PR – Is there an unconscious dimension to the process, in which not every choice is a conscious one? I knew that if you are shooting on the fields where generations and generations of familiars, places where they were born, where they sacrificed themselves, where they died, they passed away… I think to shoot those places with an intention of knowing that, trying to honor them, I think that has deep consequences in yourself. Laxe seemed unbothered by this uncertainty while we chatted. Try to be void, and it’s when you are void that something can agitate you.” If we apply that to the art then I agree, and I’m quite existentialist and determinist in the way that I think about life. I trust in identity, of course. What do you think it is that this communicates? This is what medicine calls a neurosis and obviously the way artists ask for love is related to this scar. I needed this layer of truth in the film. But I also want very badly to destroy the author I have inside. But I think this lacking is also what gives you in a way the need to make and create. I know the way they cut their bread. And the scene is transforming itself, it’s changing all the time. Those images came back, because I wanted to do that in Morocco, but one of my neighbors said, “How are you going to do that? For me, they are miracles. We have this mestizo, mixed-blood conscience. My attraction to these things is organic. RS: I understand that you filmed a real forest fire. I think there are a lot of reverberations all over the film, also when the villagers are beating Amador. Filmmaker: I imagine it was difficult to work with a rescue horse. We spoke with an unhurried contemplation about firefighting, cows, and the state of our environment. But finding these moments is a matter of finding a balance, or a spiritual geometry, between images and narration. These fires arrive at the film’s striking climax, a violent entrancement that interrupts the story’s gentle uneventfulness. But Benedicta, I was touched because at that time she was 82 years old, but she speaks too much in real life. A little bit rock ’n’ roll, American, very pop. @notebookmubi. I don’t trust the easy path. I have a script, I have an intention, but I abandon myself to reality. Those archetypes—I really know them. OL – The narrative is quite universal – the son that comes back home who either will or will not adapt. I understood very soon when I was doing my first film, You All Are Captains: that maladjustment, or being unable to adjust to society, is something that’s deeper than racial, class, or gender differences. Somewhere between a bucolic documentary and a Bressonian character study, Oliver Laxe’s terse but open-souled “Fire Will Come” begins with … I’ll be restoring the house of my grandparents, and restoring chestnut forests. But I had my first connection back then. OL – Cinema is a parallel and you have to be detached to avoid yourself – you have to let something inside of you go. It’s strange, but cinema is a perfect tool to invite some transcendental meanings to exist. The first movement was the eucalyptus with the trees and the bulldozers, the second movement was mother and son, and the third one was fire. And this is a risk, always, but it’s all in the choices you made with the people you are shooting, and I think I was very lucky having Benedicta and Amador because they carry the film on their shoulders. RS: But that’s why it’s so beautiful. You could touch and smell things here more than anywhere else. It’s like Duel, from Spielberg . Right now I’m living in the village where I did the film. Of course, I don’t have a complex about speaking about it. . Discussing "Mimosas" with Oliver Laxe. What persuaded you that Amador and Benedicta were right as mother and son? The prizewinning filmmaker talks about his 2nd film, "a Muslim Western," religious skepticism, working with Ben Rivers, and directorial ego. Fire Will Come is filmmaker Oliver Laxe’s third feature—a gentle and haunting drama that investigates the tormented dynamic between man and nature. Why was that? It was a complete disaster. PR – From communicating with the layers or aspects of your personality, why then seek a detachment? The prizewinning filmmaker talks about his 2nd film, "a Muslim Western," religious skepticism, working with Ben Rivers, and directorial ego. Filmmaker: Can you speak more about working with different animals? Nowadays spectators are yearning to make better sense of things, to save themselves by understanding reality more fully. We do that and I like that, I like psychology. (Portions of the film may be familiar to viewers who have seen Ben Rivers’s The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.) Laxe’s mystical film imagines two arduous, enigmatic journeys across the desert, one taking place in the present and involving the transport of a sheik’s body, another taking place in a pre-modern past. But this is something I understood after, and also another side of my personality is that I’m an artist, and we are quite obsessive compulsive, so there is that aim of perfection. So we had to start going to fires, first during the day because it’s more secure, to get accustomed to the smoke. (2016), take place in his adopted home of Morocco. Art is born from an inner adaptation, and I’m curious watching the work I do because I discover and understand that subtly – I unconsciously make films about region of personality. Filmmaker: Your films up to this point have all taken place in Morocco, where you lived for a good part of your life. Laxe: We have too much of an interior world, and so we don’t necessarily experience life in a good way, or have completely healthy social habits. In our discussion, Laxe compared the making of his film to that of composing a symphony. By Nicolas Rapold on July 5, 2016. So that the spectator will have the energy from the first movement, and that second movement, to have that third movement with the fire. My soul. You know? That is one of the problems of all the religions today. After premiering his new film Mimosas in Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival, I had a chance to sit down and discuss the film with its director, Oliver Laxe. It’s as if they use you to exist, and these iconic and essential images are clear to me, and so I try to relate them. But before, having the screening at Cannes, we were afraid of a cynical reaction. If you remember, she asks him, “Do you like it?” And he says, “I don’t understand the words.” And she answers him, “You don’t need to understand to like it.” Something like that. I did it with my producer, we were both doing it, and I’m a lucky man. Art is very comfortable in making films for an artist elite, and the depth and power of cinema is that it’s high culture and popular culture at the same time. Objectivity doesn’t exist. The decision to shoot in a place full of nature, that you refer to as “in the middle ages,” feels relevant. In Cannes FILM COMMENT spoke with the French-born, Moroccan-based Laxe, also the director of You Are All Captains (10), the day after the world premiere of Mimosas, which is slated for release in the U.S. this winter. Cinematographer Mauro Herce’s cool green color palette is here replaced by luxuriant black and orange dancing blazes that fill up the screen, while questions of Amador’s guilt and intent play out in haunting ambiguity. Wildfires happen all the time in Galicia for different natural reasons. There’s the Leonard Cohen cow scene, of course, but some of the most poignant moments in the film feature animals—Amador’s dog chasing after him before the fire, the burnt wild horse. I have to say, too, when we were talking about this film, we were talking about it as a symphony with three movements. Sort of like a school for the ego to die. You’ve mentioned also that when you set out to capture some of these images––the forest, the fire, the faces of the people in this village––you’re looking for something that you’ve called “essential images” or “essential cinema.” What happens between what you envisioned and what ends up on film? He doesn’t give you a feeling of fear. There is this sense of patience, asking us to be with these characters and watch them in their everyday lives. For Amador, it was very clear because he has this very ambiguous…he has a lot of mystery. I think that a non-professional actor has a better chance of being connected with their essence. We could’ve gotten a trained dog, but instead we used Amador’s real dog, which was hard because a trained dog goes where you want it to go, but a pet dog is always hanging around, bothering, doing what they want. What is religion? OL – It’s very organic and I’m quite agitated by this will that you’re obliged to do it. I wanted to cross over that to the essence, and when you touch this essence, you are touching the essence of the spectator that is connected a little bit with the character’s. He’s inhabitated, his silence, hes inhabitated. The structure or geometry of the human heart is the same here, and in—where are you from? Pleaselogin to add a new comment. How do you work with your cast in conveying the import of this weighty material? In this year’s Fire Will Come, however, the writer-director returns to his childhood stomping grounds—not Paris, where he was born and raised, but the mountainous enclaves of rural Galicia, an autonomous region in the northwest corner of Spain. Born to Galician parents, Laxe spent formative summer retreats visiting relatives among the natural splendour of the Serra dos Ancares, parts of which overlap with the religious pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. I know the way they talk to the cows. Life is clear, beauty is clear. It is something that is always appearing, ideas that keep inside you. We applied makeup on her to create that appearance you see in the film. How did you cast these two? The world felt rich. But I was doing a film in the valley where my family was born, and I know each centimeter of this valley: the way they talk, the way they are, their values. The film opens with a majestic image of nature, interrupted by the aggressive destruction of man made machinery. Less interested in the intricacies of relationships or answering the question of guilt, the story is crafted with an attention to the senses. At the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, Filmmaker spoke to Laxe following the North American premiere of Fire Will Come. We wanted to make it more fragile. Laxe: Exactly, we were around real wildfires. Filmmaker: Did you know back then you wanted to become a filmmaker? | October 30, 2020. We had a mistake, and they translated the music in the wrong way and the Koran in the wrong way. I don’t know, obviously I had to work with people from the countryside, people who know how to be with the animals, people connected with their essence. At Cannes this year, Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas won the Nespresso Grand Prize in the Critics’ Week competition. Filmmaker: In which case, the English title Fire Will Come, must’ve felt like a prayer, rather than a source of dread. It’s a little bit more oneiric, in a way. In the tradition of King Arthur and the Holy Grail quest. It’s an illness, it’s too much and I’m not interested in that. I have the tradition and the modernity fighting inside myself, like two armies. The spiritual or physical challenge for all three men—and an eventual young woman who joins—is in fact remarkably muted. PR – You refrain from explaining the relationships, thoughts and motivations of Amador. La hambre [hunger]. Filmmaker: It’s something artists have trouble with, getting too lost in themselves. How to introduce the ineffable in the cinematographical language. They don’t say, “Mom, I love you.” The only time Benedicta says something nice to him is “I’m happy you are at home,” and she’s saying that facing the other way. I think, with “landscape,” you have a dialectical relation between yourself and the nature that is in front of you. I felt like they were totally in the moment. The film receives a virtual theatrical release from KimStim beginning October 30. We knew that the start was very powerful, with that scene with the bulldozers eating a forest.
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