20/05/2002 - Kaurismaki, Erice, Wenders, Herzog, Kaige, Lee, Jarmusch: 7 directors for 7 episodes of Ten Minutes Older

Ten Minutes Older - The Trumpet is a film in seven parts directed by as many filmmakers that was selected for Un Certain Regard. It is the brainchild of British producer, Nicholas McClintock who was inspired by Italo Calvino´s statement that "Time in a story does not necessarily require time». The seven directors who boarded this pan-European co-production are Finland´s Aki Kaurismaki, Spain´s Victor Erice, Germany´s Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, China´s Chen Kaige and America´s Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. McClintock was soon joined by Ulrich Felsberg, who produced all of Wim Wenders films and by Nigel Thomas, the founder of Matador Pictures.
«Ten Minutes Older will be screened in New York this autumn, then aired on television and released onto the homevideo market,» said McClintock. But that won´t necessarily be the end of this project about Time. «If the film goes well, we will make some more short films to have enough material for three more features. We already have a title for the first, The Cello and it will be made by Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, Mike Figgis, Michael Radford and Istvan Szabo"
«Unfortunately there´s a dearth of woman directors because all the ones we contacted were busy,» continues McClintock who has been involved in this project for the last six years. «The original idea was for each film to be ten minutes long with a predetermined budget.»
« I did not conceive of time in the chronological sense but rather in terms of human sentiments,» explained Victor Erice.
«What attracted me to this project was its contradictory nature,» said Jarmusch. «On the one hand we had a 10-minute limit while on the other we were dealing with infinity.»
«None of us knew what the other was filming,» concludes Wim Wenders.

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