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Futuro Antico. Interview with Roberto De Paolis
Sep 12, 2023
Ludovico Pratesi
The work of Antonioni and Pietro Germi as inspiration, everyday life, and nostalgia for the past, overshadowed by new technologies. Interview with the director of Princess.
What are your inspirational references in art?
I believe that, on a conceptual level (the question of what to tell), inspiration is formed by what is absorbed and internalized during childhood and early adolescence. Formal inspiration (the question of how to tell) comes later, in adulthood. As a child, I saw modern art in museums, classical art in cities, Disney cartoons, and listened to the adventures of Ulysses that my parents would tell me before bed. What moves me the most is always tied to a lost world that reappears: the Riace bronzes emerging from the waters, the statues of San Casciano rising from the mud. There’s something murky about it, a strange nostalgia for one's own childhood that turns into a nostalgia for the childhood of the world.
Does this influence your cinema in any way?
It's no coincidence that I worked a lot on the myth of Adam and Eve in my first film (Cuori Puri). As I grew older, the filmmakers who inspired me the most were the Dardenne brothers, Theo Angelopoulos, and Michelangelo Antonioni. One of my all-time favorite films is Il Maledetto Imbroglio by Pietro Germi, a truly unforgettable crime movie. For my latest film (Princess, the story of a Nigerian girl who prostitutes herself in a forest between Ostia and Rome), I tried to borrow as much as possible from Fellini's masterpiece Le Notti di Cabiria. In that film, there was an Italian girl from the 1950s, and here we have a young African girl. I looked for commonalities, differences, and how things have changed for girls on the streets: for sure, there's more loneliness today.
What project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
Perhaps Cuori Puri. For me, cinema represents the challenge of stepping outside oneself and exploring distant worlds. In those worlds, paradoxically, I find myself, or I discover aspects of myself (even if only symbolically) that I would never have imagined while sheltered in my home. In the case of Cuori Puri, a simple news story (a girl pretends to have been raped by a Roma man to "cover up" her first time) turned into a long journey through the Roman suburbs and, above all, into the world of Christian faith. The research phase is what I enjoy the most; shooting the film is exhausting (will it work out or not?), editing is anxiety-inducing (will it turn out well or not?), and presenting it at festivals is unsettling (did it work or not?). Sometimes I think making a film is just an excuse to do research and give yourself time away from your own life.
How important is the Genius Loci in your work?
In cinema, I believe it's a very important concept: choosing a place, consecrating it, investing it with meaning; being able to make a certain place take on the features of the feeling you want to convey in a film. It’s one of the great lessons of Michelangelo Antonioni: in his cinema, every place, like every gesture, has a deep meaning and contains a mystery to be revealed. The most magnificent example is the ending of L'Eclisse: an ordinary place (an intersection of streets in some corner of the suburbs) that becomes the place of non-meeting between Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, between man and woman, between any human being. A sacred, mythical place, which would deserve a pilgrimage.
How important is the past in imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
The concept of an “Ancient Heart,” tied to the past, perhaps also relates to the handing down between generations. There used to be oral tradition, the elders taught the younger ones; today, unfortunately, we ask machines for information. In the past, trades were learned from one’s fathers, today they are learned from strangers; I’m not sure if a trade learned from a stranger can have the same importance or sacredness as one learned from a parent. For my generation, the problem is linked to an extreme idealization of the past; everyone says that before the Digital Revolution, things were better, people talked more (especially on trains), and people were bored more often because there wasn’t Instagram, and that being bored was wonderful, even sublime.
Can you explain better…?
I’m not sure if these discussions are rooted in reality, or if all generations feel nostalgic for the time of their childhood. Woody Allen made a film about this – Midnight in Paris – where the characters go back in time and each time find people who, in turn, long to live 20 or 30 years earlier, idealizing the time of their grandparents or parents. So, the poor protagonist, who initially just wanted to meet Hemingway in the '40s, ends up in the Belle Époque.
And for the future?
As for the future we are heading toward, it seems to me that the car from Il Sorpasso by Dino Risi is still racing on the hot asphalt, faster and faster, and sooner or later, it will crash again. In the first crash, “The Intellectual” (Jean-Louis Trintignant) died; in the next one, who will it be?
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to pursue your path?
I would definitely advise them to insist on defending their ideas to the very end. It happened to me once when I was producing a film: the debut director wanted certain things, while I insisted on the opposite for economic reasons, or perhaps because I wanted to impose my own perspective. But while I was insisting, in my heart I was hoping he would insist even more than me and win his battle.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have importance and strength?
I get the impression that art has lost the value of the Sacred. Photography, too, has lost it; today, a photographer claiming to steal the soul of their subjects would make us smile a little. When we look at the ancient cave paintings of hunters, we know that by painting those animals, they were preparing to capture them; in fact, we know that painting them was the first attempt to capture them. The act of painting determined the outcome of the hunt and, consequently, their survival. We also know that people had very strong feelings towards Greek and Roman statues because they represented (or rather, were) deities capable of changing the course of events. But both the hunters and the Athenians didn’t see their creations as artworks to buy or sell; rather, they venerated them as fundamental, living, and powerful entities that could determine their survival.
How do you imagine the future? Could you give us three ideas that you think will guide the coming years?
The future is that, in a few years, this interview will be done by artificial intelligence because we’ll all be too tired to think. So, I’m grateful for this precious space for dialogue, still possible for now.