Gianluca Jodice Interview on Locarno Opening Film ‘The Flood’

Locarno is preparing for a flood – in multiple sense! The 77th version of the Locarno Movie Competition is promising a veritable flood of arthouse films. And it’ll open on Wednesday night time with the world premiere of The Flood, which can take the 8,000-strong viewers of the Swiss city’s Piazza Grande on a journey into French historical past.

Italian director and co-writer Gianluca Jodice’s Le Déluge (The Flood) options Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet as none aside from Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. However the movie is ready in 1792 when the 2 and their youngsters have been arrested and imprisoned in a chateau in Paris, awaiting their trial.

The Locarno viewers is in for a double deal with. Along with attending to benefit from the world premiere in a stunning setting, it is going to additionally see the 2 French stars of the film receiving the Excellence Award Davide Campari as a part of the Locarno opening night time festivities.

“That is actually an apocalyptic movie: it offers with the second when all veils and all masks are stripped away,” Jodice explains about The Flood in a notice on the Locarno77 web site. “It has a metaphysical reasonably than a historic ambition and explores a private apocalypse: that of the protagonists.”

Earlier than Locarno formally kicks off, Jodice, in an electronic mail interview, informed THR‘s Georg Szalai concerning the motivations behind his new film, why historical past has such attraction to him, the challenges of being true to the previous, and what’s subsequent for him.

Why was exploring the ultimate days of two historic French characters, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, so interesting to you? And is their story well-known in Italy?

I can’t reply exactly. The movies you make are at all times icebergs. Behind, beneath the movie that seems, there are months or years of amassed emotions, wishes, notes, missed movies, concepts and – loads of unconscious stuff! Definitely, the concept of matching the dying of a single man, the final king-god of Europe, with the tip of a whole period, the tip of monarchies, and the beginning of the up to date age was an thrilling alternative to superimpose the tragic – the destiny of the person – on the political-philosophical – the autumn of the Ancien Regime, historical past.

Then, properly, like in every single place else, in Italy too, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, particularly due to their finish, are two pop and well-known figures. Though to inform the reality, the transient passage my movie recounts I don’t assume is that well-known. Not even by the French.

Your movie The Unhealthy Poet additionally had a historic setting, the Mussolini regime. Do you favor to work with historical past and why?

Thus far it has been so. Considerably accidentally – or perhaps not. I nonetheless don’t fairly know easy methods to interpret why my first two movies are “historic” movies. Absolutely, I’m fascinated by the phenomenology of the tip. Of the autumn. The final meter within the hall of life – of a person, of a regime, of a nation – the place truths beforehand saved at bay by hypocrisy, political necessity, dissimulation, cowardice come out. However I can let you know that absolutely my subsequent movie can have a up to date setting.

Do you see any parallels between the characters in Le Deluge and their state of affairs and in the present day’s world and do you discover such parallels within the movie?

If there are analogies and parallels to the present political state of affairs, they weren’t sought programmatically or rationally. That’s not what prompted me to make the movie, that’s it. Absolutely this sort of apocalyptic, violent, uncontrollable, hysterical emotion – historical past adjustments at all times produce traumatic transitions – hyperlinks the 2 historic moments. Hysterical, historic… mmh.

Did you write the script with Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet in thoughts or how and why did you resolve to forged them as your stars?

The reality: no, I didn’t take into consideration them whereas writing the movie. I made two movies and by no means thought concerning the actors through the writing course of. When the script was completed, we started to check the French names. Seeing movies I hadn’t seen, careers, paths. After all, I already knew Mélanie and Guillaume however then the decisive stage is at all times the encounter. The private encounter that clears away the fog and illuminates.

What was the most important problem on this movie?

I don’t know, perhaps I’ll offer you a disappointing reply: in a historic movie that showcases such common characters and setting, you must be so cautious about each little factor, and I’m speaking to you about make-up, the curl of a wig, the colour of a hat, the pronunciation of that phrase, the selection of vocabulary, which needs to be true to the period however accessible to a up to date viewers – the believability, the tightness of the entire. In brief, the most important problem was staying alive. As a producer good friend of mine says: “In the event you make a movie a few postal employee and it comes out flawed, you fall 10 meters. In the event you make a movie about Marie-Antoinette and it comes out flawed, you fall 10,000 meters.”

You hinted at your subsequent film. Are you able to share what new movie or different challenge you’ve got within the works?

Sure. I’m writing an erotic noir. One thing like that. Troublesome. Hopefully in English.

On this age of conspiracy theories and faux information, how interesting was it so that you can discover the theme of fact and authenticity versus self-illusion and role-playing, in addition to the theme of change/modernity and incapacity to regulate to vary – and why?

Mmh… very advanced query. Greater than falsehood/phantasm versus fact I’d converse of paradigms. Sooner or later, the brand new imposes itself as a result of there’s a widespread feeling that it speaks higher to the current time, whereas the previous drags on an increasing number of emptied and incapable of giving efficient and convincing solutions – the identical previous that had beforehand been in flip the brand new in comparison with the time even earlier than. I don’t wish to throw all the pieces into radical relativism, however every time has its personal fact, its personal social, political, and even sentimental creed. Its personal paradigm. Like a monad closed in on itself. It’s no coincidence that after we look again on the dynamics of previous eras we frequently nearly chuckle.

How early did you resolve to make use of this film title and the three chapters method and why?

The title I selected very early on, even whereas we have been writing the topic with Filippo Gravino. It clearly comes from the well-known phrase “après moi le déluge” (“after me, the flood”) of Louis XV, who exactly had already smelled that quickly in France all the pieces was going to explode.

The division into three acts… I’ve at all times, because the writing, been very eager on making a movie that’s extra metaphysical than historic. A movie set solely in a depressing citadel, with a theatrical-like division into acts, with a powerful stylization – from the classicism of the primary act to the shoulder digital camera within the second act, which is extra distinctive than uncommon for a historic movie. On this sense additionally the three acts, The Gods, The Males, The Lifeless, referred me to the three moments that mark the passage of each man in life. Once more: from heaven to the autumn.

Since we all know how the story ends from historical past books, how did you resolve on who and what to indicate and what to say within the last scene? [The next answer contains spoilers about the ending.]

The final sentence within the movie spoken by the revolutionary I didn’t write! There, you introduced me to concentrate on one of many first moments once I determined to make this movie: I used to be at my father’s home in Naples – I dwell in Rome – and I occurred to learn a e-book concerning the trial of Louis XVI. There have been the minutes of the trial, with the accusations of the revolutionaries and the king’s solutions. Then the e-book additionally carried accounts of the day of the king’s execution: because the procession main him to the gallows handed via the streets of Paris, a gaggle of revolutionaries have been gathered in a home, and within the mournful and in no way joyful silence of the second, certainly one of them stated precisely that phrase.

I believed it was great, and I instantly thought that I needed to write the film and finish it with these phrases concerning the [king’s] canine. [It] appeared to me to be excellent for the temper of the movie, which is informed not like a thousand different movies about revolutions – the enjoyment of victory, the joy of latest horizons being conquered, however a smaller and maybe extra genuine feeling about every victory: melancholy.