Yes, I think so. If you expect just a second part of the previous one, exactly the same kind of narrative and situation and so on, you are wrong, because the theme is much darker. It is much more inventive from every point of view. It’s completely unexpected. I think it is very bold, and brave, and creative, and an incredibly original film.
You also spoke very highly of Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig. Why do you think that film doesn’t have a distributor yet?
It’s not an easy film. It’s very bold, again. I don’t know if you are familiar with the book or not. It’s a short novel that was published only in 1985, right after the death of William Burroughs. It’s a very autobiographical novel when Burroughs was a drug addict and a gay man, and he was forced to leave Texas. He went to Mexico City, and he started to cruise in the bars and the restaurants trying to find company. The film is fantastic. I think it’s the best film by Luca Guadagnino so far, and the performance of Danny Craig is absolutely outstanding. I think it’s the performance of his life. He’s a great, great actor, and he takes some risks, of course, because it’s something that’s not in line with his previous films.
There were three versions of the film. The first one was more than three hours long. The second one was two and one half. The final version is two hours and 15 minutes. I haven’t seen the last one, but the two versions I saw were really, really amazing. Luca reconstructed Mexico City in Cinecittá, in Rome, so the visual is completely abstract, is not realistic. Again, it’s very personal, very original, beautiful from the visual point of view. And all the performances are absolutely outstanding.
When you have a festival like this where there’s so many big stars and often big personalities and egos, I have to imagine there’s some behind-the-scenes drama.
But actually less than expected. The major problem we have are the hotels, because we only have one five-star hotel on the Lido, which is the Excelsior. Everybody would love to be there, but it’s impossible to find a room for everybody, so we need to convince the people to go to some [other] hotels. But apart from this logistic problem that we have every year, there are not so many issues or crises connected to the participation of Venice.
You have both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attending the festival this year with their respective films, Wolfs and Maria. Obviously, there’s some tension there due to their ongoing divorce proceedings. How do you handle that? Just space out their appearances?
Yes, of course. Angelina will be on the first day, on Thursday the 29, and she will leave right after with [Maria director] Pablo Larraín to go to Telluride. So Brad will arrive only on Saturday, to Venice. There is no way that they can cross each other at the Lido.
