Original subtitles

Think about the end. First of all, in the end.

Now, "the end", says Bresson, is this canvas.

That smooth canvas on which we cast shadows, precisely.

The end is not the scene represented by the performers and photographed,

just as the end, for a painter, is not nature that inspires him,

but, yes, a canvas with colors on top.

It's a movie?

Why do you make movies?

Sometimes I really don't know.

When you have a lot of doubts...

and is very desperate,

thinks it's totally unwise to do anything,

but maybe it's just to tell

what is happening around us,

or maybe to have something to show the grandchildren, I don't know.

I really do not know.

And I like making movies.

When you realize you're doing something,

in that instant when you are creating,

that indeed there is a spark, there is a living thing in that moment

It's a huge pleasure and it's a moment when you reach...

even in your personal mediocrity, attain extraordinary genius

in all areas of creation.

I'm not talking about cinema, nor emphasizing the shot,

anything, let it be an act of creation, and that precise moment...

But that, is soon lost, dries up.

And, when it dries, it resolves, only the object remains.

The act of creating is always superior to the created object.

And that's what I think makes us always look for...

When you get into this addiction to create, you can't stop anymore, can you?

Because what you do, dries up.

So you're always looking for fresh ink

to do it again, to stay alive.

This thing of doing, which is the mystery of creation...

Today, I realize that you do,

because you don't know what it is.

You do it to find out what it is.

May it be that force that exceeds you and disturbs you

and what drives you to do something.

Now, you do, not in the sense...

therapeutic, that this will tame you, make you...

No, you do it precisely so that this confusion multiplies,

so that your anguish increases.

Now, this process is unconscious.

And that's his strength.

He is oblivious to you.

There's something that can happen, it doesn't always happen,

something can happen

in this artifact that we organized,

that exceeds everyone's ability and will to organize.

Something happens there.

And I think that's what makes someone want to make a movie.

When I finish making a film, I don't ever want to make films again.

But then it comes back, because it's like a drug.

Something that maybe, not always, not in every scene or shot,

but when it happens it is very revealing.

We have a reality around us

and we have many human conflicts,

many personal problems,

and many things.

And we have a camera

and we have a chance to show it.

For me, films are mainly images, rhythm,

human faces, eyes and lots of meta-communication.

You know, after 33 years,

what I did in the world of cinema, or movies...

After these 33 years, I really don't know anything about movies.

When I was young and I made my first, second, fifth movies,

I knew all about movies. But now, after 30 years...

It's pretty.

It's nice.

The plan is an infinitesimal part of what you mean, isn't it?

And, at the same time, being an infinitesimal part

there's so much to say in the plan,

that you are always between this contradiction of doing a tiny little thing

to mean a lot, and this tiny little thing has to say a lot.

So, it's in the process... Of course that basic plan thing,

that scripted part of the plan

that matches the script you wrote,

that verbalizes and that describes, this is very easy,

anyway, it's there within the plan whatever, good or bad,

but the metalanguage that a plan must have,

that which is not inscribed in that part, shall we say, visible on the plane,

the sensitive, sensory part,

the part that comes from the light, the sweat, the epidermis, the look,

of behavior, of the imponderables.

Capturing that which is the most fundamental part

and it's the one that I always have the feeling that escapes me,

you look for plan by plan to get.

A plan is, at the same time, a great pleasure

and great frustration.

With you already in practice, I managed to see a few times

you begin to decoupage, that is, to devise the plan

backwards, that is, from the end to the beginning.

Because?

IT IS...

Because I need to know where I'm going.

Only in death do we find the meaning of life.

And the plan will die at that moment.

I have to know how the plan dies

for me to know how he should be born and how he should go on.

Listen!

Shoot to kill.

Start with the heads.

If some bastard hides inside the house,

you get in behind and shoot everything that moves!

Lieutenant, there are only five of us. And they have the rifles you gave them.

Except they're armed with blanks, asshole!

They will fall like rabbits.

Start the fireworks, go!

Bullets are fake.

- Attack! - Let's go! We will!

- Let's destroy everything! - Attack!

Toma!

To frame is to include or exclude?

- Undoubtedly it is to exclude. - Because?

Because framing is already, in a way, selecting.

It's like a surgical process, you're excising from reality.

Now filming...

There is no type of narrative that is not linked to the act of becoming,

to the act of living in time. Narrative does not exist without time.

So, since the narrative does not exist without time

when you're uprooting,

somehow you're freezing,

it's taking pieces of time and it's trapping them.

What is alive within the plan is what follows,

is what is outside of it.

In fact, it is today, yesterday and tomorrow.

And yesterday and tomorrow are outside the frame, they cannot enter the frame.

The painting is eternally the present.

All the expectations that have been generated so far,

which is the future of the next frames,

and all the frames we've seen, present in our memory,

what I have in the cinema is pure present.

Because cinema, for me, is very close to the body in that,

in that experience.

The future exists in desire

and the past, as I remember that they left me, that they loved me,

the past is present.

In fact, for the body there is only the present.

If I show a picture of a crime, of a knife entering a heart,

the blood might impress me a little, but nothing happens.

But if up to that point, I know who has the knife, if I know who it is...

If I have a relationship with the victim, that frame, that moment has a value.

So it seems to me that the picture is the present,

in the sense that it condenses the past and the future.

Furthermore, it is the issue of visibility.

We, poor animals that we are,

we have hearing and sight as our basic sense.

It turns out that by a historical process,

that it is not interesting to analyze now,

it so happens that the gaze has become deeply linked to space.

And the ear became deeply tied to time.

We have difficulties thinking of space in temporal terms,

how we couldn't put time in visual terms.

So, that's why cinema is a wonderful form of expression,

because it basically works with moving space

and with time in the sound,

and outside the frame, the sound, because the sound is never inside the frame,

except in that more limited character verbalization,

but all other sounds escape the limitation of the frame.

So, we have a path of time and space that are in constant dialogue,

in which the time of the sound is always influencing the space of the frame,

and giving the dimension of yesterday and tomorrow.

That's why we accept it very easily.

this absolutely anachronistic thing, within the most realistic films,

within the most rational people,

to have music, musical scores within the films.

Which is the most unrealistic thing there is, isn't it?

But why? 'Cause we need the sound

so we can walk through time.

Are you okay, old man?

You can't imagine what it means to me.

-Hearing this? -I do not listen anything.

You do not understand.

This song is my whole life. All my life.

She me... Are you listening?

One day I was at home. I was playing this.

She was by my side. She was a magnificent, beautiful woman.

I took her hand and stroked it over it.

And I said, "Do you love me?"

She said, "no."

So I bought the disc. This song me...

It's a mass hysteria inside me.

One day I was at home, I put the record on the turntable, like this...

It went round and round and round in my head.

She was by my side. She was not the same woman, she was another.

It wasn't pretty like the first one, it was...

I took your hand

and caressed it underneath, to change it up a bit.

And I said, "Do you love me?"

She said, "Yes, yes."

I didn't love her, so I broke the record.

Clap.

recording.

Action.

If I'm just thinking about the image,

I see very little.

The sound for me was the key to the construction of the plan,

for scene design. So, in the script itself,

I feel better able to imagine a scene sonically,

and I write and organize myself from there, rather than from a visual point of view.

I have the impression that...

It's an idea... Can I get a paper?

Sim.

This is how I recycle scripts

when I'm a juror.

Behind it must be the magnificent work of some young director.

When we think of time, we think of an arrow, right?

- Yes. - Here would be the beginning and here, the end.

The look is represented in the same way.

If I make a person looking at something,

and I want to make it completely clear that the person is looking at that,

I do like this.

So the time and the look

are very connected to this idea of ​​the arrow.

Cause, consequence.

If we were more based on sound...

Sound emanates in all directions

and it doesn't give as strong an idea of ​​directionality as the look.

I think of the script as a swimming pool,

and the spectator is immersed in it.

It's like a movie theater, the surface of the water is the screen.

And the idea is that the sound of the film modifies this entire space.

To me, when someone says a movie has atmosphere,

what you're realizing is that it wasn't built in a temporal sense

like an arrow, but along other lines.

I'll be back.

If we want to find the gap in reality,

if we want to question the legitimacy of reality,

we should think about things that are not so consensual.

Because this arrow of time...

As early as 1905, physics showed us a more complex concept of time.

There is no law of physics that determines the direction of time.

You never saw a broken cup come back

and spontaneously reconstitute itself on top of a table,

only the laws of physics allow that to happen. And it doesn't.

Nowadays, physicists think that the reason this doesn't happen is

is a law of thermodynamics called the Law of Entropy.

Which has to do with the tendency of certain physical systems

to occupy the most likely state.

What determines the arrow of time,

for physicists, that's it. Nature tends towards the most probable state,

and not for the most unlikely,

but it has no laws of physics... The laws of relativistic mechanics

or quantum mechanics, as far as I know, are time reversible.

You can move forward or backward in time as the laws work.

And no one can explain it right,

deep down, no one knows how to explain why time goes in one direction.

I don't think the concept of movie time

has a lot to do with physics' concept of time.

Evidently, the spectator sits down to watch the film already knowing what time it is.

You know what time your session will start and what time it will end.

Time is part of cinema. Normal time, physical time, isn't it?

But within the story,

we can suspend it and...

and play with it.

And that's one of the most enjoyable things about cinema.

Time no longer has meaning.

When we watch your movies,

plane time is like real life time.

Is not true.

- It's a trick. - Trick.

Is not true.

I'm playing with time.

That's it.

Only that.

Time is a dimension of our life

and everything is happening in time.

E...

Okay, most movies

exclude time and...

they just want to know the stories, you know?

Action, cut, action, cut, action, cut.

But then you lose

many things you can have in life.

And I believe that real art has to be closer to life

than from the market.

That's it.

I find it impossible to talk about it, because it's like talking about the air.

When you're breathing...

Can you tell why you're breathing?

Because you need air.

And if you're still alive,

you have space and you have time.

When you die, it's over,

but i really don't know,

and I really don't want to make any philosophical constructions.

When I was young, I wanted to be a philosopher,

but I really don't want to be a philosopher anymore and I never...

I am a simple and pure filmmaker,

and I really don't want to do anything ideological

or any creation over time and space.

Making movies is one thing,

philosophy is another.

We see the world as a long shot,

a long plan from birth to death.

It's the longest plan we can have.

And that's why, it's...

How time changes...

That's the most important part of cinematography, for me, is making...

show how the weather

happens in our lives.

I can give an example of this.

In the Vedas, the sacred writings

of the indian people,

have a sentence

on the time scale.

Says: "If you watch the mountains carefully"

and this is important: "with care". "If you look at the mountains carefully,

you can see that the mountains undulate

much like the waves of the sea."

And if you do a...

What it means?

The interpretation of this sentence may be that only the time scale

is different between the ripple of the mountains and the waves,

the real waves that ripple in the sea.

The time scale is different. And the long plans, for me,

can give the opportunity to see the world in this way,

can open

imagination in this way.

Personally, I prefer the long shots.

On the one hand, we live in a complete space,

and the complete space can show the natural charm of time.

On the other hand, the long shot does not force the viewer

to watch any part in particular

and does not interrupt the characters' continuous movement.

This is a form of democracy.

Shows both respect for the characters

as for the spectators.

It is respectful to both parties.

When you want to show the spirit of democracy and freedom,

I think long shots are important.

Second, I think there is beauty in the long shot.

My understanding of the long plan also comes from my life experience.

I remember when I was young I had nothing to do

and stood on the street watching people pass by.

A beautiful girl passed in front of me.

Time passed and I stood there, watching.

Then the girl was gone, disappeared from my sight.

A while later, she came back and walked in front of me again.

Then I realized that she also had nothing to do.

I had nothing to do and I had a lot of free time,

and that was a collective destiny of the young.

If there were no continuous time,

our sense of life would become weaker.

I really like time in movies where it seems to have no use.

Because in fact our life is a long process of spending free time,

time that is useless.

Why do you shoot long shots?

First, because I hate the editing room

and I don't want to spend so much time here.

But for a practical reason, if you make a long plan,

you have a different voltage.

Because an actor can walk into the room and say "hi" and then we cut,

and he'll just concentrate for those five seconds.

But if you put someone in a scene that takes six or seven minutes,

there, he has no way to represent,

he has to be

and this is a big difference.

I hate it when someone is impersonating,

but if someone is just being,

It's a real thing, it's...

I can see it in the person's eyes when it's really happening,

when something happens between two people and I see the tension,

I see the relationship, I see many things.

You don't need much knowledge,

doesn't need much dramaturgy,

because you have something called life.

And, of course, there are other things in the long shot.

What do you mean by long plans?

We make cuts within the plane,

If not, how do I move the camera?

Sometimes the image is zooming in and then I go to the close-up,

then we go to another wide image.

It is also cut, but we are not cutting here,

we are cutting no set

and we're cropping on camera.

I remember when I was young

I heard a phrase from Jean-Luc Godard, he said:

"The real filmmaker cuts on camera."

Suddenly he forgot, but I didn't!

I think rhythm is the main thing we deal with

in a movie, because...

In a way, it's all you have.

The words, the actions, the camera, the soundtrack

they are all rhythmic situations.

The fundamental question, whether of a film or any work of art,

it's a matter of rhythm.

- Rhythm. - Swing.

- Rhythm. - Rhythm. This is imperative.

The unconventional plan is a convention.

You do unconventional, because you have a parameter with a convention.

Now the unconventional plan, the unexpected plan,

the plan, in that new sense...

what does he bring that is curious

it is a new relationship of language, a new relationship of looking.

In that sense, it provokes something like laughter.

It is a point where you get to where thought cannot get.

As in poetry. Common place.

Poetry is made of the commonplace,

but novelty achieves a new relationship in these commonplaces.

There is in Brazilian cinema a film that when I discovered,

in the early 70's,

and that it was the film that guided me a lot and disoriented me a lot.

Que é o Limite, by Mário Peixoto.

Limit is a recreation, a transcreation

of the Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s.

The film was made in 1930.

It's a movie, let's say it's almost an epigon,

because it's done at the end of it.

It configures the sign of the self, cinema,

in a single plan and that you only have in the Limit .

There is no other avant-garde film from those years that has this.

That is a camera in hand,

resource used since the birth of cinema,

and always at eye level.

At the Limit, there is a transgression.

The camera in the eye is placed at floor height.

And she goes on walking in a blunt plane.

It follows the main character, who is a woman,

until a certain moment when she leaves.

The camera abandons everything, abandons the stage, abandons the actor,

drop the costumes, drop everything,

take all these trinkets out of the cinema

to film only light and movement.

So, it is at a time when the cinema leans, leans over itself.

Limit is "axed"

inside a braid, is an Abel Gance formulation.

Who said that cinema is the music of light.

In my opinion, this is the interpretation I make of this phrase by Gance,

cinema is reduced to a frame,

to a transparent frame, in which light passes through it.

So, the shadow is what organizes the image.

So, the shadow is music, because everything that organizes is music,

this, according to a musical principle, is even defended by Stravinsky.

And this formulation already involves two concepts that will be later, in philosophy,

two key concepts for film thinking:

That cinema is the movement-image and time-image.

Do you remember the first movie you saw, Ariano?

- I remember. - What's up?

I had a bad impression of the cinema, I found the film "extremely boring",

called Gold Diggers.

I've never seen anything worse in my life.

I found it "extremely boring", do you understand?

I was obsessed with the movies for a long time.

because of this bastard in that movie.

The only thing I remember is a scene...

There were chorus girls, the gold diggers were chorus girls.

And they taking out of boxes, those hat boxes,

feather hats one after the other,

but boy, I've never seen anything worse in my life.

My great-aunt was a person... She wasn't...

It's even mean what I'm going to say, but I have to tell you.

She wasn't known for a very bright intelligence, no.

She arrived here, from the sertão, and my mother highlighted me

to take her to see the Arte Palácio cinema,

which was the most luxurious cinema at the time here.

Then the movie started. When it started,

it was a horror movie with Boris Karloff.

The film was set in a small country town in the United States.

and Boris Karloff represented a teacher who was "highly esteemed."

And a killer gorilla appeared, a hideous gorilla,

in the Jack the Ripper line.

When I saw it, the police managed to surround the gorilla and, with a machine gun,

strafing the gorilla and he would drop dead.

And the cinema in silence, because there they arrived with the gorilla,

lifted the mask, and when they did, it was the teacher.

When he discovered the professor's face, in that total silence of the cinema,

Yaia said to me:

"Oh Arianinho, now I understand! The bear had swallowed the man!"

What is cinema for you?

Cinema is something that passes, crosses.

It is not a synthesis of anything, it is not the seventh art.

In my opinion, cinema is something that crosses,

which has the meaning of "trans".

He passes...

He goes through things, he makes himself through things.

Cinema is a representation, it is a way of representing

quite complex and has many elements

that you can use to build your representation

and it is different from language, because cinema, it does not represent

by virtue of a convention.

That's why it's not a language.

It represents much more directly than a convention.

If I take a camera and film the sunset,

I don't need any convention.

There's the sunset.

Cinema may not be a language and it may not also be a language,

but he is a movement and a unique organism

able to record...

some movements of thought,

some thought processes

and also create an illusion of another temporality.

That's the strength of cinema.

I think the most interesting thing about cinema is its ability to falsify.

'Cause the only way to fight

an arbitrariness as the reality so consensual and legitimized,

is with a tool that can generate falsehood

and that it is based on falsehood.

I think the enemy of cinema is the truth.

That's the enemy.

I like movies that don't believe in reality

as something that exists objectively,

that film making us doubt what surrounds us. Love it.

It seems to me that this is politically the most interesting thing that cinema can do.

And it can be with any genre, any kind of film.

Do you know what is the best of cinema?

It's just that in the cinema you can do whatever you want.

If you're telling a story, if it's fiction,

the drama elements are very important,

because you deal with characters, with narrative,

with conflicts, with the language,

with the resolution of a conflict.

All these things that come from literature are very important.

I could not underestimate the influences of the great writers of the past.

And it sounds pretentious when a filmmaker mentions these names,

because it looks like it's claiming some degree of similarity.

Still, for me, Shakespeare...

the drama began with Shakespeare.

the stories of history,

the range of social characters.

And the idea of ​​tragedy, of the tragic error of the character,

the inevitable march to disaster.

I think the starting point is the most important.

Some people have images, others have stories in their heads.

when they start to design a project

and I always started making movies out of stories.

There's one thing I noticed with my last movie called Womb.

I wrote that story for nearly five years,

I did thirteen treatments,

then I became a film director

for thirty-five days,

because I filmed my last job in thirty-five days.

So, if you compare, you can understand what I mean.

Why can't we make a cinema without words?

- Always has the word. - Oh, I think we can do it.

always make cinema without words.

Which wordless movie do you think the image completes itself?

Do you remember any? Yours or someone else's?

I think Kenneth Anger movies are like that.

They are films without words and that are only images.

I think Stan Brakhage movies are like that.

I think all experimental cinema is like that,

a cinema that does not need words, that it is made by the image,

and sometimes by image and sound.

But don't you think the classics,

think that these filmmakers you just mentioned,

they consider more a plastic artist,

a performer than a filmmaker?

I think it's a bit to belittle and say that this kind of cinema is not cinema.

I think cinema is an absolutely plural thing,

and that is an audiovisual expression, understand? Then...

Whether he tells a story or not is a mere historical detail, isn't it?

Because there was a certain moment that the cinema that was privileged

it was a cinema that tells a story, but I think that cinema,

even, he is much more interesting when he expresses something

when he tells a story.

- Cut no. - Cut no, continue.

Close everything.

We cannot forget that the cinema

it is a popular art, first of all, it starts there.

Narrative cinema, specifically,

starts out as a folk art and I think there's a desire

to walk into a movie theater and be entertained in some way

with a code that was known when cinema began to be narrative,

which was the code of the 19th century novel.

So I think that cinema for many years...

I think the beginnings of cinema were by no means tied to that.

When you see French cinema from the 20's, from the 10's,

in no way related to the narrative,

but I think that narrative cinema was a cinema that adapted

to a number of 20th century needs, one of which was entertainment.

I think this cinema was victorious because of that,

but I think that this cinema is a cinema that is eternally changing.

Narrative cinema is also a cinema that has been transformed,

I think today he is somewhere else

which was where he was initially victorious, you know?

Which is in talkies, which is in the 30s.

I think that today we are in another place in the cinema.

I think that more and more these borders, between plastic arts, cinema, sound...

I mean, nowadays there are soundscapes, audiovisual installations...

I think that more and more...

while increasing,

because I think there is an industry that is gigantic,

which is the film and television industry,

but at the same time more and more

we have forms of expression that are hybrid,

and that incorporate the cinema, understand? And that cinema embodies sound,

and that are experiences that are not just sitting and watching a screen.

So I'm very optimistic about that,

I think we are in a very messy moment of the image. I think it's good.

A film is always born from somewhere in the director's imagination.

and it is tested on the screen and in the imagination of those who are going to see it in the cinema.

After the war, that terrible war of 1945,

no one would have imagined that a cinema like Italian neorealism would emerge.

A director is lonely, because he does one thing that is...

He discovers in himself

an intuition of what the audience wants to see.

And often get it wrong. It's a big risk.

I have to convince people to give me money,

actors to act, to build giant sets,

rent a studio, in a deep belief that someone is waiting for this movie.

I remember a story about Fellini,

who was very ashamed of his father,

who was a market vendor in Rimini, was a cheese seller.

He was ashamed to show his father's profession to his friends.

And fifty years later,

account when I was in Los Angeles trying to sell a movie,

he looked between his legs and he had five cans of film,

with the same shape as the cheese her father sold at the fair in Rimini.

So, you never stop selling your cheese.

I sold watches, I sold graveyard graves,

I sold the encyclopedia Britannica, I sold silk dresses,

I sold balloon sweaters, pantsuits , I sold a dick to four

and I keep selling myself, so I can keep making movies.

It took a while, but the studios became

part of corporate structures that were much larger

than the studios themselves,

belonging to monopolies, to large conglomerates.

So I think what we have today is

an even more developed corporate model

ventures to make money.

It looks a bit like a McDonald's sandwich:

It's simple, it solves the problem.

These films are not responsible for anything.

They are only responsible for the box office and billing.

Commitment is simply pleasing the public at its worst.

They know people might like that and they don't care if that

whether or not people like it.

That is to say, he has no desire to establish a dialogue.

Has simply the desire to flatter

for the object to be consumed and purchased.

That, to me, is "films".

These are films that have nothing to do with cinema.

Cinema, for me, is something else.

It is an aesthetic act and, being aesthetic, it is necessarily political.

Being a politician, you have to choose your political behavior.

It's an act of life, it's an act of living, it's an act of relating to people,

it is an act of self-transformation and the transformation of others.

It is an act of pleasure to be alive, to say and to count,

and choosing things, isn't it?

There is nothing free in the act of living.

There's nothing free about filmmaking.

- It's a way of thinking. - Yeah, but thinking is also that thing...

people think what to think

it's to stop, take Rodin's attitude, fold your arms and think.

Thinking is not that.

Think, you think with all your skin, think by smelling,

thinks without knowing what he's thinking, thinks laughing,

thinks listening to things that he does not understand or that he understands or thinks he has understood

or that you think you didn't understand

and ended up understanding more than the one who thinks he understood.

Thinking is a much broader thing.

Godard said that a camera movement

It was an ethical decision, wasn't it?

Or morals, I don't know.

I agree with that, that...

It's very difficult to talk about it,

because it ends up stigmatizing this cinema as an intellectual.

As if it's not intellectual to make Pretty Woman,

thinking about each turning point, ten minutes to introduce the character,

as if that wasn't intellectual, wasn't thought.

So, talking about these things is difficult because they say: "Oh, everything is thought out..."

But any construction decision made in cinema

implies a philosophy about perception,

about reality, about what is or is not legitimate.

In general, I like directors who...

Yeah, they allow...

that when you see the movie, you feel like the world has gotten bigger,

more complex, richer...

And that doesn't happen to me seeing Jennifer Aniston, to get back to her.

Poor thing, she must have suffered a lot with Brad Pitt.

That doesn't happen to me watching those comedies whose only purpose

is to make love triumph, as if the couple were good

and the family was...

the paradise of civilization.

What is now called a script, this was a created thing

When did cinema begin to industrialize

for the producers to control the film, the cost...

and, above all, the film convention.

Because cinema began to be made without a script, there was no script.

And then you came to something that was a guide,

you had some notes for that to guide you.

You make the movie by looking at a sheet of paper.

That is...

One thing that suggests this is a funny thing.

The studio wants to know what the script is, he fights over the script

and he takes the movie from you if he thinks the movie isn't working,

that it will go wrong and you will lose money, no matter who you are. He does that.

But deep down the studio is also very vulnerable to the director.

There's a lot of writer and director in Hollywood

who wants to make his film, wants to tell the story his way.

And want to make the movie...

I want 100 million dollars to make my movie.

I want this, everyone wants it. Who doesn't?

Give me 100 million dollars to make my movie.

The guy wants to make the movie.

And on the other side is the studio

who wants to sell a movie. He wants to catch a movie...

Now, for the studio to sell the film,

he needs to have actors, right? Famous actors and such.

Famous actors want to work with directors they think are good,

who are the original guys.

So Leonardo DiCaprio will shoot with Scorsese.

There, there is already a question, a fair exit for the studio.

Hang on, but Scorsese won't want to make my movie,

he will want to make his movie.

So, this relationship between authorial cinema and commercial cinema

is at the heart of Hollywood

since the beginning, since Charles Chaplin.

Scorsese said that sentence and I thought it was brilliant.

He spoke the other day in the United States:

"The filmmaker who works with films for the mass audience made in the studio

is a guy who tries to smuggle in ideas."

we are living now

a social system called capitalism

and the logic is quite simple:

If you have capital, you invest in business

and in the end you have to make a profit.

Money is put into the film industry

of course you want your profit.

So what's the problem?

Be happy!

But at the same time, I think there are other models

that emerge as a result.

For example?

I think there's a movie going on in Asia that is very interesting,

I think there are movies happening in Argentina that are very interesting.

They are national cinematographies that I think are reactions

to this homogenization that cinema has assumed as a whole.

So I'm very optimistic about that.

I think this homogenization is so fierce

which I think you have reactions to that are very exuberant these days.

And I think there's the presence of digital too,

makes access to the fabrication of images much greater, you know?

The conditions

for individual films have changed dramatically.

At our school, students can make films

that are displayed on the screen

and are their individual films.

This movie can be produced with so little money,

and say so much about yourself,

that cinema is no longer the film industry.

And I think, like it or not,

like it or not, we're going to make movies.

If I'm going to make my next film, I have to use new technologies.

Any effort to restrict cinematography

and create movies with...

the old style and technique generates a stylization.

We see it and think, "It's a movie made in another time.

It's not from now."

Accordingly, we are obliged to use

all news created.

My impression is that...

if we call it a movie,

we're talking about a movie made

with a celluloid camera.

If Godard is doing...

experiments, I think it's great,

which shows me that he is still fresh,

It's not an old-fashioned museum piece,

and we have to hope he does

and be revolutionary, radical...

e experimental.

I respect you a lot,

but I don't know if he's making a movie.

With an old or new camera, you have to think about the light, the content,

have to consider why you point the camera in this direction and not another,

so the fundamentals don't change, even if the technology changes.

And that's what I think filmmakers sometimes forget,

because they are interested in new technologies,

in the most modern camera, in the most advanced projection form,

but, in fact, the essential does not change.

The essential is:

Why are we making this movie? How important is he?

Why do we show these characters? What do they have to tell us?

Is it relevant? It is true?

It doesn't matter if it's the Lumière brothers' first camera

or the latest release of some technological genius.

The essential question remains the same.

Shit! It's in panoramic!

-And? -Oh no! I'm going to complain.

- The projection booth? - It's there!

Aspect ratio corresponds to 1:66 or 1:75 format

predicted during filming.

The 1:85 format is a limit that will not be exceeded in any way.

Movies for me...

I don't know, I like to say, today...

I was always deluded.

I always deceived myself saying that I didn't want to be a filmmaker,

who wanted to be a writer. And to this day, I keep saying that,

but there was a time when I said that thinking it was true.

Today I say this knowing it's a lie, but I keep saying it.

There are things you can't help but say.

You've said it so many times, you have to keep saying it until you die.

and the cinema

is what...

what I wish I wasn't, but I am.

It is what I would not like to live, but I like to live.

It's what I renounce, but I don't want you to leave me.

My first movie experience

it was when I was very little.

I was late to the cinema and the movie was already halfway through.

When the movie ended, I wondered

what would have happened

in that first part of the movie,

that I didn't get to watch.

And so began my life as a filmmaker,

I started doing the first part of that movie.

I wonder what has happened to me since that time.

I think that cinema is, in a way,

my connection with childhood, with the child I was.

Boomer! Come here!

Inspiration is usually a character in a place.

There is a story that, in the case of my films,

is being told and is a way of...

It's a way of gluing other things together, other investigations,

in the details of their situation, the situation of the characters.

Columbine was such a broad critique of the United States

that television was afraid to do anything about it,

although they could make documentaries. And that's where I came in.

I felt that fiction could bring out certain truths

in some ways more easily than documentaries.

What are you doing?

Get out of here and don't come back.

This was an idea I saw in a Béla Tarr movie,

called Satantango.

His movie was six or seven hours long.

and each character, or group of characters,

it lasted an hour and a half

until you realized they overlapped with other characters

and that everything was happening at the same time.

And I think I...

I was delighted with this feature.

Had a different kind of fun,

or enchantment, without having...

It was to subvert history

in favor of something that was more like a labyrinth,

or timing.

It was a new form of story for me,

and used this in Elephant.

His previous films like Damnation,

or others from before, were...

were influential too, and interesting,

but Satantango was the centerpiece.

And in Gerry we use it. That's where we started

to tell the story with very long stretches and with many traveling shots.

This is an old Stenberg and I like it a lot.

Because I still work with film,

I see the copy in the movie,

I like to touch celluloid.

It really seems...

a handcrafted film.

Not industrial.

An old-fashioned style, you know?

But I'm an old fashioned person, I'm a very old man

who don't want to change.

For me, black and white is more colorful than color film.

I really like the gray scale

and when you see a movie in black and white,

you have an immediate impression that you are watching a movie.

You're asking me how I cook.

"Why do you pepper and not sweeten?"

I don't know.

And it's a movie, you know?

Because it's not a story.

You can't explain it with words.

I really don't know how to explain

because my words are not good for this,

but if i'm able to show something

that makes you feel emotions

and capture something that does not come from words,

but that comes from the image,

that comes from the fate of these people,

that comes from fate,

this is something that interests me.

And I never think like that, as I'm showing.

I'm showing how I feel. What is the main theme?

The main theme starts with the whale and then he,

then together, then him, then with him,

then the whale and that's it.

This "why do you do this?" thing.

"Why the way to do it?"

This, in fact, is something that comes up unintentionally.

Style is one thing that must be overcome.

You go on doing it and, through the error, you go on discovering the thing.

Now, you do it one way,

and what I say is spontaneous, involuntary,

you do it because that's your way of doing it.

In fact, you didn't choose that way,

that way he chose you.

You start by making a film, and then the film starts making you.

There are times when the movie catches you, the movie takes you by storm.

And then, it's like you're on a sailing boat.

The film makes the wind, makes the waves. You have the rudder and you walk inside that.

You will navigate this section,

you will more or less point a direction where this boat is going,

but you don't have complete freedom when you're making a movie.

You are browsing the movie.

I make the movies, not the other way around.

That's why I have to stop making movies,

because there is a great danger

when you see someone made for their prestige

and not for what you do.

It's you who makes the movie

or the movie that makes you?

Well, both, because it's a...

it is a struggle between different elements.

In between...

It's not a hostile fight, but you advance

in a dialectical way.

The screenwriter and I have an idea.

Usually the screenwriter has the idea, but an idea we share.

We go out and test the reality against the script.

And reality pulls one way, the script pulls the other.

And you gotta make the movie, find real people

that bring you to life

and they will pull one way, history will pull the other,

and search pulls here.

It's constantly moving forward in a zigzag, it's kind of like that.

And in the end, it's an exploration.

This is why I hate movies that are made with...

What is it called when you draw the pictures?

- Storyboard. - Storyboard. I hate. Thanks.

'Cause it means you've already decided what the plan will be

before everyone's contribution.

And maybe something extraordinary happens when you're on set,

but you won't be able to use it if the storyboard...

"No, we need the actor to go

to the door and put out the cigarette now."

No, you don't.

Because film is life, it's not...

Not a person who molds everyone.

It's allowing people to say things.

I think directing is allowing people, actors, to do.

It's not giving orders. When you give orders, you lose.

You don't say, "Get angry now." You don't say, "Now cry."

You don't say, "You're feeling this way."

You put them in a situation where they will do what the movie needs

instinctively.

Sometimes you provoke bad feelings, like anger.

Yes, anger can be very productive.

You can't make much progress without anger.

There is no political progress without anger,

because anger is a justifiable response

into an intolerable situation.

Anger is very important.

Generating anger is important.

And the hate?

Hate is...

Hate is not very useful, but anger is useful.

Hatred blinds you, you lose your sense of reason.

I just made a movie with torture scenes.

That must provoke anger,

but not hate. Hate destroys us.

The camera is neutral just as the weapon is neutral.

The guns that fight for fascists also fight for revolutionaries.

And the camera can be used for Fox News, for Berlusconi,

or it can be used by a radical activist.

The camera is neutral.

You can aim a camera like you aim a rifle.

She has aim, she has to point in the right direction and at the right thing,

and has focus, if it is out of focus, the guy will not see and will miss the shot.

One of my favorite philosophers is Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza's job was to polish lenses. He was a lens polisher.

And he polishes lenses, because,

when making scientific instruments, it kept him in touch

with the greatest scientists of the time he lived,

he established correspondences with these scientists.

And at the same time, polishing lenses, for him, was a metaphor for what he did,

because he thought to polish his ideas, to see more clearly

the universe where he lived.

So the lens has that meaning. The lens is something that...

we have to understand the importance of the lens.

The human being just started to free himself

of a series of prejudices about the universe in which he lives

because of the telescope.

In cinema, the lens plays the same role as the lens played in science.

A lens reveals you.

I'm dying not to call "objectives" objective.

I always feel like calling them "subjectives".

This is one of the great dramas of my life.

Because?

Because one day I was talking to people, students and such,

and I said: "objectives are not objective, they are subjective".

I was in the greatest pride, for about three months,

thinking I made it up.

And one day I picked up Pasolini's book,

and the wretch, in nineteen sixty-odd,

I had already spoken of the subjective ones.

And I had rediscovered gunpowder, hadn't I?

Created with ways of prospecting reality,

that was still in that 19th century vision,

that there was the impression that the machine

was everything and that the objects created

with ways of prospecting reality,

had a value that would discover "the essence of reality",

an absurd concept of reality having an "essence".

So, those lenses were objective, because they had a neutral look, right?

But there's nothing less neutral than a lens, is there?

The lens is a lens.

It's called objective.

but the people in front and behind the lens

can be subjective.

Is it possible to change the world with cinema?

Is it possible to change the world with cinema?

I think cinema is always changing the world.

I wrote a text about it, in which I say:

The power of a filmmaker is limited, the power of a film is limited,

but cinema has power.

The power of bringing people together to find common problems:

Problems of humanity, society, political problems.

We can discover understanding,

points in common and thus react together.

I think cinema has that strength.

Why do you make movies?

I always remember my process.

At the very beginning, I wanted to write poems,

then I wanted to write novels, then draw,

until you find the movie theater.

I always wondered why this desire to express myself and tell stories.

This desire, originally, comes from the human being,

the understanding of the human being, the search for my own emotion.

The first reason is to pay attention to the human being.

Of course each person lives in his own society,

and each society has political, cultural and economic differences.

But living is the main reason that has always attracted me.

In the 80s, I saw Bicycle Thieves, by De Sica.

We rarely saw foreign films back then.

The western world of Europe was another world

completely different from what we imagined.

There was a phrase at the time that spoke of cultural conflict

between East and West.

For us children, the word "conflict" gave the impression

that life there in the other world must be very different from ours,

but after seeing Bike Thieves, I found that although buildings and food

were different, our emotions were similar.

There are four problems...

from Chinese Buddhist philosophy:

To be born, to live, to get sick, to die. These are universal problems.

But just maybe you've been constantly trying to chase

the feeling I had when I was a kid, my father would put me on his lap

and told me some stories.

He was a big liar, according to my mother.

And he told fantastic stories,

sometimes they repeated themselves enormously or never ended.

And the pleasure I felt, what I carry inside me,

of those stories being told by my father,

that was the only time I saw him,

are very strong inside me.

I'll tell you an anecdote: when I was six years old

it was the first time I had a memory of a projected image,

me inside a movie theater with some older friends

and it was a scene with a convertible car, it was a black and white movie

of some boys, like misguided youth

with a headlamp of those with a hand next to the steering wheel,

chasing a girl who was running very scared, in the sand pits.

And I felt an erection for the first time.

I first felt it when I was six years old,

an impulse of something he didn't know, which was a new boy sensation.

And the other image I have right after is us washing our hands in the bathroom.

And it's the most remote image I bring within myself.

I don't know if I masturbated or not

and then I wonder if I didn't masturbate because I was too young,

Why were you washing your hands?

I think I was forced to masturbate someone, probably,

but the feeling that I bring in this package

from which I cannot distinguish what is true or false,

perhaps it is in this trick of memory that it is and resides, in fact,

the enigma of why we make cinema.

What are you doing? Watch the movie!

Impolite!

Go to the window, boy, and look...

Alfred, it's beautiful!

You are just like the movie.

- Me? - Yea.

- A little older. I have a beard. - Yeah, just the beard.

In 1988, Tornatore came here to Palazzo Adriano and found the square.

Here he made a photographic selection,

we must be around 250 boys

and he chose me, I was the luckiest.

I didn't realize what we were doing,

the importance of the film. I thought it was a joke.

He did everything with the utmost spontaneity and naturalness.

Sr. Francesco,

what role did you play in Cinema Paradiso?

No dance,

when they recorded the funeral,

when there were a lot of extras...

They dressed me all in black for the funeral,

all these things...

Of my lines, I can say the one when I burned my feet:

"Oh, oh, oh, my feet hurt from making cheese..."

Can you tell me where the cinema was?

There in the middle.

That, it was right there in the middle.

Salvatore, I was little. You were a year older than me,

You must remember better than I do.

My memory was that you all went out to play,

but I couldn't, because I had other scenes to shoot.

My schedules were organized according to the scenes.

The film was so successful thanks to...

thanks to the actors.

No, the movie worked, Nicola,

the film was successful because it had a great producer, Franco Cristaldi,

a great director, Tornatore,

the music of a great conductor like Ennio Morricone

and a great actor like Philippe Noiret.

It was this cocktail, shall we say, of these four great characters

that was decisive.

And the theme of love, the...

- The love of cinema. - From the love of cinema

makes it one of the most beautiful films in the world to this day.

Because it touches us, they are themes that touch everyone.

That day I got very emotional, I cried,

I cried a lot,

because I fell in love with that cinema by Palazzo Adriano.

It's even making me want to cry right now.

I felt a lot of pain...

I didn't like it, it hurt me, it hurt the whole city.

Memories of the day the cinema was imploded are dramatic.

It was as if all that play, that beautiful experience

fade in a second,

because there was that explosion

and changed everything. The whole dream.

You won't see your movie until ten years later,

when you forgot it.

And it's very hard for you to forget. You can't totally forget.

You have a vision of yourself, I think,

which is a vision that comes from the past and that comes from the present.

It's a confluence of eyes.

So, it is very difficult to have a critical analysis of what you are,

about what you can be,

about what you think it might have been...

I don't really have that kind of conscience.

And then, there are also certain personal modesty.

Sometimes you can find yourself... There are times I think I'm a genius,

There are moments when I think of such a "congenital" imbecility

that I ask myself "what am I doing here?"

What to say, they are such antagonistic looks

that the only thing i know is that none of them are true,

because I can't be both.

Maybe it's both at the same time, I don't know.

What satisfies me is the memory of the time when I did these things.

When I can rediscover the impact of creation, I like it.

But that's a very, very thin thing, isn't it?

You only know the movie you made, long after you made it.

Sometimes it is very difficult to dissociate the public's displeasure

or the lukewarm liking of the public in relation to your enthusiasm.

The post-film is a very complicated thing.

The film, after a few months of having publicly existed,

goes away and stays inside you, half asleep sometimes.

Sometimes he comes back in a much more powerful form and...

like questioning you, isn't it? The movie speaks, it tells you things,

asks you questions: "Why did you make me this way and not this way?"

I would tell you that a movie lasts much longer than a life, almost.

I think in this room, people are experiencing something together,

something emanates from the screen, affects us.

And people leave different than when they came in.

This is beautiful, it's wonderful and no television,

no TV movie can replace that.

We have to try the cinema of balance.

No, what balance? I hate balance!

Balance, what's it called? thrift.

We have to try the cinema of imbalance,

- it's so much more fun, isn't it? - It is true.

- Do you have to stay in balance? - I think...

Are you measuring the chest of the chassis, are you?

- Give me a hug here. - Is that what you're measuring?

The main issue, for me, is just to be very simple.

And don't believe so much about yourself,

about art, or anything. It's simple.

Simplicity is the best for sure.

And if you've found something that's deep and human and simple,

you can touch people.

If you are doing a lot of things...

and erecting a false building,

and building dramaturgy and many stupid things

you will get lost.

And it will be away from the essentials.

That's all I learned

over those 33 years.

It's simple...

and enough.

Bela, could you put it here?

- What? - The cigarette.

No!

- I told you I'm not an actor. - You're not an actor, OK.

You need to find an actor who can play me.

I saw this two weeks ago in a French movie

about my French producer who committed suicide,

and someone represented me.

You can ask this actor.

I prefer to be myself.

These gentlemen are done,

so you can hand over the key, right? Thanks.

- Bye. - Goodbye.

- OK. - Stay here. Let him go.

Cinema.

Impressions of a girl who saw the cinema for the first time.

But, Dona Nina, is that what a movie theater is?

The man went after the girl, took it here and took it there, until he caught her.

Picked it up and heated it up. "Damned him" kiss.

Then they went into a room, leave that darkness

only the beautiful sheet could be seen.

Tell me something, Dona Nina, is this good enough for the girl to see?