The recipient of a retrospective and the Honorary Giraldillo, the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson is one of the protagonists at this #15FestivalSevilla. One of his star moments was at the talk organised in the Nervión cinemas, during which three scenes were shown from his latest film, still at the editing stage. A world premiere about which Andersson revealed some of its keys, and which he ended with the firm promise to bring the finished 'About Endlessness' to next year’s edition.
The director of 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting On Existence' talked about something that the images of his new work revealed: a voiceover, unknown in his previous films. "It’s a novelty for me, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, but I’m very happy. It’s a female voice that tells the scenes like a fairy tale. And it’s based on the Sheherezade of ‘The 1,001 Nights’. That device worked very well, and I’m very happy with how the film is turning out. I think it will be the best in my career".
Apart from that voiceover, the sequences shown from 'About Endlessness' confirmed Andersson’s wish to be true to himself and to his very characteristic style. The first scene has us on a bus in which a passenger says, for no reason: “I don’t know what I want”. An existential doubt, classic in the work of a director who, at times, seems like a philosopher. The frozen laughs come with the reaction of his fellow travellers: “And who does know?... Poor bastard!”
A filmmaker with a style of his own
Andersson stressed the importance of humour in his work (“there is always irony and self-criticism, they are very necessary in life"), and in his way of seeing the world, something removed from that which the other universal Swede had: “We are not as dense as Ingmar Bergman’s films paint us", he said amidst laughter. And he continued: "My films show the cruel side of existence, but really I’m optimistic. I rebel when people say I’m a pessimist because my films are dark. Life is dark! So, to survive all that, humour becomes something fundamental".
The filmmaker talked not only about his present and future work, but also the past: “In the 70s, my cinema was influenced by Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, and Italian neo-realism. Then came my 20 years directing commercials, which I began doing because after the failure of 'Giliap', no one wanted to hire me. I’ll never go back to commercials because now advertising is too superficial. But when I was making ads I took my work as seriously as now. Really, I was always surprised by the success of my commercials, because I put a lot of distance into it”. And he recalled again something that he repeated like a mantra: “I guess that I always tried to survive without losing my own style”.
