Pierfrancesco Favino has moved spectators at the Venice Film Festival with My Tennis Maestro [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Andrea Di Stefano
fiche film], directed by Andrea Di Stefano, presented Out of Competition. Favino plays a former tennis rising star, who has known glory and then the abyss of defeat – a loser training a 13-year-old boy who carries on his shoulders the expectations of his father, in a parable of downfall and rebirth. We talked about it with the director.

Cineuropa: The film arrives at the moment when the victories of Jannik Sinner have widened the audience of those interested in tennis.
Andrea Di Stefano: The film was conceived of more than 15 years ago. It’s my first screenplay. I’m happy about what’s happening with Italian tennis now, but this is a film about something else and I decided to make it because, basically, I found the right actor for it. I also felt that I had to detach myself from genre films. Dealing with emotions, directing actors in films with certain themes. This is the cinema that fits me better.

What themes are you referring to?
This is a coming-of-age film, a buddy movie, you can call it what you want. But basically, as a former sportsman, I couldn’t find myself reflected in films about sports, because they always talk about the winners. I wasn’t a winner and I’ve always wondered why they weren’t films about athletes who don’t win. Before the tournament begins, they all have their dreams of glory, even the less strong ones. I started from that to tell two parables, one who dreams of glory in the present and the other who has touched glory in the past. I knew that there was material to work with in that comparison.

Were you inspired by someone?
I took inspiration from a real person, my tennis coach, and a large number of the scenes I’ve put in the film are situations that I directly experienced.

When did you offer the role to Pierfrancesco Favino?
It was during promotion for The Last Night of Amore [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Andrea Di Stefano
fiche film], there was a strange asymmetry between the success of the film and how we were feeling: it was a very complex production that we made with so much effort, but we were missing the “putting ourselves in difficulty”, something new and different. He decided to work on this character in depth. There are few actors who can do what he did in this film.

It’s a tragic character, a fragile man with nevertheless a great sense of irony.
I know that there is a hidden emotion, my ability must be to bring it to the surface. I don’t know how to make “conceptual” cinema. I like to talk about an unfair society, in which a father can impose his choices on his son and a tennis instructor decides to ruin his own life and abandon his daughter. These life trajectories take us to an emotion. Then, it is important to let the spectator go home after seeing the film and rework it, as if the film had to continue in that work. I’ve always observed life from the side of the street, I don’t need to present a thesis.

Was it complicated to shoot the tennis matches?
It was a nightmare. Shooting tennis is extremely complicated, and with the time we had we were forced to be ingenious to get it right. It was a challenge and I learned a lot. I knew from the start that I would enter into the dynamic of “15-0, 30-15… Match point…”. I found the trick of the line on the field. In front of the line, behind the line… These are places of the soul. Tennis is a palette of actions that aren’t stylistic but narrative. It’s a dialogue. There’s always the risk of doing camera movements that are only self-aggrandising. On this subject, I’ve been feeling for a few years a stale atmosphere in cinema, as though it had lost its narrative potential.