Paolo
Sorrentino, Pablo Larraín, Maggie Gyllenhaal and other film-makers on
the restrictions, inspirations and creative solutions to shooting in
lockdown
From left; directors Gurinder Chadha, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paolo Sorrentino.
Composite: Getty/Rex/Shutterstock
“Shall
we take a tour of the Vatican?” the Pope asks the Queen. Except his
holiness and her majesty are not actually in the Vatican, they are in
the home of the renowned Italian film-maker Paolo Sorrentino.
And they’re not actually people; they are little figurines with waving
hands, such as you would buy in a souvenir shop. Sorrentino’s
bookshelves double for the Vatican library, plant pots for its gardens,
the underside of a chair for a grand hall. Then the Dude from the Big
Lebowski pops up and tells them there’s a lockdown. “Oh, that’s quite
all right,” replies the Queen. “I’ve been in lockdown for the past 94
years.”
It is a bit of a departure from Sorrentino’s usual sumptuous works such as The Great Beauty or his HBO series The New Pope
(which is set in a considerably more lifelike replica Vatican). But
this is what film-making looks like under lockdown. Sorrentino shot the
film on his iPhone, then got actors Javier Cámara and Olivia Williams to
do the voiceovers. “It was a sort of return to the beginning of my life
as a director,” he says. “When I was very young, I did exactly this
kind of stuff: making movies alone at home with a VHS camera.” The Pope
and Queen figurines usually sit on his desk. “They are both people who
have lived their whole lives in lockdown,” he says, “so it was easy to
tell a story of solitude, of melancholy between them.”
‘They are both people who have lived their whole lives in lockdown’ … Paolo Sorrentino’s Homemade film. Photograph: NETFLIX
Sorrentino’s film is part of Homemade,
Netflix’s new collection of 17 short films by renowned film-makers from
all over the world, all made under quarantine conditions. As an
exercise, it is not dissimilar to the Danish Dogme 95 movement, under
which film-makers had to submit to certain rules: hand-held cameras, no
special effects or genre gimmickry. Twenty-five years later, Homemade’s
film-makers have been forced into a similar set of restrictions:
confined to their homes, subject to local quarantining guidelines, with
little access to equipment, crews, sets or locations. By comparison
Dogme is almost literally a walk in the park.
“It’s like doing a dinner party but only cooking with what you have at home,” says the Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín,
Homemade’s chief instigator. “You have to be very creative.” Like many
other film-makers, Larraín was at home, locked down in Santiago with his
wife and children, and only able to move so far forward on any of his
projects (which include a Princess Diana film starring Kristen Stewart).
So he, his brother and co-producer Juan de Dios Larraín, and Italian
producer Lorenzo Mieli decided to make a few calls and get things
moving. On top of the strictures of lockdown there were a few other
rules to do with format, length (roughly 10 minutes), and deadline (they
only had 10 days). But apart from stipulating a PG-13/12A age rating,
film-makers were free to do what they liked. “This might be something
interesting many years from now to look back on,” says Larraín,
“something that could stay as a memoir of what happened during these
days. I believe that is something particular and beautiful.”
Pablo Larraín. Photograph: Luis Poirot/Photo Courtesy Netflix
Homemade is also something of a test, both of film-makers’ individual
powers of imagination under adverse conditions and their usefulness as
artists in times of crisis. The responses vary. Sebastián Lelio gives us a lockdown song-and-dance; Rungano Nyoni
chronicles a comical breakup in text messages. Larraín’s own
split-screen film also co-opts social media: it was made entirely on
Zoom. It begins with an old man in a nursing home (regular Larraín
player Jaime Vadell) confessing his lifelong love to an old flame
(Mercedes Moran). The regret and longing are moving at first, then
things take a more comical turn. “It was made entirely over the
internet,” Larraín says. “I never met any of these people face to face.”
Unsurprisingly perhaps, many of the film-makers turn the camera on their families. Gurinder Chadha in London and David Mackenzie in Glasgow offer relatively straightforward lockdown diaries. Nadine Labaki and Khaled Mouzanar capture a single take of their daughter improvising a childhood adventure in their Beirut office. Natalia Beristain’s
daughter is home alone in a Mexico City ominously free of grown-ups.
Cinematographer Rachel Morrison films her son frolicking outdoors in
magic-hour California. She prays the pandemic won’t affect his childhood
like her own mother’s death affected hers. “Recognise your fortune, be
grateful, but also, be five.”
Others head in the opposite direction. Running furthest with the idea, surprisingly, is the actor Maggie Gyllenhaal. She turns in a poignant dystopian sci-fi starring her husband, Peter Sarsgaard,
as a lone survivor grieving his dead partner in deepest Vermont. In
this scenario, the virus has claimed 500 million lives and is playing
havoc with time and space. There are even special effects (which would
disqualify it from Dogme certification). Gyllenhaal is preparing to
direct her first feature, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost
Daughter, so this became her debut. “Because I had never officially done
it before, there was something more at stake for me,” she explains from
Vermont. It happened very quickly. “I was like: ‘OK, what are my
assets? My assets are: I happened to have the most incredibly brilliant
actor living with me, and this place, and then I was thinking about
grief, and this really sad story I’d heard about somebody who had
ordered a backpack for their child who was terminally ill, and the
backpack arrived after she died. Then I also had this image of my
husband making love to a tree.” She shot the whole thing in a day and a
half, getting in the tree-humping before the light faded. “We just
really rolled with it,” she says. “I don’t know, for me it was like so
weirdly easy and kind of dreamy getting it done.”
A scene from Gurinder Chadha’s Homemade film. Photograph: Netflix
As well as showcasing their creativity, Homemade also tangentially
showcases these film-makers’ homes, which can be fun for snoopers, but
sometimes sits uneasily with the global moment the project is trying to
capture. While the coronavirus epidemic has brought death, poverty and
suffering to many millions, most of these film-makers live pretty
comfortable existences, from Chadha’s Primrose Hill pad to Sorrentino’s
tasteful Roman villa (Oscar fridge magnet: nice touch!) to Morrison’s
rural homestead with a canyon out back. Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard’s
primary home is a 3,600sq ft brownstone in Brooklyn (they displayed it in Architectural Digest
last year). They have been at their Vermont getaway since lockdown. By
contrast, Ladj Ly’s film takes a drone flight through the crowded,
overwhelmingly non-white Paris housing estate where he made his hit
movie Les Misèrables. One of the few film-makers to strike a note of
despair is Kristen Stewart, whose film is a glitchy self-portrait of
anxiety and insomnia.
Pablo Larraín acknowledges his own relative privilege, and the way
the pandemic has exposed underlying inequalities. “None of us are living
through this pandemic in the same way.,” he says. “And as you can see
these kinds of situations are exposing the crisis of capitalism in ways
we never expected.” The crisis will have an impact on art to come, he
feels: “There’s always something that stays with you, and probably
changes what you are doing. That is one of the existential mysteries of
the creative process: you’re just reflecting on what’s going on around
you and hopefully leaving a trace that has some kind of a meaning. What
else?”
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