FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/A BIGGER SPLASH JUNKETS Cast of "A Bigger Splash" talk about refugees, challenges and singing and dancing

Record ID: 141634

  • Title: FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/A BIGGER SPLASH JUNKETS Cast of "A Bigger Splash" talk about refugees, challenges and singing and dancing
  • Date: 7th September 2015
  • Summary: VENICE, ITALY (SEPTEMBER 7, 2015) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR RALPH FIENNES SAYING: We had to work on getting the basics of "Unforgettable", I'm not sure we'll be selling any LP's. (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTRESS DAKOTA JOHNSON SAYING: "We are going to be releasing an album this Christmas, it's called..." (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR RALPH FIENNES SAYING: "Forgettable" (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTRESS DAKOTA JOHNSON SAYING: "Forgettable"
  • Embargoed: 22nd September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAAPF2O14DZBGRGM1C0JZJRPROO
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE CONTAINS PROFANITY IN SHOT 3:36
    "A Bigger Splash", Italian director Luca Guadagnino's remake of the 1969 French film "La Piscine" (The Swimming Pool) about a vicious love triangle set on the Cote d'Azur, transfers the action to the Italian Mediterranean island of Pantelleria.
    The wave of migrants and refugees landing in Europe or dying in the attempt has not hit the Lido where the 72nd edition of the Venice Film Festival is underway, but it is coming up in the films being shown and in the discussions about them.
    "A Bigger Splash" has a subplot involving people who have come ashore on Pantelleria.
    The film incorporates flashes of information from television broadcasts about refugees and immigrants landing on Lampedusa.
    It also shows a group of refugees hiding out in the hills of Pantelleria and more who have been caged into a fenced-in area beside the local police station.
    "It's reality, I mean, it was reality a year ago, it was reality several years ago, it's not an "in" subject. It's been the reality for 20-30 years) These are war refugees and the more people think it's possible to ignore it or to somehow suppress their attention to this reality, we are going to get deeper and deeper into this kind of denial," said Swinton.
    Fiennes said the situation was very different from a year ago when they shot the film on the southern Italian island, which lies some 60 kilometres from the coast of Tunisia.
    "It was a concern a year ago, now it's become a serious humanitarian crisis, I think, in a way that it wasn't written a year ago, I think the whole thing has ratcheted up," he said.
    Speaking to Reuters a day after the film's world premiere in Venice, Swinton, who was directed by Guadagnino in "I Am Love" (2009), described "A Bigger Splash" as a simple tale about getting over a finished relationship.
    The actress said the film wasn't actually a remake and that the rights of "La Piscine" had served only as the first step in the beginning of the project. The end product was a very different story with completely different characters, she said.
    "For me it's a sort of a pagan portrait of something quite domestic. People don't have to be rock stars and record producers and filmmakers and super rich and privileged to have this kind of a story. It's about people at a point in their lives trying to move on and other people coming in and kind of messing with that. You can set that story pretty much anywhere. So on the one level it's just a very simple, quite modest, human tale of how do you get over your ex, how do you move on?" she said.
    At the film's official news conference a day earlier on Sunday (September 6) Swinton, who mostly whispers in the movie, said at first the timing was not right for her to do "A Bigger Splash".
    When it became possible she suggested her part should be a mostly non-speaking role -- which is why her character Marianne is convalescing from a throat operation.
    "It was a challenge, I remember the first time Luca and Tilda met and then Luca came to me and said: "Tilda has a brilliant idea Matthias, it's fantastic, Tilda is not going to speak in the entire film!" and I'm like, hold on, wait a second, there is a screenplay, there is a lot of dialogue, how are we going to do that. But then the instant reflex was, ok, that's an interesting choice, so how can we speak to each other without talking and so then that's what you go looking for, it's a challenge because it sounded pretty scary, like okay, so I'm not going to speak to her, is this a a silent movie? But then you find ways and then actually I found that it was a much more profound way to..it enabled us to reveal something about their dynamic and the vulnerability of the stage that they're at in their life," said Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who in the film plays Swinton's partner Paul.
    In the film Ralph Fiennes's character Harry, a record producer, flies unannounced into Pantelleria with his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) and barges in on his rock-star ex-girlfriend Marianne (Swinton) and her filmmaker lover Paul.
    The usually decorous Fiennes dances wildly around a swimming pool to a Rolling Stones tune and belts out songs on an aged karaoke system at a local bar.
    Together with Johnson, Fiennes's Harry puts on an inappropriate performance of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable".
    "We had to work on getting the basics of "Unforgettable", I'm not sure we'll be selling any LP's," Fiennes said.
    "We are going to be releasing an album this Christmas, it's called..." Johnson joked.
    "Forgettable," Fiennes quipped.
    "Forgettable," said, laughing.
    Cast as a motormouth, know-it-all extrovert, was new but exciting territory to Fiennes. He said he hoped it would help audiences - and casting directors alike - see another side to him.
    "I hope so. I don't know. I mean, I love this part. I've not been asked to play anything quite like it. I love it because it's contemporary and it's an extrovert energy which I'm not really...I think people want me to often..have asked me to play men with interior confusion or malign confusion, or I don't know what, I don't analyse it but this was a new path that Luca invited me on and I liked it and I don't know where it's going to lead. There's no knowing.," he said.
    The starry cast and crew served as the inspiration for the film, said Guadagnino.
    "I think it's all about family. Maybe it's because I'm Italian, like the Godfather, I like the idea of a family. But I like the idea of a family that's not the patriarchal family. My family is a family of collaborators, a family of people that I enjoy the proximity with. One person that I learned over years to love the company of was my writer David Kajganich and I love the script he wrote and it was important for me to stick to that and Tilda is my sister and everybody else, all my collaborators so it was a great occasion to explore something, all together in a wonderful familiar way and that's why I wanted to make the movie," he said.
    The film is one of 21 movies competing for the Golden Lion prize at the 72nd Venice Film Festival.
    It is also the second film that Schoenaerts is promoting at the festival, following his turn in "The Danish Girl" which is also screening in competition.
    "Great, we are at the oldest film festival in the world with two films that I am presenting with a great pleasure and which I had the great pleasure to work on. So, it's a little bit of nice work for me here and then I'm back to Antwerp," he said.
    The Venice Film Festival runs through Saturday (September 12).
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