SOURCE: “Antonioni in 1980: An Interview,” in Film Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1, Fall, 1997, pp. 2–10.

[In the following interview, conducted in 1980, Chatman discusses with Antonioni the filmmaker's body of work.]

I recently unearthed the tape of an interview I had with Michelangelo Antonioni in November 1980, recorded as I was preparing my book, Antonioni, or the Surface of the World. Antonioni invited me to his beautiful apartment on the Tiber. He was warm, friendly, open, and always candid. The interview was partly in English and partly in Italian.¹ For this publication, Antonioni graciously allowed me to reproduce some of his own drawings and texts.

[Chatman:] In your early, “apprentice” films of the 1950s (the documentaries, and Cronaca di un amore, I Vinti, La signora senza camelie, and Le amiche) were you working within the genres or were you trying to work your way out of them? You wanted to make a film, Cronaca di un amore, so you made a giallo, a film noir.

[Antonioni:] Yes, but it happened without my willing it; I just wanted to tell that story. I didn’t want to demonstrate anything with my movies, you know … not to start from an idea and to explain to the audience that this is my idea, that I want to tell you this and this. I just wanted to tell a story and depict the emotions it contains.

Was the story of Cronaca more familiar to the public than the kind of story told by your films of the 60s?

What you’re doing is making a critical analysis and asking my opinion about it. But I find it very difficult to respond because I scarcely know how to judge my films from a critical point of view. My films come from my emotions and correspond to a certain period of my life. Of course, behind my emotions there are experiences, ideas, thoughts, observations of reality, and political, social, philosophical, and moral convictions—everything!

And aesthetic convictions?

Of course. But I don’t know how to sort these matters out either before or after the film is finished. For me a film is only a record of a period of my life. I find it terribly difficult to say whether I wanted to make this or that kind of film. I have never thought about the public. Only one person is the public. And it’s me.

Were you conscious in 1959, when you made L’avventura, that you were entering a radically different phase of your career?

No. I have to tell you something. I never, never, never think of myself. Never. I’m a “man of action.” I have to do. And every time I have tried to think about what I was doing it was so difficult that I decided not to do it any more.

Does this most recent stage of your work concern general philosophical questions?

Maybe. Because getting old, you try in a certain way to total things up—ideologically and morally and emotionally. But also because you read new and different things. You change the way you read. I started to read more books about science, for instance. I got very interested in astronomy and things like that, in the world, in the universe. As soon as you talk about the universe, everything is involved.

Now your new film, Identificazione di una donna …

This is the script [pats it on the table].

Is the script more like the films of the early 60s, more like L’eclisse or La notte, than the later films?

Yes, I think so.

Set in Italy?

In Italy, in Rome. But there is something new compared to those earlier movies. That is to say, the milieu—the way they live, these people—is more contemporary. There is a lot of vulgarity. The cars. The people, I mean everything. I am in very close contact with this town. The life of the people in Italy today is very vulgar.

Am I right in detecting a dramatic change when you stopped collaborating with Suso Cecchi D’Amico and started working with Tonino Guerra?

Yes.

Pio Baldelli says that D’Amico’s scripts were like high-class fumetti [comic strips] for ladies’ magazines.

The movies?

Not the movies, but the scripts. I think Baldelli was making a distinction between the scripts and your resultant films. He felt that Le amiche, for instance, very much weakened Pavese, that D’Amico had sentimentalized it. How do you feel?

I wouldn’t say that D’Amico wrote the script. The script came out of a cooperation between me and two women: Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Alba De Cespedes. D’Amico is not a great writer, but she’s a good writer. She knows the feminine mentality very well. But they hated each other, Suso and Alba, so they never talked together. I picked up some material from one and some more material from the other, and then I did the script. Maybe the script was not as good as it might have been. However, I believe that the substance of the film is dramatic enough. The emotional and existential crises of the characters are the same kinds of crises you find in my other films, though the material was structured in a different way.

You’re working with Tonino Guerra again on Identificazione di una donna.

I had this idea for Identificazione di una donna many years ago, and I wrote some scenes, I made some notes, and I kept thinking of it all during those years. And suddenly, two summers ago, I was in Sardinia, and I wrote it. I wrote a hundred pages. Very quickly, in ten days. And then I gave the script to Gerard Brach, Polanski’s scriptwriter. Brach is very intelligent and very able. But he did not write much original material; he only developed the hundred pages which I had written. And then, one night he left for Paris and I needed someone to discuss the scenario with, so I turned to Tonino. I work very well with Tonino. He and I wrote the final draft.

The published English version of L’avventura shows that you cut out many things. To me its elliptical quality makes it one of the first great modernist films. Was your method to write the scenario and then to omit parts as you shot and edited the film?

Yes.

To let the audience fill in the gaps themselves?

Yes. It’s very instinctive for me, you know. Now I cut my movies by myself, and I like it very much. And it comes very naturally to me to cut something. My two best shots—nobody saw them because I cut them! One in N. U. [Netezza urbana—on garbage workers in Rome] and one in Blow-Up. Oh, it was so beautiful. Do you remember the tunnel under the Thames? There is an elevator. It was in the introduction to the movie.

What’s the shot?

The protagonist was going toward the elevator, at the end of the tunnel. And he got into the elevator and went up. I moved the light: it was beautiful.

And what about the shot deleted from N.U.?

I was on top of Via Sistina, on top of Piazza Espagna, near the obelisk, at dawn. The streets were deserted, and if you look down you see Via Sistina, Piazza Barberini, Via Quatro Fontanne, the whole street—that day you had a gray sky—it was fantastic.

Le amiche was still in the narrow screen format, and when you moved to the wide screen—when you made L’avventura—it became possible to have several people in the frame without crowding, and to convey a new sense of design. Did you feel liberated by the wide screen?

Well, I can’t say, because, you know, I’m so tied to the reality. I’m like the other Michelangelo when they told him, “Listen, this is the Sistine Chapel; you have to paint it—this size, not larger or narrower.” And the same is true of my screen: if it’s wide, I have to imagine the composition, you know, according to the wide space; if it’s small, to the small one. But I must say that I prefer the larger frame.

How do you feel about [the made for-TV] Il mistero di Oberwald?

Well, you know, it’s not one of my films. I just directed it. And I tried to do my best. It’s a kind of melodrama, a very strong drama between a queen and an anarchist. It also contains some ideological reference to our contemporary scene in Italy: this anarchist could be compared to a terrorist, though the connection is rather slender. But I found it diverting to tell a kind of story which is so different from my own stories. I have never shot very dramatic scenes, but in this film I had to do so. That didn’t frighten me because in this strong scene the emotions are very precise. They are not full of nuance or withheld; they are not ambiguous. It is much easier to shoot this kind of film.

How did it come about?

Well, Monica Vitti proposed that I shoot Cocteau’s La voix humaine, but I didn’t want to do it because it might seem like a kind of confrontation: Rossellini had already shot a version with Anna Magnani. So we had Cocteau in hand and we selected L’aigle a deux tetes [The Eagle with Two Heads]. Maybe it was a mistake: I don’t know. But I thought it was easier to do.

And then you could concentrate on the technical opportunities?

Yes. It was interesting because of the possibility of writing the film while making it, while inventing it, more than we anticipated. When I am shooting a sequence, normally I try to find the solution, the technical solution, within the set itself. I make a travelling shot here, a close-up there, and so on. When you rehearse on TV you are in touch with the cameramen through a microphone, so you tell them, “Go from here to there,” and you see the rehearsal on the monitor. And you find a lot of things in between these two points that you hadn’t predicted.

How about video color-mixing in The Mystery of Oberwald? Were you satisfied with your experience?

Well, you know, the electronic field is something completely new and very exciting. Because you have everything in your hand: you can put in colors, you can make the image more completely abstract. The possibilities are infinite!

I hear that you are planning to colorize L’avventura.

As soon as I have time, I want to try. I mean, of course we have a lot of limits, but I think we can do it. You know why: because there is a picture in Il mistero di Oberwald, an old picture, you remember those old discolored photographs, about this big? Suddenly this figure becomes stronger, like a real person. And behind him there is some landscape, and the landscape becomes a little green, and this guy a little blue. So why don’t we try to add color to a film? To transfer from film to tape, and then put in the colors, electronic colors.

For showing emotions?

Well, to emphasize.

You’ve always liked to play off narrative conventions, for instance, the roman noir.

Yes, but in fact narrative conventions have given me a lot of trouble. Also cinematographic conventions. I always try to avoid them. However, it’s not always possible, because you risk failing to communicate. Since the public is used to a certain kind of story, it’s necessary to follow conventions a bit—but only a bit. One can’t risk being incomprehensible.

We talked about ellipsis—leaving things out. Now there are other possible developments in narrative, for instance, there is experimentation with point of view or stream of consciousness, interior monologue. You’ve never been interested in that?

Yes, I thought of it—interior monologue. But I don’t like it for film. I think it’s very easy. Too easy. The challenge is to express the same things in a different way.

By surface appearances?

Yes.

Eisenstein wanted to make The American Tragedy as an interior monologue film, and have the voice-over of the hero speak his thoughts, though his lips were closed. Would that have been too easy?

It is too easy. Because as soon as you notice the technique, the film goes down a level, in my opinion.

Are there any other modern novelistic techniques that you would like to capture on film?

No, because I never think of technique. I just choose the technique when I start to shoot, not before.

The subject starts with the visual?

Yes.

First you see something, then you make up a story in your head about what you see? Then you write it down. Then you go out and find a location?

No. I have to see the location while I am writing, not after. I cannot describe a landscape without knowing it. Unless it is a house: a house is very easy to create in my imagination. But if I’m making something in the street, I have to know which street I am talking about. I want to see first, then I place the characters. Actually, the streets give me the idea for the scene.

But when the original subject is expanded into full film, then you have to find other locations to match that original one?

No. If I select a location, I want to shoot in that one, not another one which matches that one. That is my way of being autobiographical.

You would never write an autobiography?

No, I don’t think so. I could only tell something which happened at a given moment of my life. If I think, for instance, of Cronaca di un amore … You remember the movie is about money? And what I remember about myself is that I didn’t have any money at that time. And that’s very important, because I looked at that story from a certain angle.

From the angle of Guido [the male protagonist]?

No, it was from the angle of … I mean, I acted like I had money, because I wanted to have it. I never succeeded.

I want to ask about the future. You mentioned wanting to do a science-fiction film, an animal film, and a film of violent action.

Well, I just have some ideas. I cannot tell you about them. But I have different needs now. I’m fed up with psychology, with emotional analysis, psychological introspection. I’d like to try something else.

I next saw Antonioni in 1982 at a conference in his home town, Ferrara, in honor of his seventieth birthday: the conference papers were published as Identificazione di un autore (Identification of an Auteur) in 1985. Later that year, he kindly sent a print of Identificazione di una donna, and agreed to come to celebrate the publication of my book at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. But sadly a debilitating stroke interfered.

For several years, Antonioni had tried to get funding for La Ciurma (The Crew), cowritten with Mark Peploe, the scenarist of The Passenger. The film was to have been about a mutiny at sea against a yacht owner trying to save everything on his ship in a terrific storm. Antonioni wrote that the crew’s behavior “seems counter to good sense, but the sailors have their reasons.” Violence in such circumstances is “logical … [because it] is the only contemporary way to live and survive.” For the cast he wanted Matt Dillon, Kurt Russell, Giancarlo Giannini, and Gerard Depardieu, and he had invited Martin Scorsese to be co-director. He also prepared a script, with Rudolph Wurlitzer, called Due Telegrammi (Two Telegrams) about a woman in an office in a skyscraper who receives a telegram from her husband asking for a divorce. The shock makes her dizzy. Observing a man framed in the window of an office in the skyscraper opposite, she sends him a telegram but instead of answering her, he tosses the telegram out of the window, and she watches it flutter slowly to the ground (the shot would surely have been endless).

The only film that Antonioni was actually able to shoot in 1983 was the short Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca), an amusing revisit to the bleak Aeolian island which was the setting for L’avventura. Reverberating voices on the soundtrack keep calling “Anna, Anna”: she’s still missing after all those years.

Antonioni doubtless felt so frustrated by his inability to turn his sketches and scenarios into films that he published them, first as pieces in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della sera, and then as a book of short stories, called Quel bowling sul Tevere (translated by William Arrowsmith as That Bowling Alley on the Tiber [Oxford University Press, 1986]). During these years Antonioni continued painting, and his series of pictures called Le Montagne Incantate (The Enchanted Mountains) was exhibited at the Museo Correr in Venice as part of a Biennale, and again in 1993 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. (These and other works are now in the new Antonioni Museum in Ferrara.)

His devastating stroke in 1985 left him unable to talk and paralyzed on one side of his body. In 1986, he married his longtime companion and assistant, Enrica Fico (who played Nadia in Identificazione di una donna), and with her help slowly resumed his career. He and Enrica gathered footage shot in India in 1979 and assembled it into the short documentary Kumbha Mela in 1989. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. For the World Cup Soccer matches in Italy in 1990, he contributed the short subject “Rome” to a compilation film on Italy called 12 autori 12 citta (Twelve Auteurs Twelve Cities). In 1992, he made several travelogue documentaries (with exquisite cinematography) about various places in Italy—Noto (the Sicilian city in which part of L’avventura is set), Mandorli, Vulcano, and Stromboli—and one about Carnevale.

I didn’t see Antonioni again until 1992, on the occasion of a retrospective of his films at Lincoln Center. Though the effects of his stroke were visible, he seemed to have great energy and stamina. In 1995, Antonioni was awarded the Motion Picture Academy’s Oscar for Lifetime Achievement; it was presented by Jack Nicholson in an event viewed by an enormous world television audience. His new film, Al di là delle navole (Beyond the Clouds) premiered at the American Film Institute. The film is in four parts, connected by the wanderings of a film director in search of subjects. (This wrap-around frame story was done by Wim Wenders.) Antonioni’s four segments are set in Ferrara, Portofino, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence, and are based on some of the sketches in Quel bowling sul Tevere. The film has not been distributed in America, so it may be useful to describe it briefly.

The Ferrara episode, “Story of a Love Affair That Never Existed,” concerns the inexplicable refusal of a young man (played by Kim Rossi Stuart) to make love to a beautiful woman (Ines Sastre) who has received him into her bed. The narrator of the published story explains: “Only a citizen of Ferrara can understand a relationship that lasted eleven years without ever existing.” In the Portofino episode, “The Girl, the Crime,” the director (John Malkovitch) meets a salesgirl (Sophie Marceau) in a seaside boutique who both sleeps with him and confesses that she killed her father, stabbing him twelve times. (Why twelve? “Twelve stabs were much more familiar, more domestic, than two or three,” writes the narrator of the short story.) A gentler but no less enigmatic woman is the heroine of “This Body of Dirt” (Irene Jacob). Smiling, she allows a young man (Vincent Perez) to follow her to church in Aix; he falls asleep as she prays, then wakes and races back to her apartment. When he asks if he can see her again, she gracefully declines, explaining that she is entering a convent the next day. The Paris episode, “Don’t Look For Me,” is perhaps the most familiarly Antonionian: a sophisticated Parisienne (Fanny Ardant), sick of her husband’s relationship with his mistress, moves out. She finds what seems to be an empty apartment to rent. But the owner of the apartment (Jean Reno)—who has himself just been left by his wife—returns before she unpacks. So the two “losers” join forces. The film is perhaps as close to comedy as Antonioni has ever come. He had originally intended to base this episode on Two Telegrams, but he was unable to get access to two adjacent skyscrapers as a set.

Antonioni’s astonishing ability to direct Beyond the Clouds was the subject of Enrica Antonioni’s fine hour-long documentary Fare un film e per me vivere (Making Films Is My Life), a title taken from Antonioni’s article in the Italian film journal Cinema Nuovo. It is fascinating to watch him communicate with cast and crew by hand and facial gestures and an occasional grunt. Wim Wenders was at his side through much of the shooting, but by his own testimony did more learning than helping.

At last account, Antonioni had not given up on Two Telegrams and is hoping to start shooting soon. He is now 85.

Notes

1. Gavriel Moses helped me polish the translations.

2. Pio Baldelli, Cinema dell’ambiguita; Bergman e Antonioni, second edition (Rome: 1971).