PRESS CONFERENCE – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi: “Imbalance creates performance”

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi held a press conference for Un Château en Italie (A Castle in Italy), accompanied by her producer, Said Ben Said, her two co-writers, Noémie Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy, and her actors, Louis Garrel, Filippo Timi, Xavier Beauvois and Marisa Borini. Un Chateau en Italie is  competing for the Palme d’or.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, on her film character:
I’m fairly clumsy in my own life and I also like the notion of imbalance. I remember a lesson at [the] Lecoq [drama school] where he asked us just to stand on one leg, and the very fact of becoming unbalanced led to interesting movements. Imbalance creates performance.

On the place of play in writing:
Noemie Lvovsky: Valeria plays while writing and that leaves you room to reinvent the script. The character played by Filippo Timi has a physical relationship with each of the women who surround him, and that wasn’t in the script, but it makes everything somehow larger.

Filippo Timi : Valeria is a very gifted director. She drives you to see what you don’t want to see or open up.

Louis Garrel, on the autobiographical nature of the films of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi :
When you read a script, you often say “That’s me, right there”. But with Valeria, it’s the opposite. I say to myself “No, that’s not me at all!” But we’re not playing our parts: it happens on a different level. When I saw Le Chameau, I didn’t know Valeria. I thought it was great… I loved the game of clues: what is her real life, what is invented? For a long time, any films that weren’t at least a little autobiographical didn’t interest me. I need films that make me want to live, to leave the cinema and get out there. When it’s too artificial, I get stressed out.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, on the burlesque:
If you scratch the surface of life situations, burlesque is never far away. For me, an actor’s purpose is to discover their inner clown and in Un Château, all the actors did that. It was huge fun.

Reported by B. de M.