SerpApi.Org
EXCLUSIVE: Close to eight years after Bernardo Bertolucci's death in Rome in 2018, his final screenplay The Echo Chamber will debut in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September under the direction of Andrea Pallaoro.
Working closely with Bertolucci's co-writers Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, Pallaoro has made the tale of love, longing, absence, possession and obsession his own with the help of lead cast Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon.
It marks a departure as a process for the Venice regular who wrote the screenplays for his three features to date: Medeas, Hannah and Monica.
The production has been spearheaded by producers Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Carlotta Calori and Viola Prestieri at Rome-based company Indigo Film, which acquired the rights to the screenplay after Bertolucci's death.
Vikander and Marinelli co-star as unassuming physiotherapist Anne and a Leo, a successful music producer struggling with drug addiction, who are drawn into an unlikely love affair. Sarandon plays storied songstress Ava who enchants Leo with her tales of love and life as they work on her album.Check out a first-look clip for the film below.
Deadline caught up with Palloaro as the film was announced for Venice for his first interview on the process behind bring Bertolucci's unfinished film to the big screen.
DEADLINE: How did you get involved taking on the direction of Bertolucci's final screenplay?
ANDREA PALLAORO: It started with an offer from producer Nicola Giuliano. He brought me the screenplay. It took me some time to make a decision because I was very aware of inheriting a screenplay from a filmmaker whose voice and role in the history of cinema has been so meaningful. It comes with a great sense of responsibility and not a responsibility to imitate but quite the opposite. A responsibility to honor the material which Bernardo wrote with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. From the very beginning as I chose to do this, I knew that the way to honor the material but also the family of artists contributing to the realisation of this film was to be as sincere as possible and to make it my own and see it through my own sensibility.
DEADLINE: How did you work with the screenplay?
PALLAORO: I had to find what was alive in the material and the cinematic language that allowed it to exist and flourish. The screenplay provided a kind of architecture. I felt very fortunate to collaborate and evolve the work with the two writers Bertolucci himself worked with.
DEADLINE: What was your working process with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi?
PALLAORO: Ilaria and Ludovica were incredible collaborators in taking the screenplay from the first version with Bernardo to what then became our blueprint for what we ended up shooting. We had a number of sessions where we collaborated over a long period of time. We would work three, four days and then a few months later, we would resume the process. We had multiple opportunities to really go deep over the development and pre-production. And once the cast came on board, we also did this with them in mind.
DEADLINE: How did you bring your own sensibility to the project?
PALLAORO: The screenplay resonated a lot with themes I have been grappling with not just in my work, but also in my life. The screenplay and the film provide an opportunity to explore what is at the heart of relationships. It's film that explores that very subtle and almost invisible boundary that exists between the need to control and possess somebody, but also the need to care for someone else. It explores the parallel between physical and emotional pain and how those two forms of suffering are often intertwined. Another theme that was very powerful and maybe the thing that made me most excited cinematically was the relationship between presence and absence. As the title The Echo Chamber suggests, it's about the repetition of patterns that we're unable to escape. These are echoes which reverberate through time and memory. An echo in itself is a presence borne from an absence. It's a sound that survives its creators. In a sense an echo is a form of memory. We're all made of echoes. The people we have loved, the worlds that have shaped us, the experiences that have affected us, changed us. The film explores that.
DEADLINE: The film goes back and forwards in time. What was the thinking behind that?
PALLAORO: The breaking of the timeline was something that was part of the identity inherent in the screenplay. It further explores what it means to experience absence, absence as philosophical absence, but also absence as an emotional experience. The way character Anne chases Leo and infiltrates his apartment and finds ways to be close to him without being next to him that to me was an incredibly exciting thing cinematically.
DEADLINE: In your previous films based on your own screenplays you have never been scared to leave gaps or silences on screen, and you've also done this in The Echo Chamber. Did you mold Bertolucci's screenplay to your style of filmmaking, or was this aspect already in the screenplay?
PALLAORO: It's something that comes very naturally to me. I myself am that sort of spectator that cherishes the moments in cinema where you're able to penetrate and enter a character to understand their emotions and thoughts. Those are the moments that I am most excited to create and explore. It's all about the relationship the film establishes with the spectator, to create the opportunity for the spectator to have a very independent and individual relationship with the character without very telling them what to feel or think, to make them active participants as possible. That's where the real catharsis lies.
DEADLINE: Did you choose the lead actors Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon or was that already in place?
PALLAORO: When I came on board, the film was not cast. Every member of the cast and crew was someone that I selected very carefully. These are all artists I have an immense respect for, that I’ve been wanting to work with for a very long time. I feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to do so and foster these relationships and a kind of intimacy… we had to develop a great sense of trust, and when that happens, it’s really one of the most exciting things that can happen in a collaboration.
DEADLINE: What drew you to Sarandon for the role of the singing star Ava?
PALLAORO: It’s an iconic role which Susan made come alive in in a magnificent way. Susan is a legend for me, someone that I have looked up for my entire life, for films like Thelma & Louise, Dead Man Walking and even The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
DEADLINE: Did you rehearse a lot?
PALLAORO: We didn’t do a traditional rehearsal of taking a scene and exploring it together before shooting, but we spent a lot of time discussing the characters and themes, and getting to know one another. It was really about following our instincts and capturing the truth, and creating a space in which the actors really could trust the experience and let go without seeing themselves, if that makes any sense, to be present. That's the kind of space I try to create, to give an opportunity for all my collaborators and especially the actors to just be, instead of having to act.
DEADLINE: All your films to date have played in Venice. What does it mean for you to be in competition with The Echo Chamber?
PALLAORO: Venice has accompanied, given birth to all my films in the world, since my very first feature Medeas and then Hannah, with Charlotte Rambling, and then Monica. It’s with immense gratitude that that I come back to it. It’s very very meaningful to be able to to share it with all the people that made it possible and present it to an audience for the first time in a setting that has accompanied me from the very beginning of my career.
