Some highlights from my interview with Luca Guadagnino, the half-Algerian, raised in Ethiopia, Italian director of I Am Love:
MB: Do you see similarities between the cooking process and filmmaking?
LG: It's about collaborators, it's about tools, and it's about, most importantly, shaping a new form out of the natural ingredients.
LG: Oh, Jeanne Dielman, I love. I went to a film festival once and saw Jeanne Dielman at 9 o'clock in the morning. And I was hypnotized, mesmerized by this, for hours. Now that you are quoting it, I also used a lot of Jeanne Dielman for I Am Love. Of course, we don't have the gravitas and the austerity of Chantal Akerman. But the lesson, we tried to get the lesson of Chantal Akerman.
MB: The film starts as old-fashioned melodrama, and then transitions to something else, another kind of melodrama, maybe. It's the scene where she's driving to Sanremo, with her Vertigo hairdo, and it's very much from her point-of-view. And then suddenly, in this very short scene, the shape of her hair is echoed in the architecture and then the nature surrounding her. And then the film takes on this soft-focus style, with nature shots. What were your references for this part of the film?
This is what I saw: Vintage Playboy in Nature
LG: Many references. Mostly painterly references, photographic references. We looked a lot at the work of Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, great, great German photographers. Russian avant-gardists like Malevich or Pougny.
And this is what it came from: (Ruff, Ruff & Pougny)
