by Elisa Leonelli
November 26, 2018
Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci (born in Parma, Italy, March 16, 1941, died November 26, 2018 at age 77) was inspired by the experimental cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who served as mentor on his first film, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962). He directed Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964), Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1969), Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) based on an Alberto Moravia novel, starring Jean-Luis Trintignant. “I’m not a historian, I’m a storyteller, my movies are always about the destiny of one individual character and the destiny of the country. So you have history, which is the background, Italy in the 1903s, and then you go on the close up of a person, which is fiction.”
He created a scandal with the sexually explicit The Last Tango in Paris (1972), starring a middle-aged Marlon Brando. “In my memory Marlon is a mountain of magic. I had a crush on him, because I had never had in front of my camera somebody as powerful, as fatally tragic. I felt in a very instinctual way that maybe he was playing a last American character of Arthur Miller or Ernest Hemingway living in Paris 30 or 40 years after they did.”
Bertolucci’s lengthy masterpiece, Novecento (1900, 1975) starring Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu, is a Marxist history of Italy from the beginning of the 20th century until 1945. “I am talking about two young people, the landowner and the peasant, De Niro’s mirror image is Depardieu. I’ve often done movies about characters who are doubles, I must be a bit schizophrenic. Bob is Italian-American, so maybe he knew about Southern Italy, like many Italians in New York, but he had never heard about Northern Italy, so he was a bit anxious and asked for many explanations before a shot. Depardieu was very instinctive, he didn’t need any words from me, he just needed me to kick him in the behind to get on stage.”
Bertolucci directed Luna (1979) with Jill Clayburg and La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981) with Ugo Tognazzi. “A director must be a general, but also a spy and a witness, an orchestra conductor and a psychoanalyst, a radiologist and an actor.”
Bernardo Bertolucci © HFPA 1988
The Last Emperor (1987), with John Lone as the Chinese emperor, is an epic film that earned 2 Golden Globes and 9 Academy Awards. “I had such a love story with China. When I went there the first time, I was completely ignorant, and every day I was discovering a new universe, a completely unknown planet, because in 1984 China was still quite close and distant. My attitude was very modestly to go and learn, like going to school, because it’s a 4,000 years culture and we don’t know anything about it. For two years we traveled back and forth with my writer five times, meeting as many people as possible, who were witnesses to this story in some way, and also people in general, intellectuals, politicians, artists. But three years are not enough to understand a country like China, the more you know, the more the mystery becomes big, which is very strange.”
The Sheltering Sky (1990) with Debra Winger and John Malkovich is about the end of a marriage. “The wonderful book by Paul Bowles is very literary, there are pages and pages of thoughts, interior monologues, and I wanted to dive into the hell of a love story using the body language of the two actors more than the words, the sensuality of this couple, and also use the landscape of the Sahara desert not as a pure background, but as part of what happens between them.”
Little Buddha (1993) concluded the director’s Oriental Trilogy by presenting the story of Prince Siddharta (Keanu Reeves), who achieved enlightenment to become the Buddha in ancient India. “After the fall of the Berlin wall, many of my ideals had fallen with it. It was right to dissolve the Soviet Union, too many people were suffering, but I was afraid this marked an end to my utopian dreams. I then realized that Buddhism was in continuity, not contradiction, with my previous beliefs, because it’s a philosophy more than a religion. Man, not God, was at the center of the universe for Buddha, as for Marx and Freud, which is what I’ve always believed.”
Bertolucci then directed a movie set in Siena, Italy, Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty, 1996) with Liv Tyler, and The Dreamers (I sognatori, 2003) set in Paris during the May 1968 demonstrations. “I had made films that were national, in fact almost regional, but then I moved on to another phase; you can’t always be repetitive and I love surprises. I still think that The Last Emperor is a typical example of Italian cinema, because it’s absolutely melodramatic, like Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. I made Sheltering Sky in Morocco and Little Buddha in Buthan and Nepal.”
His last film, Io e Te (2012), was a chamber piece with only two actors in a room, due to the limitation that Bertolucci was confined to a wheelchair following back surgery. When HFPA journalists last spoke with him in Rome in 2012, his political savvy was evident. “We are in a strange, delicate and confused political moment, where traditional parties are completely rejected by Italian citizens, so there are other people coming out from a non political background, like Beppe Grillo, a comedian from Genova, who has an enormous following. 20 years of Berlusconi-owned television in my country have flattened many brains, sort of anesthetized people, so it will take some time to correct the damage.”
The Bari Film festival honored Bertolucci in 2018 with the Federico Fellini Award for Cinematic Excellence, a Masterclass, and the world premiere of a restoration of Last Tango in Paris. He said, “I chose Marlon Brando after the refusals of Jean-Luis Trintignant, who was shy and didn’t want to act naked, of Jean-Paul Belmondo, who considered the film pornographic, of Alain Delon, who would only agree if I made him a producer, for me an unacceptable conflict of interest.”
Published on Golden Globes website