Interviews
I think people have the mistaken impression that I always have a camera ready to go. There were periods in my life when this was true. But certainly, around family, I filmed less than 1% of the time. But I let the impression stand because I think it has comic potential.
I think many common assumptions about acting are historical and contingent: for instance, the idea that motivations are clear and knowable.
Movies are so tied to nationality: title, director, year, country. Those four things frame how we view a film. I’m Argentinian, but I’ve lived half my life in New York. I have an American passport, but I’m not fully American as a filmmaker. And I’m not fully Argentine either. There’s always something slightly off. That sense of displacement connects to the fairy tale.
MoMI will recognize both actors with its highest honor at the 40th annual Moving Image Awards. The duo sat down with frequent Reverse Shot contributors—fittingly, a pair of married film critics—to discuss acting, directing, and how their relationship has been reflected in their collaborations.
He never went away, but Two Pianos feels like a triumphant return for Desplechin, a testament to his maturing style and the observable fact that he is still a filmmaker to be reckoned with.
"One of the big things that I want people to take away is the beauty of human connection, like a one-on-one connection with someone, just a phone call. It's so simple, and now we're just so saturated with technology."
Just in my day-to-day life, if I am walking through the city at a very quick pace, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of details. I might not notice that the flowers are blooming. Likewise, being in a movie theater and sitting still for a time allows a viewer to really be able to appreciate those small movements.
I tend to shoot quickly, so I always have a little extra time every day to be able to have these moments that we call “bonuses.” There are moments where I didn't end up using what was scripted and only used what was improvised.
To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories.
I only realized as an adult the really violent side of the British presence, not only in Palestine but also in most of the countries they colonized. Part of the story that was left out was the Palestinians talking about the revolt, how we organized the longest strike in history, and we did this without talking about the trauma of it.
In the last two or three years, I have had the feeling that the people who live around me in Germany don't believe in the future. They’ve started to build up caves for themselves, where they want to survive. This feeling, that one’s story is a story of survival, is new for me.
Both of us always mention in our master classes or panels with cinema students to choose a subject that you really like for your projects because you are not sure how long you are going to spend on the project. Better to choose something that is very close to your heart.
I said maybe I will do a film about the worst version of myself in 20 years, and then that is when I reconnected with the poetry world, because making a film about a filmmaker wasn't that interesting to me.
This is a very profoundly intimate, personal family story. So while certain dates are very important because of historical events, I wanted the 1970s to have less of that. I wanted for us to see a sense of normalcy with this family.