By Vittorio Iervese

Let us start from the beginning. The first sequence of your first film, It’s Been A Lovely Day, opens with a dedication to your parents: "For my father, who made me love the land, and my mother, who made me love cinema". This dedication and the way you have filmed the daily life of a traditional Dutch farmer's family reminds one of Flemish oil painting. How was your first film inspired or influenced by this (or other) ‘traditions’?

I could talk about this for quite some time. My background is in the countryside but I have studied Literature and Political Science. During my study of comparative literature, I spent most of the time in art-house cinemas. So, my inspiration for storytelling in documentary primarily comes from fiction film, and the experiments with narration in fiction (both film and literature). I remember at the time there were filmmakers at the crossroads of experimental literature and film, who I found fascinating: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Ackerman, Straub/Huillet, the early Resnais, and one might argue the real masters Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson are somehow in that tradition (or vice versa: they are the ones who established the road to a tradition).

Secondly, from the mid-eighties onwards I was a film critic, working for Skrien (close to Cahiers du Cinéma at that time, as far as the approach was concerned) and I had opinions about cinema that were influenced by Bresson’s films mainly, and also Hou Hsiao-hsien's.

At some point, I was thinking I could make a film about the last year of my parents’ work and images of my memory, in a way that only I could do it. With the cameraman I talked extensively about the light of Vermeer, as well as the idea of horizon. As you know, Protestants watch the earth (certainly farmers do) as Catholics watch the sky… So the horizon is often high.

So I began to make films looking for a high point view aiming at the earth.

This sounds like a philosophic and aesthetic programme. You have cited, among others, Bresson and Hou Hsiao-hsien, who are considered masters of minimalist cinema, in which the small things that happen in life are the keystone of diegesis. These small things are meant to supply reflection cues on life’s biggest topics. Is this a way to look at your cinema, where “less is more”?

"Less is more" is very Dutch! Not only in cinema, but this concept is deeply rooted in Dutch art, or in Dutch design, and it becomes a way of thinking. My first films pursue this idea, they were guided by this philosophy. Probably I have lost this more recently, but the idea of “less is more” is for me extremely important and I’m trying to find it again, but it’s harder than twenty years ago. At that time, I worked as film critic and André Bazin with his notion of montage interdit was really crucial for all of us.

My problem is that I have studied Literature and Political Science and these two backgrounds are always there. But in a film, if you choose a “key” or an approach to the topic, then you have to follow it. For example, in The Making of a New Empire, of course there is a war, there is a fight, there are criminals and rebels, etc. You could analyze these aspects, but I can also think that, behind all this, there is the fact that History and Mythology are connected. And when you start to use this mythology, you’re beyond good and evil. So you don’t need to over-interpret reality, because "less is more".

Most of your films deal with the “sense of a place”. Some characters are looking for a better place (e.g. Solo, the Law of the Favela) or simply another who-knows-where place (e.g. Beyond the Game), some are trying to defend (e.g. Dans, Grozny dans) or safeguard their own place (e.g. Before the Flood) and many others describe the meaning of a certain place (e.g. Brooklyn Stories and Nagasaki Stories). Is this search one of the permanent features in your works?

I feel my films maybe deal with the idea of how we all try to give sense, meaning to our life. In this respect, the place, the environment, determines a lot of our choices, consciously or unconsciously. In The Making of a New Empire, for example, it is the place that defines people, the place becomes more important than psychology. The latter is a result of the previous one. In general, in my first films the place determines everything. In Protestantism, we have the notion of Predestination: I think this idea of how we seek our own way, how we give it meaning and create new paths, while knowing where you come from, or what tradition you are in, is important to me.

I remember Straub at a press conference in Berlin, he was criticised quite strongly and he answered to these critiques that he knew there were hundreds of better filmmakers than him, but that he knew what tradition he was in. To me, this statement is very important.

On the contrary, you’re a real globetrotter who has worked in many different places: from your birthplace to Brazil, from Chechnya to Japan, from Azerbaijan to USA, etc. Is this a result of coincidences and chance events or a planned strategy?

Maybe ‘intuition’ is somewhere in-between strategy and coincidence?

I literally feel, physically, that an encounter is going to lead to a film when I get goose skin on my arms. After my fist film (It’s Been a Lovely Day) all kinds of producers called me saying they had plans for films about farmers, or other craftsmen. After my second film (Solo, the law of the Favela), I was approached to do films about children in Africa, and so on. Of course, this is a dead-end, that I constantly need to run away from. I want to reinvent myself all the time, and in this process, I can only trust what we call intuition. My intuition tells me or – quite literally – lets me feel, if there is an idea for a new film. When I think about how this works, it may sound ridiculous: it is like ordinary things start to connect to an idea that is taking shape. For example, I pick a book from a shelf, quite randomly, open it, and find some sentence that becomes really important in relation to what I am thinking about. It assures me to go on. The same happens with films: I watch old films again and start to understand the connection to my ideas: in a way, I even understand why I am watching them. Let me give you an example: in my film with the children in Brazil (Solo, the law of the favela), there is a sequence where the kids are sitting on a rock, talking of soccer. It’s a sequence with a strongly physical approach that I love. But this sequence was only possible because, before I came to Brazil, I watched Los Olvidados by Bunuel and some films by Pasolini. I need those films, Accattone and Love Meetings for example, not to imitate them, but to know where I’m going.

Is it a sort of "fortunate happenstance", a "pleasant surprise", a sort of serendipity, or a specific method?

This is not obscure and esoteric in any sense, it is just focused work, I think. This is what I mean with helplessness vis-à-vis reality. Reality is too big, it is amorphous. I need to work with concentrated reality and the only concentration that matters is reality-as-a-story. Now, storytelling is very old, I am not an inventor. But I am also not an ‘ingénu’ – I place my work in line with what I know. Only by doing so can I let myself be surprised. This is a very important paradox or, if you like, ‘tension’ between the concept and the reality.

Also, I need to feel that a particular story is part of a ‘genre’, so I can work with it. Brazil for me was reminiscent of Los Olvidados and Accattone, as Grozny was of the Godfather and Heaven’s Gate.It has to be films, in my mind; I am completely helpless vis-à-vis ‘reality’.

So, we could consider Documentary not a genre in itself but a way of rethinking and re-working the different genres?

Reality is a genre too. Documentary evaluates this.

How do you adapt your way of working to the different contexts and situations?

I remember how I started doing 'walking shots' in Rio de Janeiro. It was a way to become accustomed to the kids and their place. Also, it gave me the opportunity to work on my style: I placed the camera very low (as Ozu used to) and I filmed the kids as much as possible from the back, while they were walking away from camera (as Antonioni used to). To me, the whole idea was to convey the feeling that we are really observing. To achieve this, I had to do quite the opposite: it was 100% 'directed'. In general, I need to find out who the people in my films 'really' are, so I just show them in a non-spectacular way in their environment – certainly no close-ups!!

I find it very stimulating, this concept of ‘directing reality’ or of approaching it so that a private and intimate experience could become a film. It’s like a translation process, don't you think?

Translating is a good word: I capture reality not just with a camera but with a certain ‘way of the camera’ (because film is a language).

Beauty has nothing to do with it; it is about the relation between form, subject, and environment. So I am aware of the meaning of certain shots and I apply them to situations that I encounter, to give meaning to the encounter.

You have realised some films in and about Chechnya, getting in contact with a complicated and dangerous situation. How did your interest for this Country and his culture start, and what has increased it over time?

In the beginning was a coincidence: I encountered a British journalist at a dinner and he told me about a remarkable Polish man with whom he studied philosophy and comparative religion. At some point, the Polish man disappeared and when he returned, two years later, he was no longer a Catholic but a Muslim, he had changed his name from Macieck to Mansour, and he was in business with the Chechen mafia. So I said: “This is the kind of man I would like to meet”.

Six weeks later, the journalist rang me. I could meet not only that Polish man, but also his boss. I had to go to a party for the rich on the Asian side of Istanbul. So I went, with two friends who did camera and sound, not expecting what to find. I had no idea who the boss was, I read something about him on the plane: that he was the king of mafia, controlled Moscow and Petersburg, dressed in super style and you could only approach him 'with you knees trembling'.

The Polish man told me I had to dress for the occasion and in the previous year I had bought a ridiculously expensive suit, also due to strange circumstances. I went to the Asian side of the Bosphorus on a yacht of Khashoggi’s (the biggest arms dealer in the world) with my ridiculous outfit. There was an uneasy atmosphere from the start. Then Noukhaev came to greet me, and we were wearing exactly the same suit. I still think the reason I made that film is because of the suit.

But seriously, that film was not about Chechnya for me. I wanted to do The Godfather actually, it was like climbing my Mount Everest in a way.Only later, when the film was finished, the second war broke out and this was the only film made in Chechnya, so everybody said it was about Chechnya and it was not. But I had come to admire the Chechens, so when I heard about this dance troupe, three years later, I knew I wanted to make another film (Dans, Grozny Dans).

Some consider Noukhaev a field commander and a patriot, others a bandit and the leader of the Chechens’ mafia. What sort of relationship and dialogue did you establish with such a controversial figure?

Well, he liked my suit. Also, at the time he was untouchable, ready to tell his story, so I came in at the right time. I was really interested in how such a figure lives with his own image, how this is built from mythology and history and all kinds of crossings between the two. In the case of Noukhaev, he sees himself in a tradition that is part of 'real' mythology, which is a different realm of mafioso (even if he is a mafioso).

From this perspective, The Making of a New Empire is closer to Heaven’s Gate because it is about creating the myth and using it to give your life a meaning, or a justification. This is also the reason I have the two old men as 'narrators': they do not distinguish between myth and history. You know, Noukhaev clearly is a killer but at the same time I felt… very close to him. If I had used The Godfather for this film I would have had to focus on the psychology of Noukhaev and deal with good and bad, for example. But when I saw the high mountains of Chechnya and the mythology of that culture, I thought that the film could be more like a western, like Heaven’s Gate. This way, the focus was more on the sense of place. If I have a feeling of the genre, then this genre structures the analysis and my storytelling, determines what kind of film is coming to be.

Have you considered the issue of the reliability of some subjects you have interviewed, or you looked more at the person behind every role?

More than use a journalistic approach, in my documentaries I prefer fucus on the 'characters'. Sometimes this is very difficult, and I do not manage to solve it, like when I use archive footage in a 'story'.

For a documentary, I think there should be a truth behind the facts, otherwise it is reportage. The truth behind the facts is often so complicated and/or ambiguous, that I doubt the word truth.

This is why I think the question, or the 'look', le regard is more important than the answer in a literal way. I think we all constantly invent facts to give our life sense and direction; we become fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and create an alternative history because they always lose. The same happens with fans of Bob Dylan, who reflect and understand their lives thanks to words in songs.

So, it’s a matter of how we ‘construct’ reality and how we represent this construction?

‘Constructing reality’ is all we do, constantly, everybody. Then art represents constructions, ways of dealing with them, exemplifying them. Art and stories do not react to reality, they are ahead.

I think it was Freud who spoke of "Verschiebung und Verdichtung" ("Displacement and Condensation"), concerning dreams. So a dream is a tale in which reality takes a certain shape that is slightly different (the Imaginary) than the 'real' and at the same time is more simple, as it combines various features into a dominant narrative. This is the way we deal with reality/existence. Film is like that, to me.

This question is crucial also when you face the Litvinenko case. Beside the personal and private story, there is a murky intrigue that is not yet clear. You have chosen to present the multifaceted figure of Litvinenko: the former member of the Russian secret service, the dissident, the victim, etc. But what appears more important is the man, with his determination and vulnerability as well. Could you say something about this dense and multilayered story?

I met Litvinenko more or less by coincidence, I did not know who he was, but found him after an encounter with Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko's wife had seen Dans, Grozny Dans and he had been in Chechnya, so there was a kind of understanding and sympathy. At the same time, he was an evasive person, talked a lot, but only about his own story. Nevertheless, I was struck by his intensity.

But 2 years after our encounter there was the polonium story, and I had done this very long talk with him… To me, this is not really a documentary, but it is of course a rather unusual story.

As in Johan Van der Keuken’s Face value, I had the impression that the attempt to look behind the masks that everyone wears in daily life is central in other films of yours as well (e.g., Beyond the Game).

The comparison with Face Value is quite something (one of my two all-time favourite films by Van der Keuken). But I think my films deal with the idea of 'text' in a philosophical sense, i.e. the multitude of meaning we create and that we derive from our environment. Like the players come to understand themselves as a result of the roles they play. This is a very old concept, that Johan Huizinga has well explained in Homo Ludens.

In Alias Kurban Said, the whole film turns around the secret identity of a writer that wrote under pseudonym. We discover that the secret around his/her identity is as fascinating as a crime novel…

On the one hand, as I told you before, I cannot begin a documentary without a sense of genre, so fiction (in the sense of creation, working the material) somehow enters immediately in the process.

On the other hand, on a more philosophical level, I liked the idea of an identity that 'disappeared' and at the same time as it was claimed by very different people. Remember, Alias Kurban Said was made during the heights of the so-called ‘clash of civilizations debate’ and I liked the idea that the love story between a Christian girl and a Muslim boy was claimed by very different people (in different cultures) to belong to them, so this 'identity of an impossible-love story' is a shared identity.

In Solo, the Law of the Favela, for quite a long time you followed two kids that shared the same humble origins and the same dreams but like in a short story by Charles Dickens, this dream comes true only for one of them. Two lives can walk together until the road comes to a fork. This reminds me a ‘classical plot’ and makes me think of the concept of Destiny. Were you surprised when your story arrived to such a meaningful crossroads?

One of the things that did influence me in studying comparative literature is the idea of an 'open ending'. Think of Antonioni’s L'eclisse, with the most beautiful ending in the history of cinema.

I prefer the open ending because, as you know, the answer is… blowin’ in the wind. On the other hand, in general, I am preoccupied with the idea of 'destiny'. Our destiny comes from our immediate surrounding (e.g. 'the land'), our history, the ways we select meaning in our life. So here is a tension that somehow keeps me going. I think: we are on an endless road of stories.

In the case of Solo, the Law of the Favela, it was only my second film, and I thought observation was the way to approach reality. Then I noticed that because I was filming, as a result of the camera, reality was taking the shape of a story. Scouts of famous football teams came to look at these kids because we were filming the kids. And so Leonardo was 'discovered' and later became a star and a millionaire, because of my film/camera. This gave me the idea that reality does not exist, we only have stories.

Apart from this, of course I saw the difference in performance between the two boys, in a way I knew more than they did. I also knew that by focusing on their friendship, there might be a story about survival, as a 'law'.

Do you mean that a film can condition and change reality?

You know, Rio de Janeiro has three big teams but they don’t really scout in the slums, because these kids from the favelas often disappear: they are considered unreliable and unmanageable, so they don’t invest in slums. I made contact with a lot of kids but I chose Leonardo and Anselmo not because they were two good soccer players but because they were two good friends, and then the place where they lived was very interesting and picturesque. However, because we were filming all the time in the favela, people started talking of some foreigners interested to two kids who played in a little field. And as a result of that, two scouts came, thinking “there is something that we’re missing”. The camera changed both life and reality. All the times I had the feeling that I was filming because I was filming!

Something similar happened after the film with Leonardo. He becomes a famous soccer player, also in top teams in Holland because of my film. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. I was making this documentary in Brazil and I wanted to bring some football shirts for the kids so I asked my team, Feyernoord (yes, I live in Amsterdam, but I’m a fan of Feyernoord since I was a teenager) if they wanted to provide some shirts and the answer was: “We don’t do anything in the Third World”. It was very hard for me as a fan to accept this answer. So I asked PSV Eindhoven where Romario – at the time one of the biggest Brazilian players – played and the answer was: “Yes, you can have the T-shirts but they cost 60 guilder per piece”. But it was too expensive for me. Therefore, I tried, very desperately, with Ajax, a team that I really hate as a Feyernoord fan, and they accepted to give me 25 T-shirts for free, no problem. So, I went to Brazil with Ajax T-shirts and I gave them to these kids. I made this documentary and at the same time, I wrote an article about making the documentary in a kind of sports magazine. And there I also discussed that T-shirt story. Then the president of Feyernoord thought that this story was bad publicity and they invited me to talk and I said: “Look, why we don’t get these kids to Feyernoord for a couple of months?". So they came to Feyernoord half a year after my film and, only one year later, Leonardo started to play for the Feyernoord youth, made his debut for the first team when he was 16 years old and won the UEFA Cup in 2002. After that, in 2006, he went to Ajax… I find this quite funny.

And now, what about Leonardo and Anselmo? I know you’re filming again their life.

I have thought that maybe I have to do a sequel of Solo one time. Leonardo Santiago is a millionaire now but he is completely unhappy because his mother and brother stole him everything. Leonardo bought a 4-million euro house in a very glamour area in Rio de Janeiro but he cannot use it is because is property of his mother. He lives a new life but the old one is yet there. His background, his belonging to a certain place is not disappeared. So, more than a film, it seems to be a kind of reality television, on the other hand this storyline is very intriguing. It started as a project for television and I still have to make a short version for the TV. Actually, this is a film in all respects, in which the movement is in the now and the stills are in the past. I must say that Leonardo was very welcoming and he immediately gave me a very long interview, because he said: “your film changed my life. Your film saved my life”. He is very open to me because he is grateful to me. On the other hand, he is very vulnerable.

Anselmo is also interesting, because you can see the little choice he has had. If you want to escape from the favelas, either you can go in to the drugs, or you can play football, or you find the Lord. And Anselmo, who is a nice guy, found the Lord. He goes to sing in a church every day.

You have worked a lot with television without forgoing your own films. How does your approach change in these two fields of work?

I started making films in 1992-1993 and soon I was invited to make documentaries for a television programme. I worked for this programme for two years, then I started making films again and then I was invited to become editor-in-chief of that programme. I accepted because I thought, “I have a regular income and I can watch my daughter grow up”. I worked there for a long time, from 2007 to 2012. It was like a power game, because I didn’t want to have a boss, so I was always a freelance.

The narration with TV rules is very simple. If I work for the editing of a 50-minute TV documentary (they called it "documentary" because they don’t have any idea of what a documentary is) I can make it in a week, easy. The narrative and the constraints of TV rules simply control everything in these programmes. The programme where I worked was on every year from January until May and from September until December. I was responsible for the last editing of around 156 programs of 50 minutes. Of course, this way of working gets in your head and becomes a way of thinking.

It’s like ‘mental pollution’! So, the risk is to format all kinds of situations and experiences you are confronted with in a conventional way?

I would say that the risk is to format in an easy way. However, I use format all the time when I refer to genre. It depends on what kind of story it is. Anyway, to face all this, now, after six years working intensely for television, I have found that I really have to learn again how to get rid of it in order to not choose the obvious ways of storytelling. Therefore, I have completely given up watching television a couple of years ago, to force myself in another mood.

Now I’m both a film-maker and I’m in charge for De Correspondent, an online journalism platform that focuses on (quoting the introduction of the homepage): “the kinds of stories that tend to escape the radar of mainstream media because they do not conform to what is normally understood to be 'news'.” Within this platform, I have a page dedicated to short documentary, it’s my private video garden. I like this job, because I can support young people and then I find very interesting short films at this moment. Recently, one of the films won the Silver Leopard in Locarno.

You have also made some films not departing from your own ideas. How did you approach these commitments?

The story of Nor His Donkey and Before the Flood are quite different. The first one is a documentary series about the Ten Commandments. I have participated in this project without a clear idea, or with no idea at all. But it was an intriguing challenge, including the risk of some unavoidable confrontation with Kieslowski’s films. A couple of months before this proposal, my father died and my mother received an unexpected love letter of somebody she had refused to marry forty-five years earlier and never saw again. This coincidence gave me the idea for the film. Beside that, I liked very much working with the donkey on the top of the mountain. The sequence where the donkey comes down the path from far away straight to the camera is one of my favourites.

I accepted to work at Before the Flood not because I’m interested in film about the future, but because it was a chance to use special effects in a documentary film. It was funny to do that. To have the possibility to film from a helicopter and to hybridize different genres. This is not a scientific documentary: science is important but not in film, more in books.

In Before the Flood, another remarkable element is the use of the beautiful found footage you’ve selected. You often use found footage in your films. Sometimes, it is a way to visualize the memory and the introspective dimension of the protagonists. In other cases, it has another function and value. How do you work with and how do you use found footage?

I have a rather uneasy relationship with found footage. Normally, stock footage is there to exemplify 'reality' but I am not interested in reality in a journalistic sense.

So it becomes problematic when I use stock footage to show the real events in a mythological story (like in The Making of a New Empire). On the other hand, found footage is often very poetic and sometimes I manage to profit from that quality: it adds a dimension rather than explaining things (like in Nagasaki Stories).

The ending in your films give the viewer many elements to reflect on ‘the moral of the story’ without presenting one. How do you achieve this?

I never grow tired fo repeating that I will only start working on a film when I have an idea about genre/narrative/style/mood. All of this has to do with 'the moral of the story’, just as much as what we call the content, or even the reality that shapes the content. So the 'outcome' is unknown in reality, but not so much in feeling/meaning.

On the other hand, I think the narrative, or concept, cannot and should not determine the content. While it is essential to have a concept, we should be open to let ourselves be surprised within the concept, bring it into question or even break the concept as a result of real events (but then we need to see that the concept is broken).

There are two types of film-makers that I really admire in the way they resolve this tension: 1) Van der Keuken and Pelechian seem to 'write' their films as they go along (one with the camera, the other with editing); thus, concept and reality become one.

2) Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul transcend the limits of the concept (or form) by creating new 'impossible' realities within the film. It is as if the linearity of film, that is so hard to break, becomes a set of verticals. All of them are far greater filmmakers than I am, but I have an idea of what is happening. Therefore, I try to find a kind of 'uneasiness' in ending my films. I avoid conclusions, try to break up the 'meaning' and to create something more ephemeral, or poetic, or a vertical, really.

My mind skips immediately to See No Evil. This film has all the elements to be defined a ‘moral fable’, like Aesop's fables. We see three animals, with three different stories and three different destinies. Can you say anything about the process of filming three separate episodes in order to conceive one single story?

In the script, I still had the idea of a 'narrator'; one of the apes would have had a voice-over, derived from Kafka's text A Report to an Academy (in which an old ape shares his memories to mankind). After shooting, I thought I did not need this text. The portraits would speak for themselves and the film would become more and more silent as it developed.

As I always thought, this film really would be in the tradition of the 'moral fable', and a journey into ourselves. Tarkovsky helped me in finding the apes. I discovered that I needed an artist, a scientist, and a guide because in Stalker, and in Solaris as well, you can find these three figures: and the guide leads you in this territory, that in Tarkovsky is very large, dealing with truth. I don’t want to compare myself with Tarkovsky, because my territory is more simply the narration. But through Tarkovsky I found the archetypes.

The funniest thing with See No Evil is that we’re invited to put all our thoughts into the minds of apes. It’s all a projection. And I have somehow directed this attention, this projection. In a sense, this film is like an essay. With my latest film - The Shot - the opposite happens, because the idea is that we don’t project but we’re astonished by pure observation.

In this regard, in See No Evil you quote from John Berger: “The eyes of an animal when they consider man are attentive and wary. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look”. How do you have developed this concept of “observing as mirroring” in your last film with/on your daughter?

Last year, when my daughter was eight years old, I decided to film her while she was watching the film Bambi for the first time in her life. Bambi is the story of the disappearance of the mother, so it’s like the first encounter with the violence. For this project, my camera operator built a mirror device so that my daughter can watch Bambi looking in the camera, straight into the camera. I was interested in the part of the film when the mother of Bambi is shot. I know that this project looks very similar to Ten Minutes Older (Par desmit minutem vecaks) by Herz Frank, but at the same time it is different because this is just a single long take, the camera is very close to my daughter, she looks straight into the camera, there is no sound, very very far away you can hear the soundtrack of the film, but it’s not clear. There is no narrative, because the narrative happens on the face of my daughter: you see all the little movements of the face muscles, the expressions of her eyes, there is a shot (the film is also called The Shot)… and then she starts to cry. I find this film really touching and so spectacular! Because it reveals that we become all ‘professionals’ with emotion, not only in film, but also in life.

It’s difficult to know what the film is going to be. I also thought of making a sort of installation, I even thought of using more screens, but then I realized that it should be simple: only a mirror image. As in Berger’s quote, we become aware of ourselves returning the look.

Many among the main characters in your films are children or, at the opposite, elderly persons. Do you have a specific attention for these people?

The first answer is very pragmatic: I like kids and old people because they have less to lose and therefore to hide. They are innocent, or they do not care anymore. The rest of humanity is fighting, and they all have agendas. On another level, I can say that I am interested in both innocence (especially the moment it is under threat) and vulnerability. Life is beautiful in its fragility, something like that.

In How Many Roads, you show us how poetry plays an important role in the life of so many (different) people. I think your portrait of twelve followers of Bob Dylan is a great tribute to the Artist - also and especially as he does not appear in person in the film! This gives us a tangible idea of the importance that the verses of a poet can have in the life of any of us.

I made the film in the year Dylan turned 65, and I was thinking about a generation that was going to retire. In a way, it is an attempt to write an alternative history of our time: what happens to the meaning of words over time? Other people take them and give them new meaning, sometimes the complete opposite of what we believed was the original. Also, old words help us to understand new situations and deal with them. The incredible thing was that when I asked Dylan's manager some rights to music (they never give the rights, actually) he asked to see the film and after some time wrote to me: "We have nothing against your film".

The title of the Florence retrospective also quotes a song by Bob Dylan. Do you like it?

Yes, of course. I think this title is very beautiful, perhaps too beautiful for a focus dedicated to my films. We’ve to stay modest. There’s not only Dylan in this quotation, there is the Bible too. I’m not religious at all, but we started our talk with Protestantism and Predestination, and the title Like Every Grain of Sand is very close to the phrase “Every hair is numbered” (Luke, 12:7). So I found it very poetic and demanding at the same time.

But although “(…) even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows”.

Retrospective at Odeon, Florence