’incertezza sembra essere il tuo modus operandi.

SS: Ascolta, nessuno vuole fare un film che non funzioni creativamente o non abbia successo finanziario. Sono cresciuta con i grandi registi degli anni Settanta – cineasti che credevano nell’emozionare più persone possibili, ma anche nel raccontare storie con significati profondi, perfino nei contesti di genere. Io e i miei partner, Michael Shamberg e Danny DeVito, per la nostra compagnia Jersey Films, abbiamo parlato con molti registi ma quelli con cui alla fine abbiamo deciso di collaborare – come Quentin Tarantino o Steven Soderbergh – erano interessati a fare proprio questo: raccontare una storia unica con una voce originale e toccare il maggior numero di persone possibile.

CS: Sembra che, come produttrice, ti sia sempre trovata a vivere dei momenti di cambiamento dell’industria. Hai lavorato con molti registi ora iconici per i loro primi o secondi film, piccole pellicole che hanno completamente trasformato il territorio cinematografico. Mi piacerebbe sapere la tua opinione a riguardo, e se pensi che ci troviamo ora ad un punto di svolta.

SS: Da quando ho cominciato a lavorare nell’industria cinematografica la gente mi dice: “Te lo sei persa. Ti sei persa i bei vecchi tempi di Hollywood”. E anche a causa di quelle parole mi è sempre sembrato di star rincorrendo questa fantomatica età dell’oro. Ma non stavo pensando ad alcun tipo di rivoluzione quando, da ragazzina, mi sono intrufolata a vedere i film vietati ai minori di Hal Ashby o Martin Scorsese. La mia carriera non ha davvero un senso compiuto a meno che tu non la guardi in retrospettiva; è sempre stata un pò sconclusionata.

Mi è sempre stato detto che sarebbe stato più facile fare commedie romantiche o film d’azione, ma non ho seguito questo consiglio. Pure Django Unchained (2012), il film indie con il più grande budget mai girato – anche quello non era certo un successo assicurato per le persone che ci stavano lavorando. C’era chi diceva che quel genere di film non avrebbe funzionato, chi invece che l’ambientazione era rischiosa e via dicendo. L’unica vera certezza era Quentin. Ma tutti noi ci abbiamo creduto e abbiamo creduto in ogni sua singola parte, sapevamo che sarebbe stato un grande successo. Un altro esempio è Contagion (2011): è stato popolare alla sua uscita, ma ha assunto un nuovo significato nel contesto della pandemia, quando è diventato il film più visto al mondo. Le vere recensioni per film come i miei sono scritte solo dopo 10, 15, o 20 anni dopo la loro uscita.

CS: Vorrei che tu ci parlassi dei tuoi primi mentori, come Debora Hill, con la quale hai lavorato per La leggenda del re pescatore (The Fisher King, 1991), di Terry Gilliam’s, e che cosa ha significato, per te, in quanto femminista, cominciare a lavorare in quel momento storico.

SS: Debra era eccezionale, mi manca ogni giorno. Mi ha insegnato che non esistono compiti troppo piccoli o troppo grandi per un produttore, come portare miele ed acqua calda a un attore per proteggerne la voce. Deve essere fatto. Facciamo tutti parte della stessa squadra sul set mentre cerchiamo di creare qualcosa di straordinario e di sopravvivere fino alla fine della giornata. È stata una lezione indispensabile e che ancora oggi porto con me. Il cruccio della mia carriera è che talvolta ho cercato di fare le cose prima del tempo. Per esempio, il concentrarmi su film con protagoniste donne è stata una battaglia. Ho dovuto tracciare il mio cammino, e magari è stato anche grazie all’esempio di Debora o della grande Polly Platt, o di Glae Anne Hurd o di Kathleen Kennedy che ho potuto farlo. A quei tempi non c’erano registe donne. Più Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow e Celine Song abbiamo, più bambine penseranno: “Quello è un lavoro che potrei fare”.

CS: Una delle prime cose che hai fatto come produttrice è stata presentare la sceneggiatura di Pulp Fiction (1994) di Tarantino ai tuoi partner della Jersey Films, ancor prima che Le iene (Reservoir Dogs, 1992) fosse presentato al Sundance.

SS: È divertente pensarci ora: avevo l’abitudine di leggere una colonna di Variety e di Hollywood Reporter nella quale erano riportati film nelle prime fasi di produzione. Era stata pensata affinché le persone potessero mandare il loro curriculum per lavorare sui set. Ho visto un film con un cast incredibile e un regista sconosciuto, ho as-

solutamente dovuto reperire e leggere la sceneggiatura – ed è così che ho conosciuto Le iene. C’erano Harvey Keitel e tante altre persone incredibili legate al progetto. Conoscevo Lawrence Bender, il produttore, ma non avevo ancora incontrato Quentin. Alla fine una sera il coinquilino di Lawrence si è rivolto a me e mi ha detto: “Sto per rendere la tua notte indimenticabile: ti presento Quentin Tarantino”. Ci siamo conosciuti, amavamo gli stessi film, conoscevamo le stesse cose, avevamo sensibilità simili…e alla Jersey Films avevamo la flessibilità di poter sottoscrivere un contratto alla cieca per il secondo film di Quentin. Questo era tutto quello che sapevamo: tre storie che sono una sola storia; si intitola Pulp Fiction; è ambientato a L.A.. E con queste informazioni abbiamo firmato. Ciò che Danny [DeVito] ha potuto garantire, grazie alla sua influenza come star e regista, era il final cut. Quello era di grande attrattiva per un regista come Tarantino. Dopo Le iene a Cannes lui e Roger Avary si sono messi a lavorare intensamente alla sceneggiatura. La comunità di cineasti a quell’epoca era forte – quello un po’ si è perso.

CS: Puoi parlare del momento in cui realizzi che un film come Pulp Fiction o Erin Brockovich - Forte come la verità (Erin Brockovich, 2000) sta prendendo forma e ti rendi conto che potresti avere tra le mani qualcosa di speciale, qualcosa di iconico?

SS: Beh, non ho mai pensato a quel modo, se lo fai sei in pericolo. Trovo una storia che amo e la seguo fino alla fine, quando si tratta di un film. Non importa quanto improbabile sia. Abbiamo incontrato la vera Erin Brockovich grazie a Carla, la moglie di Michael Shamberg. Per nostra fortuna quando il chiropratico le ha detto “Ho una paziente la cui storia potrebbe diventare un film incredibile”, non ha risposto “Sisì, certo”, ma ha incontrato Erin e le ha dato ascolto. Poi ha detto a Michael che ha sentito questa storia incredibile, che Julia Roberts un giorno l’avrebbe interpretata, che avrebbe vinto un Oscar e così via. Michael rispose “Non convincerai mai Julia Roberts ad interpretare un ruolo come quello”, ma Carla non si è arresa: me l’ha proposta e io me ne sono innamorata. Dicevamo sempre che è Rocky (1976) in minigonna. Anche in quel caso siamo riusciti a firmare un contratto alla cieca e ad opzionare i diritti alla storia di Erin. A quei tempi, per come gli studios funzionavano allora, una compagnia come la nostra aveva fondi a sufficienza per dedicarsi a qualche progetto più rischioso. Abbiamo corso rischi con Pulp Fiction o Erin Brockovich - Forte come la verità, o più tardi con World Trade Center (2006), l’ultimo film a cui ho lavorato con Debra Hill, o con hits improbabili come Due sballati al college (How High, 2001) o La mia vita a Garden State (Garden State, 2004). Non sono state scelte ovvie quando ancora erano su carta, sono diventati grandi successi solo più tardi. Quando ho proposto Erin Brockovich - Forte come la verità a Steven Soderbergh la sua prima riposta è stata “È un’idea terribile per un film”, ma non ci siamo arrese e alla fine lo abbiamo convinto. Tutti ci dicevano: “Nessuno vorrà vedere il vostro film”, o ancora “Julia è la più grande star del mondo, non farà mai un film come questo”. Abbiamo continuato a lavorarci e, alla fine, beh, ha funzionato.

CS: Lo hai scelto come tuo tributo qui a Locarno, potresti parlarci di come Django Unchained è stato prodotto, soprattutto considerato il fatto che, come hai detto tu, è stata una gigantesca produzione indipendente?

SS: Certo. Ricordo di aver visitato un lotto di riprese per la sequenza finale di Candyland, una scena molto difficile da girare per Columbia, il nostro partner internazionale per il film. Quando è cominciata la distruzione di Candyland, con quelle enormi esplosioni, ero sorpresa che nessuno avesse accennato un “ooooh” o “aaaaah”. E poi ho realizzato che è perché sono abituati ad effetti speciali non realistici. Era stata una giornata talmente stressante sul set, c’erano stati dei lampi nei campi e non puoi assolutamente preparare degli esplosivi quando ci sono i lampi. C’erano due camere ed enormi gru per sostenere luci gigantesche. Quentin e Bob [Richardson, il cinematografo] erano in una fossa ricoperta di plexiglas. Ero preoccupata che fossero troppo vicini alle esplosioni, che le fiamme fossero troppo calde e che quindi le gru fossero state compromesse e che sarebbero crollate su di loro. Un incubo. Giro il lotto di riprese e quelli della Columbia dicono solo “Oh cool”. [ride] CS: Anche i festival hanno giocato un ruolo decisivo nel successo avuto da molti dei film da te prodotti. Cosa significa per te presentare un film ad un festival ed essere riconosciuta con un premio come il Raimondo Rezzonico Award?

SS: Come è stato detto agli Oscar: i film generano memorie e le memorie fanno la storia. Anche se Django è un western mostra l’orrore della storia americana in un modo che non puoi ignorare perché è coinvolgente. O Erin - Forte come la verità, che ci ricorda che le grandi aziende non hanno sempre il nostro interesse a cuore. I festival di film sono trampolini di lancio per i registi. Girando il mondo con Le iene, Quentin, per esempio, ha creato relazioni con il pubblico internazionale e con i giornalisti, i suoi primi sostenitori, cosa che ci ha aiutati per Pulp Fiction ed altri film. Il pubblico dei festival – che sia Locarno, Sundance, Cannes, Toronto o Berlino – è incredibilmente importante. Per quanto riguarda il premio invece mi torna in mente una storia di quando stavo creando Get Shorty (1995). La nostra costumista era molto legata a Neil Young, un giorno eravamo in giro a fare compere per il film quando mi disse “Devo passare da Neil per consegnarli il completo per il Lifetime Achievement Award che riceverà stasera”. Ero una grande fan ed impaziente di incontrarlo. Quando gli chiesi del premio, lui mi rispose, “Rimettimi al lavoro – non sono ancora pronto”.

PARDO

Più Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow e Celine Song abbiamo, più bambine penseranno: ‘Quello è un lavoro che potrei fare’.

READ IN ENGLISH

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The Fall in 4K:

All images from The Fall (2006)

TARSEM’s Magical Mystery Tour

Ahead of tonight’s Piazza Grande premiere of The Fall’s glorious 4K glow-up, Pardo spoke to the infectiously effusive director Tarsem about the manipulative art of storytelling, impossible situations, and how not to get a movie financed.

by Keva York If Andrei Tarkovsky made The Wizard of Oz” – that’s how David Fincher summed up his friend Tarsem’s globe-spanning, decades-in-the-making magnum opus, The Fall (2006). Maybe it’s more Alejandro Jodorowsky than Tarkovsky, but, most importantly, it’s all Tarsem. Born in Punjab, India, Tarsem kick-started his career with a string of wildly successful music videos and commercials – from R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (1991) to Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” (1992) to that infamous Coliseum-set Pepsi ad (2004) in which a gladiator-garbed Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Pink were pitted against Emperor Enrique Inglesias.

Tarsem made his divisive film debut with The Cell (2000), a hundred-million-dollar fantasy thriller about an experimental psychologist – played by Jennifer Lopez – who must infiltrate the mind of a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio). But The Fall was always on his mind – a truly Sisyphean project, because of the multiplicity of far-flung shooting locales and the difficulty of finding the right unknown child to play the lead, whose imagination would actually help shape the plot. He found his star in Catinca Untaru: she plays Alexandria, who forms a friendship with Hollywood stuntman Roy (Lee Pace) while both are stuck in hospital. Roy regales the girl with a fantastical, freeform story – set against a series of stunning landscapes and landmarks – but what initially seems like paternal affection reveals itself to be clouded with something darker.

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LOCARNO77

Keva York: The Fall was your second feature. You worked on it for decades; you’ve described it as your baby. Looking back, almost 20 years and a handful of films later, how have your feelings about it evolved?

Tarsem: Actually, even when I made it, I felt kind of the same way. I always believed that your ticket to immortality is in your genes and your memes, as it was put by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker (1986). Now, I have a son, but probably the thing that most carries my genes and memes is this personal film that I made so many years ago. I was obsessed with the project; I had to get it out of my system, because it was stopping me from doing any other work. Everybody in advertising has a pet project that they think they’ll put their money into, and instead they just become old people with money who never made that film. My brother [Ajit Singh, The Fall’s executive producer] said, “Are you going to be that guy?” But I finally found the girl [Catinca Untaru] and so I said, “We’ll make it right now.” While I was putting together the 4K restoration, I was close to doing a new project, a very visual film with a very cool script called Butterfly. But the moment I saw The Fall again, I just thought, “I blew my wad on this film” – so I walked away from Butterfly. Everything and the kitchen sink ended up in The Fall – and I’d given myself the license to do that, by having the little girl’s imagination dictate the story.

it was being solved by James Bond in collusion with Daaku Man Singh, who’s like an Indian Robin Hood character. We knew that there was something about a “Watergate” going on, something about the American president – and it felt so visceral to us. The story would just continue every Saturday. Then when we’d come back next week, she would go, “Where was I?” and we would look at her, like, “As if you don’t remember, it was the biggest cliffhanger in the world!” And then we realized that she was literally making it up. She could see these 10-year-olds, and to tell the story all she had to do was look at our body language – we were so eager and so transparent. I realized later on, there’s nothing more transparent than a child’s body language.

Everybody complains that studios show early versions of movies to test audiences and take notes – but that concept was completely normal long before cinema. If you go to a street in Morocco or India, there the audience is as much the author as the person telling the story.

When you go to a studio to pitch a movie and you see the person getting bored and looking at their texts or something, you introduce a crazy person who comes in and shoots everybody; you pick up the pace. Then, when you’ve got them and they’re leaning forward, you can take your time and milk it.

KY: I’m also curious about the religious iconography you use, there’s a lot of – T: You’re gonna say “spirituality”. Everybody says that to me!

I’ve been an atheist since my early teens, Darwin completely opened the universe for me. The imagery that I use, I go, “This is what you like, let me think about that.”

It’s calculating, manipulative. I’ve never understood what the word “spirituality” means. I don’t meditate. I just play a lot of chess, watch a lot of porn – I watch whatever shit’s in front of me, any cop show, anything, a khichdi of everything.

KY: Let’s go back to the film’s origins. I think no one who’s seen The Fall would guess that it’s an adaptation, but it’s actually based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie, Yo Ho Ho. T: It is! I saw it at a film festival in India – the first festival I went to. Somehow, the nutshell of the story stayed in my head. Twenty-five years later, I said, “You know what, let’s get the rights.” I got them, never watched the original film again. Now I look at it and I see that it’s the same and completely different. As the quote goes, originality is the art of concealing your source. With that kernel of an idea, I started looking for locations – which took about 16 years. I kept shooting commercials and making contacts, saying, “I’ll come back.” Basically, I would write scenes, but I didn’t really know how to interweave them. That’s perhaps why the film seems a bit indulgent – I put the cart ahead of the donkey. Whenever I would do a commercial – Scotland, Ireland, India, Russia, anywhere – I would tell somebody, “Hey, just take a camera, go to a school, tell a story to the kids. Just capture them in a wide-angle shot, and I’ll find the child. Boy or girl, I don’t care.” That took forever. I had just done The Cell when my girlfriend dumped me, and my whole world fell apart. I was thinking, “What exactly am I saving this money for?” And then, when I was shooting a commercial in Romania – I had actually gotten stuck there because my assistant lost my passport – I saw the girl.

KY: Lucky they lost the passport, then!

T: That lost passport really cost me, but it was worth it. I called my brother and said, “Sell everything, you’re going on a magical mystery tour. I don’t know where it will end.”

David Fincher had introduced me to financiers, but I mean, I had nothing to show them. There was a very basic screenplay structure, and the box that the little girl carries around. So I’d tell them the story through her box: “These are the things she’ll have in her box.”

And that’s no way to get a movie financed.

KY: In the range of locations, I see a connection to the video you made for the Deep Forest track “Sweet Lullaby”, back in 1992.

T: That was actually the dry run. There was another 10 years where I was doing commercials and looking for locations. Even when we started the movie, there were still a lot of locations left. Pepsi would say to me, “Here’s a commercial,” and I would say, “Okay, I want to do it in this place.” So I would do the commercial, and then do the movie parts in that location. The actors were kind of on hold. Fortunately, there was nobody that famous in the film, so we were flexible.

KY: Were any of the locations particularly difficult to get access to?

T: Every one of them! We almost got pelted with stones once.

We had religious riots three times. I refused to give up.

They found me alternatives, I just said “No, this is it.”

Even Pangon Lake – which nobody had shot before, it’s high in the Himalayas – when we went up there, there was nothing. Now they’ve shot so many Bollywood films there, there are whole campsites up there. Whole industries got built because the right people saw the film and realized that the reason nobody shoots there was just that it’s difficult to get there. But that was really my brief – I said, “Find me impossible situations and we’ll make it work.”

KY: These very beautiful, far-flung locations are a large part of what makes the film so striking. Can you speak to your love of visual storytelling?

T: For 10 years growing up, I was in a boarding school in the Himalayas, and my parents were in Iran. Every time we were snowed in, I’d go visit them. I saw a lot of Iranian television, but I didn’t speak the language well enough to understand, so I always took it to mean whatever I wanted. Back at school, every Saturday was a half day and we had to tell stories – and I would be the guy who tells the stories, because I had been “abroad” and seen a lot more movies and television than them. But my stories were so bizarrely off. Now, my friends make fun of me about it, but they made complete sense at the time. I don’t know if you’ve seen the TV series Get Smart, where the guy has a telephone in his shoe. It’s a comedy, a parody of spy movies – but in Iran, the laugh track was taken out and it was dubbed in Persian. I didn’t realize it was a spoof. For an Indian, a guy having a phone in his shoe is not over the top at all. On Saturdays, our teacher would also tell us stories. She would take current events and mix them up with mythology, with whatever; I remember this story about the Watergate scandal, and

T: It started officially with The Cell, but me and my classmate Nico [Soultanakis, associate producer on The Cell; co-writer and producer on The Fall] used to rip off Eiko’s work all the time when we were in school. We would go to the library and see the things that she was doing – at that time, she was directing commercials in Japan. Then she did the production design and the clothes for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which we loved. Me and Nico were just in awe of her.

And then, unfortunately for us, she exploded quite big after doing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993); she won an Academy Award and everything. So, for The Cell, I just said, “This is the woman I want.” We met and it was love at first sight.

For every film we did, she would come camp out in my place. She would come to the house and just throw everything on the floor. So, to a certain extent, that’s why the work ended up being even more “cart ahead of the donkey” – because I would start with those visuals and say, “How do we get them into that shitty story?” A lot of the time, you tell the people you’re working with, “Try to have the unlimited imagination of a child. Think outside the box.” Eiko never understood what a box was.

She just was so left-field, you had to rein her in. Like, “Eiko, help me here, people actually need to walk in these clothes.”

KY: But it’s not only religious imagery that you make use of, there’s also a lot of stuff from myths and legends.

T: Yes, because they’re good stories, and should be appreciated as such – and we should be worshipping the people who wrote them, not the characters in them. That’s what I’ve always claimed. When you look at the Ramayana, those characters have become gods to people, living gods; meanwhile, you should be worshipping Valmiki, the guy who wrote the Ramayana.

KY: There’s a kind of Jorge Luis Borges quality to the film in the way that it rewrites itself as it goes.

T: My favorite writer in the world! I’ve always wanted to adapt The Secret Miracle (1943). Unfortunately, I’m not really a poetry fan. He’s done a lot for poetry; his poetry does nothing for me. But his stories! They’re beyond poetry to me. They’re so Escheresque-ly complicated, I love them.

KY: When it came out, The Fall divided critics.

T: I’ve never done a movie that was critically beloved, ever.

That means nothing. My favorite film, one of the best of that decade, is Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), and it’s below 50 percent on the Tomatometer. What I love about that is it usually means that it’s polarizing. People love it or hate it – and that’s okay with me.

KY: And a 90 percent score can just mean that 90 percent of people think it’s ‘okay’, which is also not very inspiring.

T: Yeah, when everyone gives it a six out of 10, that makes it 100 percent. OK, so it didn’t offend anybody. The good news with The Cell and The Fall is that now, the older critics who saw it and hated it, they’re all dead and gone – Thank you! [salutes] – and a younger generation has grown up and has completely new values and they’ve become critics.

KY: It debuted at Toronto, and it got a negative review in Variety. As I understand it, that pretty much nixed its festival run.

T: Completely. The funny thing is that two years later, Roger Ebert saw it, and he gave it the best review. Ebert always used to go to Toronto, but that particular year, he got cancer and he wasn’t there. He had really loved The Cell, and The Cell had the same problem, where people really hated it – but Ebert had put it in the 10 best films of the year. But when those guys nixed it, all the buyers, everybody, left. Whoever gave me that review in Variety, I hope they died a horrible death. I hope they suffered.

KY: The Fall’s having its comeback, I don’t know if you need to go full Vincent Gallo…

T: Yeah, it’s fine. It’s really quite incredible – after all those years, suddenly everywhere I go, people ask me, “How can we see The Fall? Or The Cell?” With The Fall, nobody has been able to show it, but now I can say, “Wait until after Locarno this year, it will be available.” I was touring around with my last film Dear Jassi (2023) and everybody would bring up The Fall. “Jeez, okay, maybe it’s time.” And then MUBI and Locarno approached me and I realized it’s the perfect time for a 4K release. We did it properly.

KY: I also wanted to ask you about the costumes, which are so important to the film’s look and feel. They were designed by Eiko Ishioka, who worked on all four of the features you made before her death in 2012. Can you tell me about that relationship?

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KY: For a film this grand in scale, I can’t think of a better venue than the Piazza Grande.

T: I’m so excited. I’ve been to Switzerland, I’ve shot there, but I’ve never been to Locarno. Apart from a couple of things I did for The Fall, I’ve never really been to festivals.

Because of Dear Jassi, I’ve been doing the rounds and I’m really loving it – mostly now because they like my baby. It’s hard to go to festivals when they tell you that your baby’s ugly. The Fall was that. I told myself “Yeah, my baby’s ugly and it smells but it’s mine.” It will be a really cathartic experience for me, after putting everything into this film, for the people to finally say, “Yes, your baby still smells but it’s beautiful.”

I called my brother and said, ‘Sell everything, you’re going on a magical mystery tour.

I don’t know where it will end.’ ◼ The Fall (Restored Cut) screens

tonight at the Piazza Grande after the 21:30 screening of Klaudia Reynicke’s Reinas

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CRITICS ACADEMY x RETROSPETTIVA

MAN’S CASTLE

By Katarina Docalovich

None of the characters in Frank Borzage’s Pre-Code Romance Man’s Castle utter the words “Great Depression,” but neither do they know where their next meals will come from most of the time. Bill (Spencer Tracy) meets Trina (Loretta Young) while out feeding popcorn to pigeons on a bench in Central Park. It’s not Bill that Trina is interested in, but the popcorn he’s tossing to the ground, as she’s not eaten in two days. Right off the bat, Borzage’s masterful blend of melodramatic romance and frankness about American poverty is apparent in every frame.

An even thornier question emerges: would Trina be better off on her own? It’s difficult not to register some level of cognitive dissonance. Bill and Trina share plenty of sweet lightness, and the chemistry between real life paramours Young and Tracy is undeniably swoon-worthy. These moments are somewhat tarnished when Bill threatens to sock Trina in the jaw in virtually every other scene. For a poor, unemployed woman in America, the two options are evidently to stay in an abusive relationship, or to starve on the streets.

After dining and dashing at a posh restaurant, Bill takes Trina back to his shack in a riverside Hooverville, which sure looks like a castle compared to the shantytowns that populate lower Manhattan in 2024 Here, we meet Bill’s neighbors: the down-and-out Bragg (Arthur Hohl), whose dark side is barely veiled, argues with the neighborhood drunkard Flossie (Marjorie Rambeau) over – what else? – money. “Don’t give her the two bucks, Bill, she’ll only spend it on booze!”

Bragg whines, to which Bill responds, “That’s her business.”

Trina is lucky to have Flossie looking out for her. Flossie may drink more than the whole lot put together, but her sight is the clearest, and her solidarity with Trina is just as touching as the central romance. When Trina insists that Bill is different from all the rest of the “bindlestiffs” out there, Flossie tells her the only way to keep a guy like Bill in one place is to send him to jail. It’s not that Flossie is cynical, she’s just experienced enough to know what happens to a girl when she trusts an unemployed guy with a noted habit of splitting, solely on the basis of his “personality.” At the same time, Flossie is intelligent enough to know that there’s no stopping a woman in love from standing by her man, no matter how much of a fool he is. And while it’s romantic to believe that love conquers all, it’s ultimately Flossie’s final sacrifice that allows the lovers’ happiness to thrive, not fuzzy feelings.

Trina soon moves into Bill’s castle, working hard to cook and clean for him, despite Bill’s assurances that he’s prepared to leave her anytime. Trina doesn’t even bat an eyelash when he carries on an affair with a blonde singer named Fay La Rue (Glenda Farrell), who promises to fund Bill’s international travels. Still, he’s head over heels for Trina. The central question of Man’s Castle becomes whether Bill will stay with Trina or abandon her, and later their unborn child, by way of hopping on the next train. This question is accentuated by offscreen train whistles, constantly reminding Trina of what she stands to lose.

“The unemployment situations got nothing to do with women,” Bill offhandedly remarks to Trina during their recession meet cute, as if Trina’s rumbling stomach is somehow disconnected from the Depression-era unemployment numbers. Trina is far too sweet, and maybe too famished, to point out the ob-

Emerging talents are the Locarno Film Festival’s lifeblood – 8

vious: the unemployment situation affects everyone below the poverty line, regardless of gender. It’s only once Bill is able to see Trina as his equal in his economic struggle that the riches of romantic love finally become theirs to behold.

Man’s Castle was cut down by roughly eight minutes and re-released by Columbia Pictures in 1938 to boost Spencer Tracy’s burgeoning stardom, but within the limits of the Hays Code, creating the version you may have seen on TCM. The new restoration, which will play in Locarno, revives Borzage’s original vision, which includes skinny dipping and hints of abortion. Ninety plus years later, Man’s Castle still has the power to both provoke prickly conversations about class and pull on our heartstrings.

© 1933, renewed 1981 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

See the full program here

KATARINA DOCALOVICH is a participant in the Locarno Critics Academy, the Festival’s workshop that prepares emerging critics for the world of film festivals and professional writing about cinema.

◼ Man’s Castle screens today, 8.8 at 11:30 at GranRex

From the Pardi di Domani, the shorts film competition where important voices find their first expression alongside established filmmakers, to the Locarno Residency, sponsored by Swiss Life, which provides vital support and hands-on expertise to emerging filmmakers to develop their first feature film.

During the Festival, this youthful spirit finds a home at the Swiss Life Lounge, a convenient point of social exchange

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and mid-festival relaxation located near L’Altra Sala, La Sala, and the Palexpo (FEVI).

This year, the three filmmakers to participate in the Residency – selected by an expert jury of industry professionals from among 10 shortlisted candidates – will be announced at a ceremony at the Swiss Life Lounge on August 9 at 19:15.

The Grand Prize from last year’s Residency will also be awarded at the same ceremony.

Cinema in piazza piazza affari?

Qualunque sia il luogo di vostro interesse, noi sosteniamo chiunque desideri una consulenza previdenziale e finanziaria personalizzata.

Per una vita in piena libertà di scelta.

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10.06.2024 12:08:35

la cultura

in prima fila

Emozioni uniche al Locarno Film Festival con la Posta.

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04.06.2024 18:19:35

HIGHLIGHTS FROM TODAY’S PROGRAM

Dragon Dilatation

PARDI DI DOMANI

The Map and the Territory

by Keva York

Images: ©Bertrand Mandico

by Eddie Bertozzi SELECTION COMMITEE

Salve Maria

by Laurine Chiarini

Stand on a ledge, a roof, or any high place, and the urge to jump might just cross your mind. Knowing what would happen if you did, however, you quickly counter the thought – after all, you are of sound mind. A curious mix of fear and fascination, this phenomenon, referred to as the “call of the void”, is common and does not necessarily indicate any suicidal intentions. But now, picture being in that situation and being a new mother.

Caring for a newborn, with all the sleep deprivation and the emotional ups and downs that entails, are just part of being a new parent. Concorso Internazionale selection Salve Maria, the latest feature from the Spanish director Mar Coll, takes us on the downward spiral that seems to engulf the eponymous Maria (Laura Weissmahr), a writer and yes, a new mother. When Maria stands on that imaginary ledge – she is convinced that something is wrong with her newborn and unable to stop imagining worst-case scenarios – the void whispers to her with all the allure of a siren.

She becomes obsessed by the story of Alice, a French woman who made headlines after drowning her ten-month-old twins in the bathtub – the tragic story a source of both morbid fascination and inspiration for Maria’s next book. Set to a soundtrack under constant tension, veering towards psychological terror, this drama chases the ghost of a monster that doesn’t exist. Overwhelmed by the needs of the tiny human who seems impervious to his mother’s attempts to communicate, surrounded by a network of people who mean well but fail to recognize her distress, a depressed Maria finds herself trapped in the shadows of a sort of Plato’s cave.

Adapted from the bestselling novel Mothers Don’t (Las madres no, 2018) by Basque writer Katixa Agirre and punctuated by quotes from strong female figures like Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir and Medea, the film expresses the disturbing element of the experience of motherhood and the overbearing guilt and judgement that society still places on its matriarchs. In centering what the director calls a “repentant mother” – a character rarely seen on the big screen, and one that that resonates with the director’s own experience – Coll’s film hits hard.

As the narrative builds to a crescendo, Maria leaves her child behind in a frantic search for Alice, determined to get an answer to the nagging question of the reason behind this woman’s double infanticide. The turning point is a return to reality that, for a few seconds, takes the form of a close-up on Maria’s lips whispering the unfathomable into her partner’s ear. This act, both desperate and courageous, marks the beginning of a renewal – as if the world, which had seemed to spin faster and faster around her, had suddenly come to rest, finally ready to let her regain her bearings. As the young woman slowly rebuilds her life after the cataclysm of childbirth, terror no longer has a place in her mind. Through its unsettling exploration of what society considers to be “acceptable” models of motherhood, the film exposes something that remains all too relevant.

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The opening program of this year’s Pardi di Domani once again aims to be an ideal preview of the spirit and the visions to come in the following days. Not a simple teaser, but a true map of cinema as we want it to be: an uncharted world. Five films as five territories, where vital forces clash and invite us on a journey through extreme intimacies and profound existential challenges.

Hot on the heels of their Cannes-selected feature Eat the Night (2024), French wonder couple Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel are back at Locarno with La Fille qui explose (The Exploding Girl). Captured using a videogame software, the film chronicles the daily life of Candice, an avatar who, for the past three months, has been exploding every day. A pure outburst of sorrow and anger that confirms the directors’ unique vision.

South African multi-hyphenate superstar artist Nakhane astonishes with their debut short B(l)ind the Sacrifice, a powerful reimagining of the myth of Abraham as experienced by a nomadic family. Religious tensions blend with ancestral elements and a violent quest for emancipation in a tale that questions traditional beliefs and their deadly burden.

In Gimn chume (Hymn of the Plague), collective Ataka51 orchestrate a cinematic séance that reawakens ghosts past and present. The specter of Puškin roams corridors that jolt one back to Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining, until the film gradually swells into a musical performance that evokes timely echoes of war. An unclassifiable, multi-disciplinary, genre-bending blast.

Tinderboys, by filmmaker-dancer Sarah Bucher and Carlos Tapia, will easily be the most provocative, brilliantly absurd Swiss short of the year. The title hints at a malicious promise, but nothing unveils as expected in this formally rigorous and conceptually challenging work that deftly toggles between utmost seriousness and disorienting ridiculousness.

For those who might think that American indie cinema is agonizing or dead already, here comes Claire Barnett to light up the screen with her surprising Freak. As outrageous as it is tender, the film smartly explores desire, judgement, and acceptance by following a conversation between two lovers whose relationship is suddenly put to the test after one reveals a peculiar sexual fantasy. Hopscotching across different cinematic territories, these five fulminating shorts invite us to come to terms with and embrace our humanity in all its diversity.

©Atlas V

Images: ©Pol Rebaque

You’ll be seeing double in this, the latest feature-length phantasmagoria from Bertrand Mandico. In part, because Dragon Dilatation comprises two works: the first being the French maestro’s gender-flipped reimagining of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1911); the second, a new facet of his prismatic exploration – also gender-flipped – of Conan the Barbarian, coming hot on the heels of the feature She is Conann and the shorts Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley and Nous les barbares, all three of which premiered at Locarno76. But each of Dragon Dilatation’s stories is also presented entirely in split screen: another means by which Mandico here doubles down.

While the film bears an intertitle with the warning, “If you like tasteful shows, what you are about to see is not for you,” aficionados of the filmmaker and his polymorphously perverse cinema will feel right at home in Dragon Dilatation – or at least in La Déviante Comédie, the second and meatier of the film’s two sections. This return to Mandico’s Conann-verse offers a characteristically heady collision of glitter with gore, the mythic with the corporeal, as conjured entirely in-camera.

In the opening, Peaches-esque musical number of La Déviante Comédie, the Franco-German performer Karoline Rose Sun declares, “Theater is dead! Oral sex forever!” Theater was indeed dead at the time of filming: the project – actually Mandico’s first Conan-inspired endeavor; a backstage tale of actresses martyred by their art and the cross-dressing director (Christophe Bier) whose sacred calling is to shepherd them in his Conan adaptation – was originally conceived of as a show for the 2020 season at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, but COVID restrictions prevented it from ever being publicly staged. Its adaptation for the screen nevertheless seems effortless: Mandico’s cinema has always been in the theatrical tradition of smoke and mirrors. The man is a modern day Méliès – but by way of Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger, with a dash of the campy, high artifice delirium of Guy Maddin.

Dragon Dilatation’s first section, however, finds Mandico charting new aesthetic territory: in sharp contrast to the lush color palettes he loves so, his Petrushka is washed out, bathed in harsh fluorescence. It is also almost entirely silent, scored with selections from Stravinsky’s original ballet – no soliloquizing here! What unites it with La Déviante Comédie – in addition to a number of the cast members, including, of course, his constant collaborator Elina Löwensohn – is its focus on a woman hollowed out in the name of art. Petrushka here is not a dancing puppet, as in the ballet, but a model (Clara Benador) made into a plaything by her employer, an iron-fisted fashionista (Nathalie Richard) who feeds her pills when she crumples with exhaustion.

Taken together, the two parts of Dragon Dilatation form an exhilarating extension of Mandico’s experiments in cinematic cross-pollination. That the bifurcated mise-enscène is often used to present different takes of the same scene seems to speak to his grander project: by opening up this space for duality, for multiplicity, the director pays tribute not just to the feminine mystique, but also to the labor – physical, psychological, and spiritual – of his actresses.

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«Sono le imperfezioni a rendere davvero tua un’opera d’arte»

Klaudia Reynicke a proposito di Reinas Klaudia Reynicke riflette sul suo ultimo lungometraggio, proiettato questa sera in Piazza Grande di Leonardo Goi Tradotto da Anna Rusconi

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er Klaudia Reynicke, cineasta svizzera-peruviana che a Locarno si fece conoscere per Il nido (The Nest, 2016) e Love Me Tender (2019), Reinas rappresenta una sorta di ritorno a casa. Il suo primo film ambientato interamente in Perù, dove la regista crebbe prima di trasferirsi negli Stati Uniti e infine in Svizzera, narra la storia di una famiglia di Lima alla vigilia del colpo di stato di Alberto Fujimori, nei primi anni Novanta. E lo fa dalla prospettiva dei suoi componenti più giovani: due ragazzine che Reinas ritrae mentre si apprestano ad abbandonare il proprio Paese e un padre che non è mai riuscito davvero a star loro vicino. Dopo aver esordito a Sundance quest’inverno, il film arriva finalmente a Locarno; alla vigilia della proiezione di questa sera in Piazza Grande, Klaudia Reynicke ci parla del suo rapporto con il cinema, e con un Paese che Reinas ha reso meno distante.

Leonardo Goi: Guardando Reinas mi è tornato in mente al tuo documentario del 2013 ¿Así son los hombres?, un altro film che ha al suo centro una famiglia peruviana dispersa per il mondo – la tua – e nato, così hai detto, dopo che ti eri imbattuta in un mucchio di vecchie cassette VHS. Reinas da cosa ha preso le mosse?

Klaudia Reynicke: A me non era mai venuto in mente di collegare quel documentario a Reinas, il che è strano, perché in effetti un sacco di gente sembra trovarci delle analogie. A portarmi verso questa storia è stata la volontà di ristabilire un contatto con il Perù. Si tratta del mio terzo film. I primi due li ho girati qui in Europa, oltre ad una serie che ho realizzato per la tivù svizzera e francese, La vie devant (2022). Cosa di cui sono molto felice, naturalmente: oggi è in questo angolo di mondo che vivo, so di cosa parlo. Ma ogni volta che mi presentavo e dicevo che ero peruviana percepivo un po’ di scetticismo. Così ho iniziato a domandarmi se non stavo perdendo il mio lato peruviano solo perché il Paese non lo conoscevo davvero. Me ne sono andata a dieci anni e da allora c’ero tornata solo due o tre volte, e solo in vacanza. Ma crescendo ho sentito di dovergli restituire qualcosa. Sapevo che prima o poi avrei dovuto girarci un film. In un modo o nell’altro, i miei film ruotano sempre intorno a questioni familiari, ma in questo caso mi interessava un momento preciso e che raramente il cinema mostra: quello in cui ti prepari a partire. La maggior parte dei film sulla migrazione parla dei protagonisti durante il viaggio o dopo che sono arrivati, quando non sanno cosa fare perché gli è tutto estraneo. Ma quel particolare momento in cui sei ancora nel paese da cui sai che presto dovrai staccarti, ecco, è così intenso che è difficile raccontarlo, ma era proprio su quello che volevo focalizzarmi. Quando ho cominciato a scrivere non

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era tanto al mio vecchio documentario che pensavo, quanto ad altri film seminali sul mio Paese e sul periodo storico in cui volevo ambientarlo. Una delle principali fonti d’ispirazione è stata Metal and Melancholy (Meetal en melancholie, 1993), di Heddy Honigmann e Peter Delpeut. Honigmann è una regista olandese peruviana di nascita e ha girato questo gioiellino di documentario – visibile su YouTube! – facendosi scarrozzare per Lima da alcuni tassisti. Solo che non erano “veri” tassisti, ma, come il padre di Reinas, persone che si erano ritrovate a fare quel lavoro perché agli inizi degli anni Novanta l’economia nazionale era allo sfascio.

LG: Hai scritto questo film insieme a Diego Vega, un altro peruviano trapiantato in Europa. Quanto è stato importante lavorare con qualcuno in grado di condividere un senso di dislocazione analogo al tuo?

KR: Fondamentale, è stato fondamentale. In realtà avevo cominciato a scrivere per conto mio, ma presto mi sono resa conto che avevo bisogno di qualcuno di peruviano come me che conoscesse meglio gli avvenimenti del periodo, perché io ero troppo piccola quando me ne sono andata. Diego l’avevo conosciuto proprio a Locarno, mentre era lì con il fratello Daniel per il film a cui avevano lavorato insieme, El Mudo (2013). Così siamo diventati amici, e a distanza di anni l’ho richiamato per sottoporgli una bozza del soggetto. L’idea gli è piaciuta subito. Anche lui è un expat, la prima volta che è partito dal Perù aveva solo 14 anni, si è trasferito in Messico e poi è tornato a Lima, dove è rimasto per qualche anno, ormai grande, per poi spostarsi definitivamente a Barcellona. È stato bellissimo avere qualcuno con una storia familiare che risuonava con quella che mi immaginavo io. Il suo punto di vista mi è stato preziosissimo.

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LG: Quanto tempo ci hai messo a finire la sceneggiatura, e quanto è cambiata negli anni?

KR: Qualunque progetto di questa complessità attraversa molte fasi diverse. In realtà mentre scrivevo da sola avevo pensato al personaggio di un patrigno, che poi ho tagliato per concentrarmi sul padre, e alla fine sulle bambine. L’unica cosa che sapevo fin dall’inizio era che il film doveva seguire le vicende di due sorelline che stanno per emigrare, e a cui di colpo viene offerta la possibilità di riallacciare i contatti con un padre completamente estraniato. È buffo, perché proprio mentre stavo ultimando il final cut mi è ricapitato tra le mani un vecchio pitch del 2000 e la sinossi era identica. Non riuscivo a credere di essere tornata al punto di partenza! Tra una pausa e l’altra, l’intero processo di scrittura è durato tre anni. Inizialmente non abbiamo ottenuto i fondi per cui avevamo fatto domanda. Avevo sempre pensato che fosse un film molto fragile, un protagonista vero non c’è e fondamentalmente l’antagonista è il contesto stesso, ma non volevo portare questo aspetto in primo piano perché non mi interessava fare un film politico. È un film sulla famiglia, e trovare questo equilibrio in fase di scrittura è stato molto difficile. Dopo il primo rifiuto abbiamo riscritto tutto daccapo, ma sono ancora convinta che non avessero realmente capito in che modo volevamo procedere. Può darsi dipenda dal fatto che le commissioni di valutazione tendono a pensare alla sceneggiatura come a un filo rosso da seguire in maniera rigorosa, mentre non è così! Alla fine, il film vero lo scopri sempre in sala montaggio.

LG: Una volta terminato il film, i personaggi continuano ad accompagnarti? In Reinas ce n’è uno in particolare che ti perseguita ancora?

LG: E personaggi che invece hai fatto fatica a scrivere? Oppure qualcuno che, al contrario, ti sei divertita particolarmente a plasmare?

KR: Credo che il più difficile sia stato il personaggio della madre. Il padre era più facile. Relativamente parlando, almeno. È un uomo dotato di fervida immaginazione, capace di intrattenerti in mille modi. Mente, sì, ma comunque fa ridere, e questo in gran parte si deve all’interprete: Gonzalo Molina è un attore generosissimo. Ha una leggerezza speciale! Credo sia questo che aiuta molto il pubblico ad amare Carlos, il suo personaggio.

Magari se avessimo scelto un attore un po’ più misterioso sarebbe risultato più difficile. Ma con la madre la difficoltà sta semplicemente nel fatto che la sua non è certo la parte più accattivante del film. Lei è una donna molto pratica: ha tirato su le figlie, ha un progetto, vuole andarsene. È pragmatica, ma siccome non ha mai potuto contare sul marito è anche il poliziotto cattivo. Il che complicava la scrittura. Le figlie… be’, loro le ameranno tutti, di questo non abbiamo mai dubitato. Con la madre, invece, dovevamo costruire una figura che andasse oltre la relazione complicata e i conflitti con Carlos. Sì, trovare l’equilibrio con lei è stata dura. In effetti il grosso del lavoro mio e di Diego è stato proprio su di lei, compreso decidere se volessimo descrivere di più o di meno il suo personaggio.

LG: Vorrei tornare all’ambientazione storica e politica. Sono rimasto molto colpito da come il film lasci filtrare pochissimo di quanto succede al di fuori delle mura domestiche. A parte l’inserto televisivo iniziale, dei protagonisti del Perù di allora non si parla quasi (del presidente Alberto Fujimori, o del capo dei servizi segreti Vladimiro Montesinos), così come delle atrocità avvenute in quel periodo. Puoi raccontarci qualcosa di più su come hai coniugato storia familiare e sociale, micro e macro?

KR: All’inizio qualche nome l’avevamo incluso, ma poi l’abbiamo tolto perché doveva essere un racconto con una valenza più universale. Aggiungere dei nomi qua e là, a mo’ di sottolineature, non bastava. La clip di apertura a cui accennavi, quella dove il giornalista parla dei prezzi che schizzano alle stelle, è uno spezzone molto famoso che ai tempi ebbe un impatto profondo sul Paese, ma lo guardano ancora oggi. È del giorno in cui la gente si svegliò e, in sostanza, scoprì che il Perù stava andando gambe all’aria. Ho pensato che sarebbe stato più forte inserire momenti del genere piuttosto che affidarsi a nomi che a qualcuno potevano dire qualcosa e a qualcun altro no. A me interessavano soprattutto gli effetti di quei cambiamenti sistemici, parlare della disperazione con cui deve fare i conti una famiglia della classe media quando il mondo che conosce di colpo si sgretola.

LG: Hai citato Gonzalo Molina, ma come ti sei imbattuta nelle due giovani attrici, Abril Gjurinovic e Luana Vega, e quando?

KR: Be’, abbiamo iniziato le ricerche per il casting delle due sorelle prima del Covid. All’epoca ero in Svizzera, per cui molto lontana: in Perù c’erano agenti che mi mandavano dei nastri da visionare, ma non ci ho messo molto a capire che non mi interessava vedere bambine già comparse in televisione o in pubblicità, perché erano già abituate ad utilizzare un linguaggio per me molto difficile da scardinare. Con gli adulti funziona, ma coi bambini è complicato. Perciò chiesi ai nostri collaboratori di andare a cercarle in giro, per il vasto mondo! [ride] E a quel punto arrivò il Covid. Ci siamo dovuti fermare per due anni, in Perù la pandemia ha avuto un impatto terrificante. Solo dopo aver ripreso in mano il progetto abbiamo trovato Abril, la più piccola, che impersona Lucía.

Lei e suo padre si trovavano in un centro commerciale e accettarono di presentarsi per il provino. Quando la vidi non ebbi il minimo dubbio, seppi immediatamente che era lei. Solo che quando lo comunicai ai nostri responsabili del casting, mi dissero che era sparita. E così saltò fuori che viveva non in Perù ma in Belgio, con la madre.

Ci volle quasi un mese per rintracciarla.

LG: Sembra quasi la storia del personaggio che interpreta.

KR: Assolutamente! Quando la incrociammo per la prima volta era in vacanza con il padre a Lima, ma doveva rientrare in Belgio. Per quanto riguarda Luana, invece, che interpreta Aurora, avevo già fatto delle audizioni con delle ragazze, ma nessuna mi soddisfaceva del tutto. Poi un giorno stavo parlando su Zoom con Daniel Vega, il fratello di Diego, quando gli passò di fianco la figlia di quattordici anni. «E com’è che lei non ha ancora fatto un provino?» esclamai, e lui disse che non le interessava. I suoi lavorano entrambi per il cinema e Luana non aveva nessuna intenzione di seguire le loro orme. Voleva studiare legge o medicina. Allora chiesi a suo padre di mandarmi delle foto, e poi gli dissi che magari la figlia poteva presentarsi al provino insieme a un’amica e vedere se lì per lì le veniva voglia di tentare. Così è stato. Andò al provino con un’amica che nel film interpreta appunto una delle amiche di Aurora, e poi decise sul momento di buttarsi anche lei. Fu stupefacente. Insomma, alla fine l’ho chiamata e le ho detto: «Senti, Luana, ti va di fare il film o no?

Perché se non ti va, ovviamente io non intendo forzarti, ma vorrei capire se l’idea ti interessa». E lei disse che le andava, sì. «Mio padre ha detto che mi paghi.»

LG: Avere chiare le priorità è importante!

KR: Eccome! [ride] È una ragazza molto simpatica e sveglissima. Parla tipo cinque lingue, sembrava una professionista navigata.

LG: Non è la prima volta che lavori con dei bambini. Sono curioso di sapere come dirigi gli attori più giovani, che non lo fanno di mestiere.

KR: Sicuramente non come dirigo gli adulti. Ai bambini non do battute precise. Ci parlo. Magari gli dico «Prova a pensare a una certa situazione e a fare questa cosa, o a dire quest’altra…» Non puoi usare lo stesso approccio che adotti con un adulto, non puoi andare da un bambino e dirgli «Okay, ripetiamo la scena, e stavolta falla triste».

Prima devi conoscerli. In genere ci passo molto tempo insieme, finché arrivano a fidarsi di me, perché l’elemento indispensabile è la fiducia. A quel punto diventa tutto molto più facile. Non che lavorare con Abril e Luana sia mai stato complicato, ma devi sempre ricordarti che per loro deve continuare a essere un gioco, non un lavoro. Perciò abbiamo elaborato una tabella di marcia che le proteggesse: tanto per dirne una, abbiamo deciso che con loro non avremmo mai girato per più di sei ore al giorno. E così alla fin hanno avuto uno spazio in cui si sentivano al sicuro, cosa che, essendo alla loro prima esperienza, era di importanza capitale.

LG: Mi piacerebbe parlare un po’ di fotografia, adesso. Conosco Diego Romero, il tuo direttore, dal suo lavoro con Roberto Minervini. L’hai scelto anche per la sua esperienza in ambito documentaristico?

KR: La nostra è una bellissima collaborazione. Abbiamo lavorato insieme in Love me tender (2019), e poi di nuovo per la serie La vie devant (2022). Ormai ci conosciamo molto bene e mi piace che Diego abbia questa esperienza enorme tanto nella fiction quanto nei documentari.

Io sono una grande fan di Minervini, la prima volta che ho visto i suoi film stavo montando Il nido. Fu proprio la mia montatrice, Marie-Hèléne Dozo, a consigliarmi di guardarli, e io me ne innamorai all’istante, soprattutto per la qualità altissima della fotografia. Saranno anche documentari, ma ti sembra di essere dentro una favola. Quando i fratelli Vega hanno deciso di fare il loro terzo film, La bronca (The Clash, 2019), l’hanno voluto come direttore della fotografia e alla fine ci hanno presentati. Diego è un personaggio molto intenso… molto divertente, ma è un artista. Quando abbiamo girato Love me Tender, per esempio, lui non voleva luci artificiali per via dei suoi trascorsi con i documentari, immagino. Il che è pazzesco, perché guardando il film non te ne accorgi neanche. È curatissimo, eppure non abbiamo praticamente usato luci. Il nido l’ho girato con Hélène Louvart alla direzione della fotografia ed è stata un’esperienza straordinaria, ma lei viene da una scuola completamente diversa. Più francese… più classica. Un sacco di luci, un sacco di attese. Con Diego, era sempre lui ad aspettare noi! [ride] Da allora ha anche cambiato un po’ l’approccio, ma il motivo per cui lavoriamo così bene insieme è che siamo molto veloci. Non ci è mai capitato di sforare i tempi, in nessuno dei progetti a cui abbiamo collaborato. E questo grazie alla preparazione minuziosa prima di girare. In questo modo è sempre possibile inserire cambiamenti all’ultimo minuto, magari gli dico che ho cambiato idea su dove piazzare questa o quella cinepresa e lui in un attimo risistema tutto. È veramente incredibile ritrovarti sul set a lavorare con qualcuno a cui praticamente non devi dire niente.

Per fortuna alla fine è andato tutto liscio. La troupe veniva da tre paesi diversi e sul set si parlavano quattro o cinque lingue. Ad oggi, credo sia stata per me l’esperienza di lavorazione più incredibile. L’amore e la passione che ci hanno messo tutti… una cosa pazzesca. Come regista, poter contare su una squadra pronta a battersi per la tua visione è un aiuto enorme, perché di fatto è ciò che poi rende il tuo film diverso da tutti gli altri. Strada facendo ho imparato proprio che se c’è una cosa su cui non devo mai scendere a compromessi è questa: la mia visione. Che naturalmente comporta tutte le imperfezioni del caso, ma sono le imperfezioni a rendere davvero tua un’opera d’arte. Se però vuoi anche salvarle nel final cut, devi batterti nel vero senso della parola. E questa è stata la grande battaglia, fino alla fine.

LG: Potremmo dire che fare questo film ha risanato il tuo rapporto con il Perù? Che Reinas ha cambiato il modo in cui pensi alla tua identità e al legame con il tuo paese di nascita?

KR: Oh, senza dubbio. La sensazione è che ci sia una vita prima e una vita dopo Reinas. Poter passare tre mesi in Perù, e non come turista ma per fare il mio lavoro, circondata da altri peruviani ed europei… be’, è stato impagabile.

D’ora in avanti voglio tornarci una volta all’anno. Voglio che i miei figli possano stabilire un legame con un Paese da cui io sono stata costretta a staccarmi troppo presto, ma con cui adesso sono abbastanza adulta per mantenere un contatto. Voglio pensare a nuovi progetti e collaborazioni con altri Paesi latino americani. Il che non significa farmi ossessionare dall’idea di girare sempre lì, perché ogni storia ha bisogno del posto giusto per essere raccontata, non è che tutto può avere inizio a Lima. Però sì, certo, il mio rapporto con il Paese è completamente cambiato. È molto importante non cadere nel sentimentalismo quando parli del luogo in cui sei nata, soprattutto se poi hai trascorso tanto tempo altrove, e io sono contenta di avere smesso di idealizzare il mio Paese. Però sono anche contenta di averlo potuto conoscere e amare molto di più, e di poterne finalmente parlare con tranquillità. Di poter parlare di Lima e di tutti i bei posti che ho visitato, di poter dire che mi sento tanto peruviana quanto svizzera, perché sono due parti fondamentali di me, di chi sono. È stato un gran viaggio, davvero.

◼ Reinas premieres

Thursday, 8.8 at 21:30 at Piazza Grande

LG: Spero di non sembrarti inopportuno con questa domanda un po’ più personale, ma sarei curioso di sapere cos’hai provato a girare un film nel Paese in cui sei nata ma con cui avevi da tempo perso il contatto…

KR: La luce verde è arrivata soltanto nel settembre del 2022. In giugno avevamo inviato la seconda sceneggiatura, rivista e corretta, e di colpo a settembre ecco il finanziamento dalla Svizzera. Non riuscivo a crederci. Avevo anche una bella paura. Ho due bambini ancora piccoli, uno di sette e l’altro di dodici anni, ho sempre cercato di portarli con me per poter passare quanto più tempo possibile insieme mentre giravo. Ma avevo sempre lavorato in Svizzera. In Love me Tender andavo sul set in bicicletta: ci mettevo cinque minuti. E nel caso della serie, hanno potuto seguirmi con mio marito e mia madre e trascorrere un mese assieme a me. Insomma, all’improvviso mi sondo chiesta «E adesso cosa faccio?»

Voglio dire, non conoscevo neanche più il Perù, non sapevo se fossi in grado di dirigere in spagnolo, se padroneggiassi ancora la lingua… Poi è arrivato ottobre e sono andata a Lima per finalizzare il casting e conoscere gli attori. Là erano all’inizio della primavera, faceva freddissimo e umidissimo, la città era molto diversa da come me la ricordavo. Grigia. A un certo punto mi sono persino chiesta se mi piacesse ancora… [ride] Poi ho cominciato a bazzicare qualche ristorante, e le cose sono cambiate. Comunque sì, è stato parecchio difficile riadattarmi a un paese che non ero nemmeno sicura di poter ancora chiamare mio. E poi sono scoppiate le proteste, ci sono stati gli scontri. In dicembre il presidente Castillo ha tentato un golpe, proprio come Fujimori trent’anni prima. Ma non ce l’ha fatta. È finito in prigione e al suo posto è salita la sua vice, che da allora governa come una specie di dittatrice. E la gente ha cominciato a protestare, è scesa in piazza, ci sono stati scontri e alcuni manifestanti sono morti. Noi ci siamo ritrovati in mezzo a tutto questo, a girare un film che parlava dello stesso scontento, capisci? Sembrava di essere dentro alla storia che stavamo raccontando! [ride] Ogni giorno i produttori ci dicevano che da un momento all’altro potevamo dover fare i bagagli e andarcene. La situazione continuava a peggiorare. Siamo arrivati a spostare la location principale dal centro di Lima a una zona più periferica. E poi un giorno si è messo a piovere, cosa che a quanto pare non succedeva da trentotto anni. Sono venute giù due gocce, ma è stato un disastro.

Basta che a Lima piova pochissimo, e lungo la costa si formano delle colate di fango. Infatti così è successo.

Stavamo girando in una location sul mare: una settimana dopo, l’intera area è stata letteralmente devastata dagli allagamenti.

Reinas ©Diego Romero Suarez Llanos Alva Film Inicia Films Maretazo Cine.

KR: No, non credo ci sia un personaggio che ha prevalso sugli altri. Per me Reinas è un pacchetto completo: non puoi pensare al padre senza le due figlie, o alle figlie senza la nonna o la madre. Detto questo, sicuramente ce n’è uno che mi fa ridere ogni volta che mi viene in mente, ed è il fantasma… ma non arriverei a dire che mi perseguita!

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PARDO

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Uniti dall'amore per i film.

Grande cinema in Piazza Grande o a casa, con blue TV. Pronti, insieme.

Men Want to Write their Own Ending: A Conversation with Christoph Hochhäusler Master of German crime cinema Christoph Hochhäusler returns to Locarno with Concorso Internazionale selection La Mort viendra. Pardo spoke to him about his melancholic, brilliantly staged meditation on men who operate in the dark but don’t – or won’t – recognize their own blindness.

by Maria Giovanna Vagenas

I

Maria Giovanna Vagenas: La Mort viendra is your seventh feature film, but the first in French. How did it come about?

Christoph Hochhäusler: It all started with a casual trip to Brussels about six years ago. I fell in love with the city, its contrasts and beauty astounded me – and I thought, “I have to make a film here!” As I walked the streets, I thought, “This might be the home of an old school gangster.” Why French? First and foremost, it is the language spoken in Brussels. And the French-speaking world has a rich tradition of crime and gangster films, a genre I adore, whereas Germans typically prefer the police perspective – German television is brimming with detectives. I also like how the francophone “Polar” [detective story] allows for artistic perspectives from auteurs such as Claire Denis, Audrey Estrougo, and Jacques Audiard, as well as more mainstream positions like Olivier Marchal’s. Both appealed to me: shooting in Brussels and making a genre film in French that at least seemed to fit in with the city.

MGV: Certainly, the melancholy score by Nigji Sanges evokes classic gangster films.

CH: We agreed early on that the film needed a musical language that is less concerned with specific scenes and instead attempts to create a musical space of melancholy and doom for the whole length of the film. We experimented with a variety of themes before Nigji suggested the one we would go with – that’s when it clicked. In my experience, the relationship between image and music is a mystery. You can’t really know what a specific piece of music will do to a film until you try it.

MGV: The film can be thought of as a requiem for a certain kind of lost soul. Was that your intention?

CH: The title already conveys the film’s intention. Cesare Pavese, one of the favorite writers of my co-screenwriter Ulrich Peltzer, wrote a famous poem titled “Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi” (“When Death Comes, It Will Have Your Eyes”). A bit long for a film title, but the words “...and it will have your eyes” point to the heart of it. I wanted to deal with death from a male perspective.

This may also be slightly autobiographical – a few years ago, I was given a life-threatening diagnosis that, thank God, turned out to be incorrect. Nonetheless, this possibility loomed over me and my family for a while. The inability to accept one’s fate is, in my opinion, one of the many toxic components of male supremacy. Men become especially petty and laughable near the end of their lives because they want to write their own ending.

MGV: Why did you set this film in the world of prostitution?

CHP: Prostitution has traditionally been one of the most profitable trades used in organized crime. It all boils down to the exploitation of desire and misery. And, because I am interested in the body as a ‘recorder’ and display of experience – as any filmmaker must be – it made me wonder, “What happens when things – in this case, sex dolls – replace the human body? Is that progress already?” However, I believe these ideas are not so prominent in the film; they are simply one piece of the puzzle.

MGV: Figuratively, the term “doll” refers to playing with and manipulating others.

CH: Everyone in this story wants to be in control of their lives, which extends to manipulating others and treating them like lifeless puppets. But is having so much control over one’s own and others’ lives truly beneficial?

Should this attitude be tolerated? I believe this is the film’s main theme.

MGV: The narrative is structured like a hall of mirrors, where you enter and quickly lose your way...

CH: My co-writer Ulrich Pelzer and I frequently discussed the idea of a labyrinth, but it was more playful than programmatic. Similar to Jorge Louis Borges’ stories, the film’s main character, the gangster Mahr, becomes lost in his own labyrinth, which is exactly what he wants: to create a labyrinth in which to die.

MGV: How did you and Ulrich Pelzer shape this complex storyline?

CH: We’ve been working together since The City Below (2010) in essentially the same way: one of us – it could be me or him – sits at the computer and listens to the other’s ideas before then writing them down and reading them aloud. We discuss constantly, and we try to create a “panoramic” view of a fictional world, with many different strands, characters, and, most importantly, omissions, so you can never be certain about the story’s inner workings.

MGV: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing gives a wonderfully multifaceted performance as Mahr, being charismatic, wistful, and cruel all at once. I found all of the performances to be quite impressive, in fact. How did you work with your actors to help them achieve such striking performances?

CH: Acting is becoming increasingly important to me. I don’t want to dictate everything, while shooting I want to be a spectator and experience something new and

PARDO

Still from La Mort viendra ©Heimatfilm

n La Mort viendra, the latest from Christoph Hochhaüsler, a newfangled sex doll has the potential to shake up the Belgian sex work trade. To launch his new venture, up-and-coming mob boss De Boers (Marc Limpach) needs both funds and the approval of the underworld’s legendary leader, Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). But this disturbs the fragile criminal hierarchy, setting off a ruthless, multi-directional battle for supremacy. In this thrilling, atmospheric gangster story, the narrative is carried by an array of shady characters with often baffling motivations. Entangled in a web of opposing interests, the film’s “heroes” are mere puppets in an unfathomable play – a play darkened by the looming specter of death.

unexpected. Costume fittings and make-up tests, in my opinion, are critical in determining a character. However, once the character is established, my main job is to project confidence, give the actors space to create, and serve as their mirror. I usually work from the outside in, giving the actors a lot of freedom. However, directing also involves problem solving. You let everything go as long as it’s fun and seems right, but if it’s not, you must step in. Then, of course, I’m on the spot, offering suggestions for what could be changed. However, my direction is frequently “external,” and I rarely do any psychological preparation with them before shooting.

MGV: The theme of sight – seeing, not seeing, and going blind – runs through the film. Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s (16651747) painting Hecuba blinds Polymestor, which plays a key role in the story, refers directly to this.

CH: The act of seeing is inherently aggressive. It is our most controlling sense. Naturally, cinema, as the dominant visual medium, is obsessed with the eye as a weapon – uncovering, detecting, and observing. When the objects are in focus, both the camera and the viewer are in positions of power. At the same time, the eye is a very fragile organ that is easily damaged. It seemed natural for this story to combine both aspects.

But that particular painting wasn’t mentioned in the script. We discovered it during research in Brussels at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts and decided it would be great to include. It was a pure stroke of luck. It’s also very impressive and intriguing in terms of form: Hecuba throws himself at Polymestor, but we don’t see the blinding itself.

MGV: The film’s suspenseful and furtive atmosphere is enhanced by dim lighting and subdued colors. What was the underlying concept behind the cinematography by Reinhold Vorschneider, your long-time collaborator?

CH: Indeed, the Crespi painting served as an important visual reference. As always, we examined a wide range of reference materials, including paintings and photographs. We also discuss films, but I try not to get too focused on any one particular movie. This time, we aimed for a nearly classicist image. I believe it’s our most restrained film yet.

◼ La Mort viendra premieres

Thursday, 8.8 at 16:45 at Palexpo (FEVI)

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A Portrait of Locarno as Remembered by its Guests In the weeks leading up to the Festival, we reached out to some of Locarno’s most illustrious former guests and asked them to share their first memories of the fest – whether that meant impressions from their world premieres or casual walks around the lake. The result, Beginnings, is a treasure trove of anecdotes and recollections; a polyphonic mosaic of the Festival assembled by those who’ve shaped its history.

Pedro Costa, 2000 In 2000, the Locarno Film Festival chose to present In Vanda’s Room. It seemed to me the ideal place for this film: not too fictional, not too documentary, not too chic, not too frivolous... And I remember the jurors declaring it poorly made; a disgusting film.

I also remember many young people coming to talk to me. In Locarno, in 2000, I began a nasty affair with those who judge films and a steady courtship with the young spectators.

Denis Côté, 2005

Anticommunism in Switzerland

By Cyril Cordoba

For this year’s edition of Pardo, we invited historians Cyril Cordoba and Lucia Leoni to take us daily on a tour through the Locarno Film Festival’s history, chapter by chapter.

In the 1960s, the Locarno Film Festival was steered by Vinicio Beretta, a film critic who had been a big part of the Festival since its early days. In the decade before, he served as both secretary and head of the selection committee; before that, he had presided over the awards ceremonies in the garden of the Grand Hotel. As director, Beretta fought hard – often against tourism promoters and industry representatives, who had a vested interest in prioritizing commercial cinema – to transform the LFF into a cultural event dedicated to the promotion of film culture.

Because Hollywood was largely uninterested in sending movies to Locarno – the Swiss market being such a small one – while Eastern European countries were very keen on using the Festival as a political showcase, the LFF became the site of a kind of a cinematic Cold War. Alongside Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, where a new wave of young filmmakers was emerging amid de-Stalinization, had a particularly strong presence in Ticino. A number of Nová vlna films were awarded at Locarno, including Miloš Forman’s Black Peter (Černý Petr, 1964). Locarno was one of the few places in Western Europe where these subversively youthful and highly influential movies could be seen: in Switzerland, their influence was manifest even in the creation of a production house named Milos-Films.

The Festival’s platforming of productions from socialist countries generated quite a bit of hostility in anticommunist Switzerland, however. Its most ferocious adversaries were so influential that, in 1962, a government-approved “national selection committee” with a mandate to reject films deemed overly “political” was installed. Things got personal, too: a xenophobic slander campaign was launched against Festival Director Beretta, who was Italian and had only recently become a Swiss citizen. As a result, he suffered a nervous breakdown, eventually quitting the Festival in 1966.

Nevertheless, the LFF managed to preserve the space for artistic and political provocation it had carved out. With financial support from the state, the Festival became a hub for emerging cinema. Young auteurs were given the chance to show their films to international audiences for the first time: the likes of Claude Chabrol, Lina Wertmüller, Stanley Kubrick, Henry Brandt, Shirley Clarke, and Marco Bellocchio all used the Locarno Film Festival as a springboard early in their careers. Showcasing emerging cinema also meant programming the work of more experienced filmmakers from so-called “Third World” countries, completely unknown to Swiss spectators at the time. Mexican, Indian, and Brazilian films were introduced to our country thanks to Locarno, which celebrated such important figures as Luis Alcoriza, Satyajit Ray, and Nelson Periera dos Santos.

New and exciting cinematic avenues were being pursued in Locarno, despite economic and political constraints – paving the way for the even more radical filmmakers of the late ’60s and ’70s.

Audience gathered at the Grand Hotel, 1960

Outside of a handful of short film festivals and a freakish FIPRESCI jury at MoscowIFF, I didn’t have much international festival experience. Locarno seemed like an unknown and mysterious place for the international premiere our DIY low budget experiment called Drifting States. As a small but excited delegation of four, we stayed in a small hostel-like but perfectly located hotel: the infamous Dell’Angelo; grumpy restaurant staff included. The old-timers will remember the huge festival parties at the Locarno Grand Hotel. Sadly, it closed just weeks after we all got drunk there. These days, amidst rumors of renovations and a reopening, urban exploration fanatics are hopefully keeping the memory of this place alive.

Far away from the glamorous competition, I screened my film, programmed in the now-defunct Video Competition sidebar, at the discreet PalaVideo in Muralto. I left days after that premiere, but was then surreally rushed back to Locarno 24 hours after my return to Montreal. Jumping onto the Piazza Grande stage to receive the sidebar’s Pardo d’Oro remains one of the most special moments of my career. At that time, I had just left my job as a film critic at a local newspaper. I was unemployed and severely doubting what might come next. Caressing the Leopard was like an epiphany: I had to go on with my projects and filmmaking.

I owe this first and special opportunity to two lovely souls who were part of my filmmaking journey: Agnès Wildenstein and Luciano Barisone, both in the programming committee at the time.

19 years later, I don’t forget.

HOW THE LEOPARD GOT ITS SPOTS

The screen set up on the lawn of the Grand Hotel, 1965

BEGINNINGS

◼ Jours avant la mort de Nicky

Do you have any memories or anecdotes from Locarno you’d like to share?

(Days Before the Death of Nicky), Denis Côté’s latest short, premieres Thursday, 15.8 at 14:30 at La Sala

◼ Marta Mateus’s Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind),

produced by Pedro Costa, premieres Tuesday, 13.8 at 14:00 at Palexpo (FEVI) Join PIAZZA NOSTRA, a new initiative launched to collect people’s experiences of the Festival ahead of its 80th edition in 2026!

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SHOWING WHAT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SHOW A Conversation Between

by Hugo Emmerzael

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n Cartas Telepáticas (Telepathic Letters), Edgar Pêra uses AI-generated imagery to send writers Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft off on a trip to uncanny valley. Meanwhile, in found footage opus Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală (Eight Postcards From Utopia), Radu Jude collaborates with Dr. Christian Ferencz-Flatz to unravel the potent and often surreal imagery of the commercials aired on television in post-socialist Romania.

Then Jude transports viewers to Andy Warhol’s grave, in his cheeky digital surveillance cam film Sleep #2.

Ahead of the world premieres of these three films by luminaries of rebellious world cinema, all playing in the Fuori Concorso, Pardo brought together their makers for a spirited conversation, in which they reflected on AI, irony, death, and that evergreen question, “What is cinema?”

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All images from Cartas Telepáticas (2024)

All images from Sleep #2 (2024)

All images from Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală (2024)

Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and Edgar Pêra

Hugo Emmerzael: Radu and Christian, your film Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală stems from a long collaborative process. The film is a fantastic piece of media archaeology – somewhere between a wild documentary and a rigorous essay film. What did that creative process look like between the two of you?

Radu Jude: For a few years already, I had wanted to make a film with materials from advertising. Maybe it’s because I used to do advertising work as a director – I made my living with it for many more years than I would’ve wanted to. So, I had this idea, and asked Christian at an early stage. He was someone I didn’t know very well personally, but I knew his work. He’s a very unusual figure in the Romanian intellectual landscape: a serious philosopher, specializing in phenomenology and critical theory – he translated Walter Benjamin into Romanian, for instance. He has very wide-ranging interests in the arts as well. So, I proposed it to him, and I was glad he accepted.

Christian Ferencz-Flatz: Along the way, we assembled this huge archive of advertisements. At first, the project was about Romanian commercials in general, but then we began to focus more and more on the transition period – that early post-socialist period when the short films that were made had this sort of strange energy and a real sense of ambition and possibility in them. We’ve actually built a small research project around this stuff as well, which is currently in development. So, for me, it was always this double thing: something to play around with through cinema and to explore further in academic circles.

HE: There’s a strong overlap between Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală and Cartas Telepáticas, Edgar Pêra’s new film based on the works of Fernando Pessoa and H. P. Lovecraft. Edgar, your film also exists at the intersection between research practice and art, and features very bold aesthetic choices, using AI-generated images as raw material.

Edgar Pêra: It started, actually, as a continuation of a recent film I did about Fernando Pessoa called Não Sou Nada (2023). I thought of using some of the actors from that film in a documentary in which they would deliver lines from Lovecraft and Pessoa. Then I realized it was too similar to the film I had made before; I had already seen what that would look like. That’s when I found out about this way of making images that, for me, are like lost archives of something that never even existed. However, from another point of view, all these AI-generated images do exist, in a sense, because they’re based on all the things that humans have created for centuries. It’s lost footage from the present, and from the near future.

HE: The technology behind AI-generated imagery is developing fast. Even in your film, Edgar, you see that the output of the machines becomes more sophisticated at a certain point.

EP: When I started this film, there was no type of generator yet available to make my moving images speak. So, I only used still images. Then, a new generator allowed me to make moving images out of the still frames, and that changed everything. It’s almost as if the material was like using VHS in the beginning – it was so rough. Ironically, now it tends to be too perfect. I already had this concept about two writers who were polemical in their own ways and who really had a huge effect on the world of literature, and I had a script written with lines I wanted my actors to say. But then I asked ChatGPT to write things as well. What I’ve learned from that process is that if you don’t know more than ChatGPT, you are lost.

You have to know if it’s right or wrong. I actually like it when ChatGPT is wrong, because it’s wrong in ways so different from how I think.

HE: Something that both works have in common is this interesting relationship between the past and the future.

They deal with historical archives of one kind or another but produce future shocks in the way that they present the material. This jolting duality is something I recognize in the work of both Edgar and Radu – you both operate in this exciting space between experimental cinema and, let’s say, a more grounded, arthouse-like mode of filmmaking.

EP: I don’t like this word, “arthouse”. We simply make cinema.

Well, I do experiment a lot, but I also reach conclusions.

Hollywood is far more experimental in the way that it tests everything to not have any flaws at all. I’m just fascinated by different ways of showing what is impossible to show. It’s like poetry – if you want to talk about a tree, you don’t use that word. You use everything around the tree. So, the unseen attracts me a lot.

CFF: I’ll add another overlap, which might be that both films deal with postcards and letters. And adding to the conversation: for me and Radu, the archive is also something that didn’t exist. It was pretty difficult for us to assemble, because the institutions that should have hosted, stored, and maintained these materials are in many cases gone. Some of the broadcasting companies that aired these advertisements in the early ’90s are no longer in existence. Nor are some of the agencies, or even the clients who commissioned the material. Actually, there’s really no one [whose job it is] to host this sort of material. So, we had to go through all kinds of private collections that still contained some of it. And indeed, our dialogue with these materials played with this temporal aspect. Of course, the materials are important because they talk about this transition from communism to the capitalist world that we now experience every day.

At the same time, we also tried to play with them a bit, and make them talk about our own world and also hypothetically about stuff that is implicit in advertising.

Take the production of waste, for instance, or ecological concerns – those ideas weren’t really at the forefront in these films in the early ’90s, but they can be extracted from them, because they’re latently there. So yeah, the film starts with how advertisements represented our historic past, and it ends with an idea of the future.

RJ: Opt ilustrate probably took the longest of any of my films to make, from the moment we had the idea until it was fini-

shed. To add to Christian’s observations: when you deal with materials that belong to a certain age, they speak about that time; they become documents of that epoch.

Even if they were, let’s say, the most fictional material that you can have, like advertisements, they’re full of documentary details. Another thing to add, although it might sound a bit, how should I say it, pretentious, is André Bazin’s question: “What is cinema?” I think it’s a question of huge importance. I have the feeling, also judging from Edgar’s film, that it has become an even more pressing question today. Asking this question now can provoke answers that in many ways were not obvious in the ’50s or ’60s, or even a year ago, for that matter. I also belong to a generation that, maybe in a false way, obsessively asked, “How can you make films? How can you find funding? How can you make a living out of this profession?” That was an obsessive question decades ago, and it still is, even now. Luckily, some of the films that I’ve made recently have allowed me to relax in a certain way, because all of a sudden you discover that making cinema is not necessarily making a Hollywood film, nor is it necessarily making an “arthouse” film, if you want to use that word. You can take some material – a few photographs, maybe, like I’ve done in previous films, or some recordings from the internet, or you can generate images with AI – and all of a sudden you can create cinema. This is something that makes me feel free, or at least freer than I felt before. Cinema becomes something that is still not easy to make, but at least it is possible – and this is, for me, a very important thing to acknowledge.

HE: Both of you, Radu and Edgar, also seem to enjoy messing around with your materials. You both love a chaotic type of cinema with a rebellious spirit. Would you say there’s in each of your cases a strong pleasure principle in the creation of cinema?

RJ: Pleasure is obviously important, but it exists anyway – the making of anything generates some sort of pleasure, I guess. I’m sure Christian also has a lot of fun writing his books. For me, cinema is mostly a knowledge tool. I connect to the world – that which I can see and understand – through the basic tools of cinema, like montage. Then the source of the image doesn’t really matter; it can come from the internet, it can be short, it can be fictional, conventional, or documentary. It doesn’t matter, as long as this knowledge principle is involved, more so than the pleasure principle.

I don’t like this word, “arthouse”.

We simply make cinema.

Edgar Pêra

EP: I see it similarly. I just love to research. If I do a film about something, I can’t stop buying books about the subject matter. I think human beings are at their best when they share knowledge, at least when it’s knowledge for good.

And yes, I might start with completely wild material, but I’m an absolute control freak during the editing. So, those two worlds always collide. That’s how I learned to make films, fighting against the material. I did a film about the Portuguese revolution only using material from the archives, and I think it’s one of my most personal films to date. Freedom for me is the key thing. Because with freedom comes knowledge. Until I was 13, I lived under fascism. I knew that my father had to hide forbidden books under the bed, for instance. So, I understood that knowledge was crucial in the fight for freedom. In that sense everything revolves around the question of knowledge. We do things to know more.

HE: At the same time, both of you tend to present your material in a somewhat ironic way. Radu’s Sleep #2 is an especially ironic piece of cinema that plays with the lineage of Andy Warhol. How important is irony as a tool with which to treat the materials?

EP: I found it funny, because Andy Warhol himself would give prompts to his assistants to make art. So, in a way, he started it. You could go back to Walter Benjamin and his theories about the reproduction and the reproducibility of images. I see a connection in all these things. But please, Radu, keep talking, because I’m tired and get lost in my thoughts...

RJ: I’m always lost in my thoughts, so maybe it’s easier for me!

I think that in both Sleep #2 and Opt ilustrate, there are parts that can be considered ironical or can even be seen through a camp lens; I guess that’s just a part of the overall perspective on things. Because, for instance, with Sleep #2, apart from having this dialogue with

PARDO

Warhol at the beginning and making this kind of Warholian joke even about durational cinema, I think the film took on a life of its own. For me, it became a reflection on filmmaking as a process, revealing the nature of the internet and the nature of these digital images, including their poetical aspects. It’s a film about poetry, or a metaphysical poetry of passing time. It deals with this relationship with death, and with transformations in nature, but does it through this strong digital lens. It’s almost an impressionistic film at some level.

EP: I think irony is very important for us [as a tool] in staying away from dogma. When I put someone that I’m in sync with on an intellectual level in my films, most of the time I feel the urge to do something silly or out of context, so that you become more aware that it’s also just a point of view. So, for me, it’s really a way to fight dogma.

CFF: Just a quick note on this question of irony, because in our film, we had this issue that the materials were so silly and dumb most of the time that it was almost impossible to be ironic about them. What we did in part was actually try to bring out the serious stuff in them – discourses about death and sickness and transitivity and so on. You can see this as a sort of ironic reversal in itself, perhaps: taking them seriously and sort of exposing them that way.

RJ: It’s a post-irony film!

HE: Edgar, I also thought it was smart and ironic to bring AI into contact with Pessoa and Lovecraft. They both deal with the uncanny, and I’d say AI-generated imagery is pure uncanny valley. What was it like to use this tool as a critical reflection on the material you were dealing with?

EP: I think most of the things I’ve seen people do with AI is recreating stuff like Shrek and Avatar: colorful uniformity. I tried to find ways to create my own aesthetic algorithm, at the cost of generating thousands of images per day. Basically, I was working for the machine. But in that way, if I would write the prompt of a man, Fernando Pessoa would appear – like a guy with a mustache and all that – just because I’d written so many things about him already. In a way, I tried to tame the AI. RJ: Edgar, I have a question. The voiceovers are real actors, right?

EP: Yes. RJ: I’m curious why, because I was sure these were AI-generated voices as well.

EP: I wanted to work with human beings. I had a small budget, so I worked with the same amount of people that I would work with without AI. It’s very important to not make anyone lose their job during the process, just because of AI. That’s really important. But yes, it’s very unsettling to sometimes not recognize the actors, because the AI-image takes control of the voice. But that reflects the work of Fernando Pessoa, and Lovecraft’s phobias of the world.

RJ: I have a funny story about Lovecraft in the Romania of 1992.

I had just started high school and was getting into reading science fiction and fantasy books... Immediately after the revolution of 1989, like maybe one or two years later, there was a commercial, which we sadly couldn’t find for our film, but it had a kind of fake stone that was supposed to give you good luck, which was called the “Stone of Dagon”. It was like a craze for a few months.

And at the same time, a short story called “Dagon” by Lovecraft appeared. There was this girl I knew, who came to me with the book and said, “You know, my mother is crazy about the Dagon stone and also bought this book, because she thought it’d be the same thing.

And actually it’s not. So, if you want to, take it and read it.” I fell in love with this book. I was also a fan of Edgar Allan Poe at that time.

EP: I am named Edgar after Poe, because of my father.

RJ: I’m doing a Dracula movie now and I’m doing some parts of it with AI. Contrary to Edgar, I’m using it in a very trashy way, especially for the scenes we don’t have the money for. So basically, I am firing people to make the movie! But do you know, Edgar, that there is quite a huge backlash in the cinema and art world against using AI? People say AI is stealing jobs. So how do you feel about that? I actually say this because my film is called Dracula, and the principle of Dracula is to suck everything up.

EP: If I don’t have any money, then what’s the problem of using AI? I did a music video where I exploded Seoul, New York, and Lisbon without any money. So I don’t think that’s a problem. Also, when we talk about jobs being stolen, are we talking about Hollywood screenwriters or smaller artists?

RJ: Everybody, basically.

EP: Well, I am most concerned with the lives of people who are really living in hard times. So, I don’t really have an opinion. I know that AI can create some kind of Dracula, but in my personal case, I know what ethics come before that.

RJ: Well, I don’t care. I use whatever I can to make film.

HE: I think both of you showcase this liberatory potential of AI, especially on a creative level, whereas I also see a lot of homogenous examples of AI that make me wary of the future of image production.

EP: Well, it’s like a hammer. With a hammer you can do two things: kill someone or build a house. So, it all depends on the person who is using it.

◼ Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală

and Sleep #2 premiere Saturday, 10.8 at 14:30 at Palacinema 1

◼ Cartas Telepáticas premieres

today, 8.8 at 18:45 at Teatro Kursaal

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Resist the Impulse to be Liked:

Tim Blake Nelson

Ahead of this morning’s screening of Fuori Concorso selection Bang Bang, directed by Vincent Grashaw, Pardo spoke with star Tim Blake Nelson about his characteristically “full on” commitment to his role – and what taking on the real-life role of Concorso Internazionale jury member in Locarno means to him.

By Keva York

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All images from Bang Bang (2024)

im Blake Nelson will be a busy man at Locarno77 – he’s both the star of Bang Bang, playing the eponymous Bang, an embittered, foul-mouthed Detroit boxer, and a member of the Concorso Internazionale jury. When I called him up to discuss his doing double-duty at the Festival, the prolific, Juilliard-trained actor was fresh from the set of Captain America: Brave New World, his third trip to the Marvel universe, and already prepping for his next role.

In this case, that means learning the mandolin: “I was just practicing,” he tells me over Zoom, holding the instrument up to the camera. For his turn as the titular outlaw in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), Nelson picked up gun tricks; for his breakthrough role as Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou (2003), his first collaboration with the Coens, he learned to sing (and bagged a Grammy for his troubles). An unmistakable screen presence whether hamming it up hick-style or paring things right back as a hardened old soul – as in his star turn in slow-burn Western Old Henry (2021) – Nelson is not one to shy away from hard work.

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Keva York: I wanted to start by asking about what drew you to this role. You’ve played gunslingers, in Buster Scruggs and Old Henry (2021), but I don’t think you’ve played a boxer before, and I understand that you had some trepidation about doing so. What was it that convinced you that you could become Bang?

Tim Blake Nelson: Well, when a script comes my way that’s really good but I don’t think I can play the role, that interests me. On one hand, I need to do the movie a favor and urge them to find someone better suited to it. But on the other, I know the work that I’ll put into it, and the possibility that I’ll find inside of myself some version of the character no one else could excites me. Now, I think every actor brings to a role something no one else can, so that’s not a hubristic statement. Each of us is unique – no actor like another, ultimately. But I love directors, and I will always understand the actor’s job – whether the lead or in a supporting role – to be to serve the authorial vision. And so, if a director has a gut instinct about me playing a role, I don’t dismiss their impulse out of hand. And if I’m in, I’m all in. Of course, sometimes people are under the misapprehension that if I sign on to a movie, it’s gonna get made – and so they cynically offer me a role for which I’m not appropriate. When I sense that’s the case, I’ll say, “Find somebody else.” But in this case, there was a lot about the character with which I connected.

KY: Such as?

TBN: Specifically, his sense of having been wronged by life.

Now, I haven’t felt that way in about 35 years, but when I was really young, which is when one’s emotions really get defined, I was a self-pitying brat. I’ve spent decades trying to neutralize that stuff so that I can be a better citizen in the world – and yet, when I read the script, I identified with that on a gut level.

KY: I also see a connection between Bang and a couple of other lead roles you’ve played recently, being the titular character in Old Henry and Tom in Asleep in My Palm (2023). Even though they live in different worlds, all three are hard-bitten ascetics, living in the long shadow of their pasts. I wondered if you yourself saw these roles as being in conversation.

TBN: That’s a great question, and the answer is no, I never thought of it. I suppose that something that’s in me right now – some of it deep, but most of it superficial – has caused filmmakers to imagine me in these roles, but there has been no agenda on my part. One of them, of course, was written by my son, Henry [Nelson], in the case of Asleep in My Palm. He didn’t write the role for me originally, but then we ended up suiting the role for me when we decided that I was going to play it. I guess that’s a common theme in these movies – I’m at a point now where I’m known enough as an indie film actor that fascinating roles come to me, and filmmakers want to engage me not just as an actor, but as a producer – because I’m getting on in years, which also means that I know a lot about making movies and helping to guide them toward distribution. Being someone who’s not afraid to commit in that way, roles come my way often that other actors have rejected.

With Bang Bang, I think I was the fifth actor they approached. What distinguished me from those other actors they wanted more than me was that those other actors just weren’t interested in the commitment that this role involved – not only in preparing, which was a whole thing that involved months of five and then six days a week boxing training, learning a difficult dialect and an enormous number of lines, and then going to some tough emotional places. But also, when you’re the lead, you don’t just take a hike once the movie’s been made. You’re full on, it becomes years of your life. I love that, it’s what I want to do. And Vincent Grashaw is not only a wonderful filmmaker, but he really understands boxing, because he has not only boxed himself, but he has that in his family history; the writer, Will Janowitz, spent years developing this script – but these guys aren’t making any money off this movie. They’re committed to this as an art form – and those are the people for whom I want to give my all. Thankfully, a lot of other guys are less interested in that, and so I ended up with this role.

KY: This is not a ‘training for the big fight’ kind of film, which a lot of films in the boxing canon are. Nevertheless, I wondered if you had turned to any boxing films for inspiration or instruction in forming this character…

TBN: Every movie is in conversation with all the other movies, and I am not one who shuns that influence. When others have assayed a particular genre or type of character, I pursue an understanding of that, rather than shield myself. I trust myself enough to leave that stuff behind once I’m on set, and to play a scene with my partner in the aesthetic vernacular of the movie. But there’s no way that I could have played this role without having spent a lot of time rewatching Fat City (1972). My character has nothing to do with Jeff Bridges or Stacy Keach’s depictions of boxers, but I believe that the spirit and the concerns of that movie are similar to those of Bang Bang. So yeah, I watched boxing movies, and I think you need to do that ­– and the boxing movie, like the prison movie, or the vampire movie, or the Western, offers constraints that are inherently metaphorical. All the differences between one of these movies and another allow them to articulate a specific philosophy; they’re venues for worldviews.

KY: For all his prickliness, Bang is a weirdly magnetic character – he’s not likeable in any conventional sense, but you’ve managed to make him endearing somehow, or at least, you find yourself rooting for him to have some kind of breakthrough...

TBN: There’s this wonderful director named Mark Wing-Davey with whom I’ve done a lot of plays, and one of the great lessons he taught me was to resist the impulse to be liked in your relationship with the audience. It’s great to

do that with characters – of course your character might want to charm another, be liked by another – but don’t be caught doing that with an audience. It was a very helpful lesson to learn early on and extremely useful with Bang Bang.

KY: You’ve done a lot of work as a character actor, but increasingly you’ve been taking on lead man duties – as in this film, and in Old Henry and Asleep in My Palm. I wanted to ask whether you approached these bigger roles differently, beyond just having to learn more lines.

We’ve talked about the ways in which you’ve helped to guide productions, so that would be part of it, right?

TBN: The main difference is that, when you’re a lead – particularly in a small movie, but this applies to larger movies as well – the acting contingent looks to you and the way you behave, and mostly, they follow that. If the lead actor is a pain in the ass and is making all sorts of demands, many of the other actors are going to do that too. Not all of them – I never have, but a lot of the people around me have. Conversely, when an actor is encouraging fealty to the director’s vision and an esprit de corps and a graciousness with the crew, everybody gets on board. So that’s really the main thing – and then the other is, who are you going to be once the movie is done? As a filmmaker, I’ve been heartbroken when actors – supporting actors, no lead has ever done this with me – have not shown up to help out with promotion. But as the lead, that’s really part of the deal; you support the movie.

KY: You bring a real lived-in grittiness to the character of Bang, but a bunch of your best-known characters are comedic ones – like Buster Scruggs, or Delmar in O Brother, or Mr. Pendanski in Holes (2003). You’ve played both drama and comedy with great aplomb, but do you have a preference for one or the other? Does one idiom come more naturally, or give you more of a feeling of enrichment?

TBN: I’m led by really good writing. All those projects you just mentioned started with wonderful scripts, with wonderfully unique and challenging characters who demand a lot of the actors playing them. After that, it really doesn’t make a difference to me what the genre is. I follow the writing with the guidance of a director who’s going to tell me when I’m off the beam and also watch me, to extend the metaphor, when I want to try particular dramatic gymnastics – and that’s pretty much it. It’s why I went to drama school – so that I could be any color of paint on anyone’s palate. My mother gave me a great piece of advice when I was headed off to college: she said, “Look at your intellectual life as a series of meals in an array of restaurants, from fast food to the three-star Michelin spots that maybe you’ll end up in a couple of times in your life. College is about learning how to read all those menus.” That has stuck with me. I’ve passed it on to my boys, and that’s the way I approached drama school; that’s why I trained for four years as an actor after having done four years of college.

KY: In addition to representing Bang Bang here in Locarno, you’re also a member of the Concorso Internazionale jury. You’ve worked across a range of film production roles – as an actor, producer, screenwriter, and director – but how do you feel about being on the flipside of the process, as a kind of critic, essentially?

TBN: After having been in competition at Sundance and being childishly bitter for not having won the Grand Jury Prize when it really would have made a difference for the future of my film, I vowed I would never be on a jury.

I didn’t want anyone to ever feel about me the way that I felt about that jury for not having given me a prize – but I’ve grown up now, and I recognize that, even though I didn’t win, somebody else did, and it advantaged their movie. Not everybody can win a prize – but, by serving on a jury, if you’re sensitive and careful and fair, then the possibility of really helping a film reach a broader audience or in some cases get distribution at all makes it worth doing. And finally, I’m really excited to see these movies from all over the world that have been selected for a competition at one of the planet’s more esteemed festivals.

When you’re the lead, you don’t just take a hike once the movie’s been made. You’re full on, it becomes years of your life. I love that, it’s what I want to do. ◼ Bang Bang will screen for the first time today, 8.8 at 11:00 at La Sala

PARDO

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Piazza Audience, 1999

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TIPS: OGRE, DONKEY, DREAMWORKS, FRIENDSHIP

FILL IN THE GAPS AND GUESS THE MOVIE TITLE Using the clues fill out the five-letter title of a classic movie.

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Reinas

by Klaudia Reynicke

August 8th, 21:30, Piazza Grande

Reinas — Illustration of the film by Soña Lee

Vote for the Prix du Public UBS

◼ The voice of the audience is key for a film’s success. That’s why since 2000, the Festival’s most trusted jury – the audience – decides which film wins the Prix du Public UBS award. ◼ Vote for your favorite film at the Piazza Grande with the QR code or the link on your e-ticket. ◼ All participants have a chance to win Festival Passes for Locarno78 (6-16 August 2025) and enter the final prize draw for an exciting holiday in Switzerland!

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