Federico Grandesso meets the legendary Australian director in Venice to discuss his Golden Lion honor and his remarkable career.
Q: Mr Weir, where is contemporary cinema going now?
A: It’s very complicated, you can only make small observations. For me, one of the difficulties is that television and the streamers are essentially the ‘’province” of the writer, the share runner is the director, then I get sometimes mostly several directors make the series. Cinema is the director’s medium, and he or she is the key person, and we need more directors with better ideas.
I don’t think we should blame the technology entirely; I think we filmmakers have to look at ourselves and say: are we making the films the public wants to see?
And maybe we need longer apprenticeships, we need to ignore the “auteur’’ idea, you probably are not a genius but at least you can be a very competent director, so you should do an apprenticeship; and most of all aim to entertain the people in your own way.
You don’t have to compromise and entertain in someone else’s way but give them an experience. Stanley Kubrick could make films for a very large audience, Christopher Nolan did with a very difficult subject in Oppenheimer.
A lot of people didn’t even understand what they were watching, but as Hitchcock said: “You don’t always have to make sense, but you do have to hold the audience’s attention”. So, I would like to see a sort of counterattack from the directors of the world, particularly new emerging directors, that would make films that people would like to go to, worth the price of the ticket. I would like to see fewer activists, social workers, polemicists, and secular priests selling their message.
This is not a church when you go into a cinema, we didn’t come here to be lectured to, we came here to have an experience. So, we need less political cinema, they can go to the festivals if they want to but I think “stay out of the cinema” because people are saying that some films are like a kind of lecture which is not good anyway.
Q: Is Europe (mostly Italy and France) financing with ‘’easy’’ public money too many bad movies while in the US producers have always struggled to get the funds?
A: Yes, three are too many pictures. One film school I went to, in Australia, had very good equipment, 20 to 50 students all setting up shots and made me talk about shooting a scene etc.
I said: let’s clear all the equipment out of the room, sit down and let’s just talk ideas, because these instruments are just there to record and transmit the idea, but first we need to have something worth photographing. It’s like playing with a loaded gun, first, you have to learn how to handle a weapon and how it works and then you can fire at the target. Bad analogy. To the group, I also said: did anything happen on the way here this morning, did you see anything curious or strange, or touching, what were you thinking about when you came this morning here. Let’s go around the group, I don’t care if you talk for 1, 2 or 5 minutes. Let’s do a mental gymnasium, let’s make the muscles of imagination work out. That’s where we have to begin. There are too many cameras and not enough looking or sitting.
Q: Screenplays are still important or are they less important, to you?
A: They are very important, but before the screenplay comes the idea. Screenplays can be technically very well written, but still not very interesting. First of all, you have to say let’s have an idea or a mood, a piece of structure and let’s talk about that.
A French screenwriter, Jean Claude Carriere, who worked with Bunuel, and wrote a book about writing screenplays, is the best one in my opinion: he said when he worked with Bunuel (he did at least 4/5 films together), they would go to the country, they would work in the morning and have the afternoon off, then dinner and a couple of drinks. The next morning, they had to tell each other any dreams they had and do this for a lot of time and not write anything down. The last thing to do is the writing. I loved it.
Q: Some people are a little bit scared about AI, what do you think about this?
A: It’s too early. There will be benefits but we have to learn still what the dangers are. In terms of the creative world, it’s most threatening to the least talented.
In terms of copying somebody, in the end, even the best art forgers were detected, so there will be AI that will fake being some famous writer but, in the end, they will be discovered. It will take some years to harness the horse, to break it in, AI is like a wild horse, and we have to get the bridle on and then the saddle, then it will have to obey you. You can’t have wild horses running around. Copying voices then is very dangerous, we saw what happened with some politicians and you don’t want to think about that when I can relate
