After 30 years as manager of the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, Lucius (Willem Dafoe) learns that the building has been sold to an Argentinian developer, Facundo Ordoñez, who intends to demolish it. Vienna-based Argentinian director Gastón Solnicki (A Little Love Package [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Gastón Solnicki et Angelik…
fiche film]) stars in his new film as Ordoñez, looming over Lucius, who desperately wants to preserve a world, an epoch, an era that’s vanishing. Upon The Souffleur [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Gastón Solnicki
fiche film]'s premiere in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, Cineuropa sat down with Solnicki and tried to untangle the knots of his intuitive filmmaking.

Cineuropa: You’ve said that instead of developing ideas into a narrative, you abandon them after they’ve given you an initial impetus. This intuitive, expansive approach to storytelling makes me think of folds in a fabric: would you say that things and characters fold into your unconventional “narratives”?
Gastón Solnicki: I like the sound of that! In fact, cinema and textiles have a long, shared history – the sewing machine provided a mechanism to hold film strips. I also like to think of it as cinematic tissue – cultures in Latin America use textiles as a way of writing, to keep accounts of birds, the dead, crops and so forth. Folding is also a nice metaphor because in poker – and I’m not a poker player, but my grandfather was – that’s what they call it when you don't bet. I think one has to bet high, especially while one is young. We have to really be courageous and go all in as much as we can – that’s also important to keep in mind when you are improvising: when you have an iron-clad script, you should be able to fold.

Can you give an example of that kind of folding, perhaps in relation to The Souffleur?
Well, one is forced to fold all the time! Sometimes, you spend a significant part of your assets or your time on something that might not work, and you just have to let it go. Willem [Dafoe] was very keen to work with me that way, but there was a point when he asked me: “Gastí, you can't possibly expect me to pull a rabbit out of a hat every day!” And I said, “Willem, what do you think our work is?” I'm very open to chance, to improvisation, and so was he! Actually, for him, it was the highest form of concentration, a testament to how much he believes in artists and the possibilities of their craft. I met him once when I was very young in Buenos Aires, and he had said some things to me that only now started to come back to me. It must have made a great impact on me as a student, him saying something like “I don't care about these ideas.” And neither did I.

Perhaps surprisingly, your film doesn’t treat the Intercontinental Hotel as a main character. There are a lot of scenes taking place in the nearby park, on tennis courts, without any notion of a centre and periphery. How did you manage to achieve that balance in practice?
My films don’t propose a narrative logic to the audience in order for them to be understood or accepted. It's rather the opposite – the film asks you to join the dots in your own chosen way. In that regard, I'm always trying to understand this idea, to quote John Cage, that what we are doing is trying to understand what we're doing, which is not a metaphor. Editing is when and where the writing really takes place, at least in my films. So, in that regard, things and scenes are not shot in a certain place because they're serving a particular function, but because somehow, going back to the metaphor of the tissue, they can produce an epiphany, of sorts.

What do you mean by that?
Things that hold within themselves something timeless, whatever form it takes, narrative or not. This [kind of] epiphany can come from colour or sound; it can come from unexpected things that, when put together in a way that works for them, seem timeless. Yes, the movie takes place in Vienna, but I don’t intend for people who know Vienna to be thinking, “Oh, why are we now in the First [district] if we were in the Fifth?” I like to give the audience elements to stumble upon and support them as they make their own connections, while not obstructing their path.