Article by: Matteo Merlano

Translation by: Ilaria Rana

 A press conference is often a useful instrument for getting rid of any doubts about a film. “La sapienza” is undoubtedly one of those films that must be discussed a lot, whether for its techniques, its narration or the recitative style of its actors. It is a film in which each shot represents a room (in fact the underlying theme is architecture) and each actor talks with themselves without interacting with the others. Each line is pronounced clearly and it represents a struggle rather than a sentence with a meaning. It is a kind of cinema that may not please people.

Green is a director of bygone times. He resembles Einstein and he has a smile that makes you feel comfortable. He said: “Borromini is one of my passions, but I didn’t want to make film in costume about an architect or some theatre. I wanted to tell the story of a pair in a crisis and their meeting with two young people who teach them to see things from a new perspective”.

Christelle Prot Landman, a French actress who worked with Green in 2001 for “Toutes les nuits”, affirms that working with him is always a new and stimulating experience.

Green’s style consists in controlling emotions and feelings. “La sapienza” is the manifesto of this style, with its stares, its attention to words and its frosty faces. All the characters have these features. The director says that his main purpose is to pass on to the audience a sensation of distance.

Also the young actors, Ludovico Succio and Arianna Nastro, represent this anti-naturalism, through close-up shots and shot/counter shots during the (very slow) dialogues with the adult characters, in order to compare the young with the adult world. Green explains that the most important element of his actors must be intensity. He said: “I try to find it during the auditions”.