Jeremy Brock: Good afternoon everyone, apologies for the slight delay but it’s worth waiting for. I’m Jeremy Brock, welcome to this year’s Screenwriters Lecture Series. If you are nursing a hangover, or fierce ambition, we are here to soothe both.
Our next speaker has already garnered a dazzling array of international nominations and awards that include work like Heavenly Body, The Wonders, Happy Lazzaro and the brilliant La Chimera. In 2020, Bong Joon-ho named her as one of the world’s top 20 up and coming directors, describing her work as having a wonderful mix of magic realism and neorealism with innocent characters butting up against corrupt behemoths.
We are delighted to welcome Alice Rohrwacher to BAFTA where she’ll lecture with her translator Yante, followed by a Q&A, with writer, broadcaster and film critic, Simran Hans. Ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure, please welcome, Alice Rohrwacher.
[Applause]
ALICE: Thank you very much. Sorry I will talk in Italian but first, in English I want to say thank you to BAFTA, thank you to JJ Charitable Trust Foundation and thank you to Curzon of course, for all the support. And thank you to the producers that produced all my movies this year, Carlo Cresta-Dina from Tempesta . If something is wrong, it’s his fault!
[Laughter]
No, thank you, thank you.
[Applause]
I would like to begin with a universal image.
Universal in the sense that it’s very well-known at least in the West. It’s The Expulsion From The Garden of Eden by Masaccio. It’s a fresco in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. And we all know the story, even if you are not Catholic. We used to live better before. There was a time when we all lived happily in paradise, then we were banished and everything went badly. Naturally we should have taken better advantage of that time when we lived in communion with nature and animals. But then someone, lo and behold a woman, made a mistake, ate an apple and, we have been banished from paradise ever since. And that is where we’d all like to go back to ever since, to the Garden of Eden.
So, this image became very important over time. It’s very well known in the history of art, and it’s an image that I feel particularly tied to. The reasons why it’s so important is that Adam and Eve have lost all their grace and balance. They are transfigured by the pain of exile and we have never seen them like this. But what really always struck me is that they have their eyes shut. Eve is wringing her eyes weeping, and she looks like a little girl, whereas Adam covers his eyes with his hands so they are walking as if they were blind, they are cast adrift. But why do they keep their eyes shut Wouldn’t it be better to keep them wide-open, since they’re going towards a world of great dangers, enemies, savage animals?
But maybe Masaccio is suggesting to us that the banishment from paradise is a journey that’s taken place inside our eyes. We have been thrown out of paradise because we have stopped looking at it. We have closed our eyes, our gaze to unsold destiny, a private far-away paradise. But what if the story of expulsion from paradise were just a tale, invented as a joke to make us keep our eyes wide-open? If it were a game that we call blind man’s buff, that our ancestors told us to make us look better at our surroundings, but which we took too seriously.
And we are still here, blinded folded. The party is over, but we are still fumbling around in the dark, banging against the chairs, always imagining somewhere elsewhere to live better. This image was very important for me when I worked on my first film.
[Clip]
When I wrote my first film, Heavenly Body, more than a story, I actually thought about a wish that I wanted to express for Marta the protagonist, and the title derives its name from a book of essays by Anna Maria Ortese, which explains that the paradise, the somewhere else, it’s actually already here on this earth. And you’ll be pleased to discover you don’t have to go to Mars to discover a planet. You already have your feet on a planet. Planet Earth.
We are already flying, even in this room. We have our feet on the ground, but actually we are suspended in the sky. And also, when I look at the masterpieces of history of art that have to do with representations of the Garden of Eden, what do I see in them? Fruit, animals, flowers, abundance – all things that actually exist on this Earth.
As the poet Paul Eluard puts it so beautifully, “there is another world but it is in this one.”
And it’s appropriate to start from somewhere, from a low place, from the earth, that I would like to talk about my screen plays, to speak about roots.
[Shows an image of roots]
But don’t worry, I don’t want to talk about roots and lay claim to an exclusive belonging or to highlight my roots and say that they are better than all of yours. I believe that my roots do not exist. Roots exist that belong a little bit to us all. Way too often, roots are called upon to justify a war, conflicts, violence and deprivation. We hear “this land belongs to me because this is where my roots are”, but poor roots and poor trees, what have they done to us?! If we look properly, we can see that fruits are not where trees separate or have their own specific identity, but rather the place where they unite and they lose particular identities. So I talk about roots because that is where excavating, entering into details, really delving deep down, I always find something that unites me with other human beings, not something that separates me.
All the films I have made searched really searched, rummaged for questions among roots – the roots that nourish me, and that therefore also nourish everyone else. What ties us to the world? What should we do of the past? The cinema I love creates connections, does not create divisions. Enters inside the roots to pass under borders, to reach forbidden lands. Because borders really are just imaginary lines.
Okay! The roots of the generation I belong to are on the border between the 20th and 21st century and here I’ll add a note which is in Italian we say 900, so there’s a marked difference that you don’t get in English there and 2000. They are roots that grow in the border not only between two centuries but between two Millennia, the triumph of consumerism and individualism, the passage from ritual to entertainment, from the fairytale to the spoiler. And this is why, all I do has to do with this border, the borderland between two worlds, visible and invisible, political and poetic. Sacred and profane.
And incredibly in my generation, even an outrageous highly criticised song from my childhood can transform into sacred moments of sisterhood.
[Clip]
[Applause]
Not being handed down prayers from my family, I always try to transform everything I do into a prayer. Into a feast to celebrate the fact of being existing in this world. The Wonders among all of my films is perhaps the one most inspired by my childhood. Now I would like to take you to a place very close to where we shot the film – the sacred wood. There is a park that some of you may know and may have been to that dates back to the second half of the 1500s, and where someone realised cycles of monstrous sculptures starting in 1665.
Are you ready?!
[Shows images on screen]
This is a colossal sculpture in terms of its dimension that, according to some represents Hercules destroying the monster. The mermaid. One of the most famous ones perhaps. This one perhaps is one of the most famous ones, the face of Pluto, and imagine what it would have felt like in the 1500s to enter it?! So today it’s a tourist destination, but it was left to its own devices up to the 1960s, and every time I’ve been there accompanying friends or relatives, I always ask myself about the sculptures, the monsters, but I especially interrogated myself about one specific structure which is not a sculpture. This house which is at the centre of the park. This was the first construction built in the park in 1555 and it was not built by Orsini who was busy with a war, but by his wife Giulia Farnese. Since I was little I ask myself, what does a crooked house, what is it doing in a park of monsters?
So it’s a house, all in all, identical to a 16th century hunting lodge. But it was built and planned with a slant. So, as I said, from when I was very young, I asked about this construction because it seemed to have nothing to do with the place, with a place full of monsters. It’s inherently educated, civil, cultivated. Whereas all the other sculptures are monstrous. When I discovered that it was a first sculpture to be built in the park, the initial sign, the first stone, everything suddenly made sense. How can we see monsters? How can we enter a layer of experience different from that of daily life but whilst remaining here inside life rather than leaving for an elsewhere? There is another world, putting words into practice, but it’s in this one. So, to put the words into practice, we must enter a house identical in each and every way to the house we live in. Inside the house, there is a stone table, a fire place, you can light the fire, but the access of the house is tilted. Tilting the centre of gravity of that house is crucial in order to gain access to a monstrous, to a mythological vision, but what does it mean to tilt your centre of gravity? It means to be able to see with the eyes, to avoid the vision that we always see. To make a film is to build a house but you have to build a house with a slanted access. And from this point of view, it’s a little easier for us women because we are being cut out for thousands of year so we have a great deal to say because we are the foreigners by silence. So, I would like to quote another poem of great importance to me, by an Italian female poet Mariangela Gualtieri, a poem where the poet interrogates ‘what do we ask for?’ and the poem finishes like this, “to be a (name) of the nothing that transcends into things.” So we mustn’t forget that cinema relies on things, on scenes. Images are things that evoke transcendence, but that must be found within things. So normally when you write a script, you begin with a white page, but in cinema you also begin with a black image. So which image will be the first to fill this space? Which gesture? Which light? Which face? Which word? The beginning but also the way you arrive n a place is important. So, if I had come in here shouting and with a great deal of ferocity, everything would be different now. Likewise when white men decided to arrive in the Americas, killing and conquering, they changed the course of at least American history. So would it have been possible to arrive in a different way, the tone of voice, the words we use, the first image determines the attitude towards listening of the audience.
So I would like to show you the beginning of my film.
[Clip]
[Applause]
Obviously to make a film is also convincing a whole casting crew to stay up at 4am to film a chicken! One minute is missing from what you just saw. The film actually begins with one moment of entire darkness. So when I had to choose which image to begin my first film with, Heavenly Body, I had so many doubts but also a great deal of fear. I wondered, which image can I use that will break the screen, as we say in Italian. And so I asked myself what my strongest cinematic impression was but I didn’t grow up with a significant relationship with cinema, cinema came later when I was at university. So I thought that the first movies I made were inside my mind during the long car trips we made to Germany or to the beehives. We’d fall asleep in one place and wake up somewhere else. At the beginning, while travelling, sat on the back seat, I couldn’t see anything so I first heard sounds, voices, smells. It was like landing on an unknown planet at night and only in the morning could we understand where we had arrived. First, I imagined things from all the clues and they will reality exploded. So I thought I would ask the same of the audience. Bring them into a dark space and place them into a zone of listening. So, Heavenly Body begins during a nocturnal procession. We hear singing, as you may have understood, singing is quite a fixation of mine. And we see people illuminate stones of the river, but also the rubbish with their mobile phones, just like aliens who have just landed upon this marvellous planet that is earth and they pray. The Wonders begins with a nocturnal hunt but that is what breaks it and sets it into motion. It’s the light of the hunters that enters into the light and wakes up the family, the characters, perhaps brings them to life because perhaps the characters don’t exist in. In fact the house when we see it at the end of the film in the last sequence, is only an abandoned house at dawn. Happy as Lazzaro begins during a nocturnal serenade. This time the light that makes the film start is the light of the only light bulb, actually there are two but you can’t touch the one in the kitchen, it’s sacred, is the only light bulb of the farmers of the farm, it’s the only light bulb and it’s the focal point of the work and a similar billion of their condition. A reminder for those that haven’t seen the film, the unviolated, untouched, is the name of the farm where the farmers are held hostage and sort of separated from the world. It coincides with our own shut eyes or the lens of the camera which is shut. It’s the memory that forces the camera, opens it, inundates it with light. And of course, the identification of the eyes of the camera is an ancient almost really recurring trope since the time of silent films perhaps. It seemed important to me because our gaze is like the sun. I’m certain that that which we look at grows just like when the sun looks at the plants.
So making all of the films start in the dark clearly has to do with my desire to make something be born inside the mind of the audience. And so immediately the film confronts the imagination of the audience because the audience, if it doesn’t see anything, has to start imagining a film. So I must confess, I don’t know if my desire to create a memory to ignite the imagination of the audience is at all helpful or productive. At least my neighbours don’t really agree with me!
[Laughter]
So in particular one of my neighbours, called Katir, has acted in lots of my films and he works in the village cemetery. And he always tries to come to the festival premier of the film. Each time he’s the first person I meet right after the screening and he’s always shaking his head. And he always tells me, “you’ve lost a big chance!”
And he actually was really angry because he told me, “look you had all the elements in your hand to make a successful film, love, thieves and adventure and look what you made!”
So what he always says was, when are you going to make a real film?! And so I ask him, “what is a real film?”
Well, as Katir explained to me very well, for him a real film is a film that makes you forget everything.
It makes you forget your life, your problems, and it makes you forget everything. You simply go into a dark room, sit down and suddenly you are no more. Well, then I realised that there’s a really big problem, because with what I try to do is the exact opposite. You see, I’d really like to make films that instead make us remember while we watch them that we are there, that we are present, that we have a body. So I’ll show you another clip.
[Clip]
[Applause]
I showed you this clip because, of course, each movie is born from a first image, but of course the first image that the film is born with is not necessarily the first image of the actual film. Maybe only in the one where the memory forces the camera open was one of the first images. However, for this film, Lazzaro, the first image was that of a group of migrants who had to cross the sea in Happy as Lazzaro. There were a lot of images like that on TV, unfortunately just like today so, what to do? I told myself that maybe if I could tell the story of a domestic Migration instead, it would help us look with different eyes at those migrating also from the other shore of the sea. So the first image was that of a group of migrants in front of water, from TV. But how could I tackle this story? How could I take on this dramatic moment? Especially in this part of the film in which Lazzaro dies, the farmers have to cross the river, are transported to the city and Lazzaro resuscitates.
So I thought that if I had to do a death jump of the circus, the only way was to grab on to the fairytale with all my strength. Of course, the tale is told, but the entire film is born from the thought of the way of thinking of the fairytale and is pervaded but the Aura of the fairytale. The fairytale is the opposite of the narrative logic that dominates the real cinema which Katir talks about. “You can make it. Inside you you’ve got everything that you need.” But in the fairytale, it’s not inside you, it’s not within you, it’s around you. The hero of the fairytale is lost. He cannot, it’s not within himself that he must find solutions to the problem, the magic weapon with which to kill the monsters and the strategy to solve the situation. He only has to recognise outside of himself the signs of a destiny and fulfil it. He must ask for help, seldom the hero of the fairytale knows where he’s going, in fact most of the time the destination is behind him.
So it’s difficult, if not impossible, to identify the protagonist of a fairytale. And in fact, both in Lazzaro Felice and in La Chimera. This which I see can try to bring, I try to bring it into the construction of the film and every time I feel the identification with a character, the pathos of the story is exaggerated, I try to distance the audience. Almost as if I was ringing a bell or we were inside a theatre and I was going, “wake up, hey, you are just watching a film!”
And to do so, I rely on the instruments that come from tradition, because if you think about it, also in Greek tragedy, the most dramatic moment does not happen on stage. It happens in the wings, someone comes and recounts it. And these instruments of tradition are the fairytale, the epic, the parable and the song.
So another song for you! During the filming, I asked the marvellous, incredible and unique person that is Josh O’Connor who cannot be with us here today, but is one of the most extraordinary encounters I had in my life, not only to be Arthur, which of course is the job of the actor to identify with the character, it’s what he would have done anyway, but also in some moments, to maintain a little distance from Arthur to be close to him. To love him, and here we need to specify in Italian, we have romantic love and friendly love, family love, which is what Alice asked Josh to do, which means to want the good of someone, to want his good, to wish him well. But also to accept that the character would maintain his secrets. It’s important today to remember that things are beyond our control.
And so for instance, in La Chimera, we are getting into the film, there’s this moment, we are getting into the story, the raiders are starting to steal objects, and so that’s where I decided we need to invite some story-tellers to come and distance ourselves, tell us what was happening in the film by recounting the story of the film with the song. But then there was a problem because there was one character who was too much inside himself, Arthur, and it was not conceivable for him to sit and listen to his own story, he cannot listen to his own story. Josh O’Connor would have listened to the story, but not Arthur. And so, of course, what we see is that, what happens in the film, is that Arthur is sitting and joking and laughing and everything’s hunky dory with his friends, and then the singing begins and he imperceptibly changes his expression and goes cold. It’s almost as though he hears the call of destiny and has to go away.
I would have liked to show you another clip but let’s say it clearly, to make a film you cannot do it on your own, you are one small part of a gigantic body. However much we can talk about for hours about scripting a film and of how important the thoughts of the director are, but the truth is that the film is made by a multitude of people, all adding little pieces of thread of story and all these threads together create a golden net that stretches out under the story and it is the net that protects the tightrope walker from falling. It’s a safety net.
And, of course, if this net has been made with love and care, it will support the tightrope walker when he falls, he or she by which I mean the actor, actress, who is therefore able to communicate feelings that have no name, that cannot be nominated. That is exactly why we make films, to show things that cannot be expressed in other ways.
So the writing of the film, however complex, its architecture is made up first and foremost by the writing that is executed all together by a huge multitude of what is called artists from the more technical to the more artistic crafts, they are all creating the script together. Of course, it’s not only human beings, but also nature, the landscape, the climate, to the sun, the night, the shadow.
So I think it’s really important today in a world that fans the flames of unbridled individualism telling us how important we are as individual so remember that a film is still a collective gesture. First and foremost. And this is why it concerns our roots. A most beautiful thing that can happen to me as a director, as an artist, is to watch a film and think it was not I who made it.
So when I was invited to come and talk here at BAFTA, they asked me if I would like to show any clips by other artists, other film makers, and I think there are so many things I would like to say that really I would like to end with a song. Another song!
A farmer took part in Happy as Lazzaro and his obsession in life was his military service. He spoke about that one occasion he had in life to travel and visit a different world and a day wouldn’t pass on set without him telling us about his adventures as a soldier.
And the shoot was over and so he did a dinner to celebrate the end of the shoot, and he was very moved and he told us at the dinner that making this film was even better than military service!
And his words filled me with joy because it means that you can be attractive even if you don’t carry a weapon!
So just as we construct an enemy, it’s also possible to deconstruct the enemy. So I think that to tell a story is a way, but also a duty to deactivate bombs, to transform the image of the opponent, to travel through other worlds, as was the case without needing to have a gun in your hand. The song I would like to leave you with is from my film, the Soldier in Love and it’s a song we all know in Italy, perhaps some foreigners, as you have heard. So Evita, she plays Flora, a penniless singer who has no more work during World War I because she doesn’t really know where to bang her head, she accepts to sing for soldiers on the front line. She decks herself out with a crown and a huge Italian flag and prepares herself. When the curtain open, Flora looks and she wasn’t expecting that audience, but it’s an audience made of mutilated young men, broken soldiers made for nothing, so what Homeland and victory, Flora cannot sing the planned song so she takes off her crown and the flag and deeply moved, sings Oh My Life and it was banned, accused of the defeatism yet the lyrics don’t say anything bad about war, but still it was outrageous.
So the outrage of these words, magic words, the oh life, oh sweet life, heart, this heart, did not elude the officials because the magical words evoke space of love. And in times of war, how can you remember sweetness and the simple terrestrial paradise in which we could live? So yes, we can talk about cinema, but what I really wish today is for this sweetly outrageous song to flee away from this room into the world and sneak into the ear of every soldier and every person who in this moment handles a weapon capable of killing other human beings and murmur, oh, my life, oh, my life. Then I would like him to hear and to look around him and let his weapon fall, open his eyes, and it’s not just about scripting a good film, it’s about carrying within us, bringing with us this song, this hymn to life, and deserting all wars saying, shouting, I will say the words right – “there is another world but it is in this one”.
[Clip]
[Applause]
Q&A
SIMRAN: Thank you for your beautiful songs. We don’t have lots of time for a Q&A today, so I think a good place to start would maybe be with children in your films because I don’t know if you could tell from all of the clips, but a lot of your protagonists are very young, they are very innocent, and you write children so beautifully. How do you approach writing from the perspective of children?
ALICE: So, the beauty of having lots of children on set is that the urgency of their problems becomes the protagonist of the whole thing and no-one sees my problems.
For instance, if I really don’t know how to go about a scene and I’m undecided and if my indecision was seen and perceived by the rest of the cast and crew, it could create problems and it could depress them. However, there’s always a child who needs to go to the toilet, another one who’s missing him mum and so on and so forth. And so really I just disappear behind the children.
So I think the beauty, however, the real beauty of having a child next to a professional actor, especially a huge actor, is that the child brings us back to the emergency, the necessity of presence, which is the more every-day, the harder to find and having the child to anchor us to the presence of the moment, the presence and the urgency that goes beyond every super structure, is a huge inspiration, that truth is a huge inspiration, but not only to me, also to the actors, and to the whole cast and crew.
SIMRAN: Something else that I wanted to touch on from your lecture is that you talked about using fairytale logic and the other kind of rules of story-telling from mythology. And I’m wondering if you can talk about a rule from narrative cinema that you don’t like, which is when we have to have, in the structure of the film, the character going through this change, and you know, you have said that you’re more interested in seeing how the world changes around the character. Can you talk about why that is and why you disregard that rule of screen writing?
ALICE: So maybe I should clarify – it’s not that I don’t love this law, but I think so many other directors do it incredibly well, and so maybe it’s better if I experiment another way of doing it.
I think this desire really comes from observing plants. You know, and plants, they grow and of course they change, but they simply change by growing, and developing upwards or downwards. So for instance, an apple tree will always eventually make apples, might make a great amount or very few, but it’s the world around the apple tree that I find fascinating, how that world changes. That is where I draw inspiration when constructing a character. What I would really like to do would be to be able to create characters that are like plants.
SIMRAN: I think that we have got time for a couple of questions, so can we have some more lights up, please, so I can see. Thank you. I’m going to take two, and if we can wait for the mic, that would be great. So, you first and then we’ll come down here. We’ll take them one after the other, if that is okay?
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you, Alice for an incredibly generous talk. Thank you to the three of you, beautiful questions and translation, very touching. So my question is about your last film, La Chimera. In relation to one piece of literature and another film, the piece of literature is Dante’s Purgatory, given the tombaroli worked just under the surface, and the second, or the Film I was thinking was Vagabond. It almost seems like Arthur is the twin of Mona from that film, and Isabella’s character in your film is almost like a little sister to Anya in a certain way. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on those two pieces of work.
SIMRAN: You answer, go ahead and we’ll get the mic down here.
ALICE: Thank you for your question. In terms of purgatory, definitely La Chimera works very much on the relationship between what is underground, the subterranean level and what is above the ground, and if you like, also the relationship with time in La Chimera is vertical, whereas time in my other films, like Happy as Lazzaro, it was different.
In the country, where I live which is a country that has always been inhabited, and of course, that makes me realise that it will be inhabited by others in the future and so it’s constantly this presence, what is here now, what was and what will be. There is a homage to Anyas as one of my favourite film makers. And you are write in noting the similarities between Mona and Arthur.
Mona does everything she can to make herself repulsive to the audience yet we love her. When she goes towards her destiny, we still suffer and I think another element that ties La Chimera and Vagabond is the fact that we know how they are both going to end from the outset. Just as we know how a fairytale is going to end, but we want to it be told once again. Especially today, with spoilers, knowing how something is going to end does not mean that we do not want to listen to it. Quite the opposite.
SIMRAN: A beautiful place to end. I hope that you are able to go away thinking about destiny, and fate, and roots, and…
ALICE: And peace!
SIMRAN: And peace!
[Applause]
Thank you so much for the excellent translating and to all of you for being here and for listening today. There is one more lecture today, with Alice Birch, so if you are booked in for that, we’ll see you later, but otherwise, keep an eye out for this lecture online on BAFTA’s social channels, and if you are not signed up to the newsletter, you can do that at bafta.org. Thank you.
[Concluded]
