At IFFR with his new film Me and You, cinema legend Bernardo Bertolucci relaxes with friends at Directors’ Drinks in de Doelen on Thursday evening.
photo: Nadine Maas
Notes from the underground Legendary Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, in Rotterdam this week to present his new feature Me and You (screening in Spectrum), was in playful and reflective mood as he looked back over his career. By Geoffrey Macnab
“I am a case of arrested development. I am still aged between 14 and 17”, Bertolucci joked when asked why Me and You (lo e te) – like its 2003 predecessor The Dreamers – is about rebellious adolescents, living apart from the adult world. “The other reason why I like very young people – the boy (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) was 14 when we shot – is that you see time passing. You see that not only young people are changing all the time. You see them growing up in front of the camera … I feel more free with adolescent characters.” Me and You is based on a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti (who also worked on the screenplay). Antinori plays Lorenzo, a truant teenager who hides out in the basement of his parents’ home when he is supposed to be on a school skiing trip. Tea Falco plays his glamorous, heroin-addicted older half-sister who joins him in his hidden, underground world. Bertolucci describes the young femme fatale as “a little Marlene Dietrich from Sicily.”
Fast and loose
The 72-year-old acknowledged that he originally intended to shoot Me and You in 3D, but reconsidered when he realized how cumbersome the equipment would be. “The process was too slow. Every time you change a lens, you have to stop because there are two cameras”, the Italian auteur sighs. “Often, my relationships with directors of photography are based on whether they are fast or not. I do a shot and that gives birth to another shot and then to another shot. Everything is like that.” Bertolucci also considered making the film digitally but thought better of that too. “The definition of digital, the focus, is so implacable that I felt shooting in digital was like killing all the art of impressionism, because of this definition.” Waking up
Me and You is Bertolucci’s first film back in Italy in many years. He describes Italian cinema as having been in “a long, long coma.” Only now, thanks to younger directors like Matteo Garrone (whose latest feature, Reality, screens in Rotterdam) and Paulo Sorrentino, is Italian film culture wakening from its slumbers. “It looks like Italian cinema is better every time there is a political constriction or something to fight against”,
he says, invoking memories of the glory days of Neo-Realism after World War II. “Paisa, or Open City, or De Sica doing Bicycle Thieves”, he lists films in which audiences began to feel, for the first time, that “the camera has been taken away from the studio and taken into the street to (film) real people.” Keep on rolling
A few years ago, Bertolucci was quoted in the press as saying that he didn’t want to make any more movies. “I never said that I don’t want to do any more movies”, he protests at the idea that he had contemplated retirement. “I couldn’t move any more. I couldn’t walk. I started to be in a wheelchair. That, maybe, was the moment I couldn’t do any more movies. I thought, ok, it is finished. Let’s do or become something else.” His attitude changed once he realised that he could still do the job from his wheelchair. “The only difference is that the bit of the camera instead of at eye height would be at chair height.” The director knew his limits – one reason why Me and You appealed so much as a project was that there were not many locations. Almost the entire movie is set in the basement where the boy is hiding out. Bertolucci relished being back at work and is even able to joke about being in a wheelchair. He tells a story
INTERNATIONAL film festival rotterdam
about his friend, the late Gilbert Adair (scriptwriter of The Dreamers) seeing him give a Q&A at the BFI Southbank in London. He was cracking lots of jokes and the audience was laughing wildly. Adair told him at the end of the Q&A: “Oh, you have a new gig now – you can be a stand-up comedian!” When he picked up a lifetime achievement award at the European Film Academy Awards in Malta, Bertolucci even quipped that in his wheelchair-using state, he might feature in Untouchable: Part 2. Closing in
This isn’t Bertolucci’s first visit to Rotterdam. He remembers (“even if it is in the fog”) coming here for a screening of his 1968 film Partner starring Pierre Clementi. (The film featured a song composed by Ennio Morricone but sung by Dutch performer Peter Boom.) Having made Me and You, Bertolucci is keen to keep on working (although he won’t say much specific about future projects). The new film is again likely to be a chamber piece. After all, the Italian director says, he relishes tight spaces. “I like to be in a ‘huis clos’, as the French say, a closed location. One place. It is something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia but, for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia … I love it!”