Alice Rohrwacher: Screenwriters’ Lecture

Alice Rohrwacher, the Italian director behind La Chimera and The Wonders, has spoken about how cinema can create human connections as she reflected on her experiences working in film.

Speaking as part of BAFTA’s latest Screenwriters’ Lecture Series, Rohrwacher explained: “The cinema I love creates connections. [It] does not create divisions. [It] enters inside the roots to pass under borders, to reach forbidden lands. Because borders really are just imaginary lines.”

The director, who is also known for her acclaimed works Heavenly Body and Happy as Lazarro also shared it was the act of “really delving deep down” when making a film that leads her to “always find something that unites me with other human beings, not something that separates me.”

Rohrwacher also likened making a film to building a house. But “a house with a slanted access” that allows people to see something different and “avoid the vision that we always see.” So how do you do this? For the Italian director it has led to her films all beginning in a very unique way – in the dark.

“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”, she explained.

By bringing the audience “into a dark space” and placing them “into a zone of listening” Rohrwacher invites viewers to imagine things from clues heard in the dark. Getting them to use their imaginations in the way that she did as a child during long car trips.

Continuing to draw on the idea of connections, Rohrwacher also reflected that “to make a film you cannot do it on your own, you are one small part of a gigantic body.” Championing the group effort that goes into bringing a film to life she said: “it’s really important today, in a world that fans the flames of unbridled individualism telling us how important we are as individuals, to remember that a film is still a collective gesture.”

Elaborating on this idea, she said: “However much we can talk for hours about scripting a film and of how important the thoughts of the director are, 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.”

• Think about what connects us all: “What ties us to the world? What should we do of the past?”
• Remember filmmaking is a collective effort: “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”.
• Embrace the power filmmaking has to create space to communicate complex things: “we make films, to show things that cannot be expressed in other ways”.

For more inspiring Lectures from the world of film, games and TV explore our BAFTA News Resource section.

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