In Hollywood Ending, Woody Allen was a down-on-his-luck film director who went blind, but still made a movie that failed in America and hit Europe. With his usual sense of humor, Allen delved into the idea that independent cinema has much more experience among the European public than among the American public, the consumer of blockbuster productions par excellence.
Ira Sachs, indie film director whose work has fallen in love at the Toronto, Sundance and Cannes festivals, endorses Allen’s thesis: “Europe is the place for the cinema that I want to make”, says the American filmmaker in an interview with La Vanguardia on the occasion of the premiere of Passages, his latest film that will hit Spanish screens on September 1.
Passages is a European film, shot in Paris by an American director and with an international cast headed by the German actor Franz Rogowski, the British Ben Whishaw and the French Adèle Exarchopoulos.
It is not by chance: “My relationship with Paris is very long. When I was 20 years old, in 1986, I went to live in the French capital, I was there for three months without having any idea of ??French. But the city changed my life. I went to the cinema two or three times a day and saw 197 movies. In Paris I fell in love with cinema and I also fell in love with the city with which I have lived a long history. There I have had sex and relationships, I have cried and I have laughed and that is why it has been very natural to shoot Passages in Paris”.
In the city of light, Tomas, played by Rogowski, finishes his new movie. At the end of shooting party he sleeps with one of the employees Agathe (Exarchopoulos). The relationship is getting better and Tomas decides to leave her husband, Martin (Whishaw) for the girl with whom he is going to live and who immediately becomes pregnant.
The film is somewhat autobiographical, but it also captures the idea that life is pure improvisation, an accumulation of uncertainty. Sachs recalls that he wrote the script “during the pandemic, together with Mauricio Zacharias, and it was very profound to see how things can change in an instant, we wrote and we didn’t know what was going to happen the next moment.”
Later, during filming, “the camera captured the moment and that’s exactly what interests me, the present, the here and now, because people are constantly in a process of change,” he adds.
But Sachs also wanted to delve into power relations: “What does it mean to be a white man with power and how is that power used? I wanted to show that this power is not indestructible and can be turned against whoever exercises it, because people are also contradictory and sometimes with our actions we hurt others but we can also hurt ourselves ”, he concludes.
