Presenting two films at Rotterdam Film Festival this year, his sixth feature as a director “Hold Me Tight” and musical comedy “Tralala” by his regular collaborators Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu,admitted he found it hard to shake off the role of a singer-songwriter in search of the Virgin Mary.
“After ‘Tralala,’ I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Everything was dark. There was this extraordinary project with Noémie Lvovsky, whom I love, there was another one with Pietro Marcello and I said yes to all of it, obviously. And then I just couldn’t do it.
The French filmmaker also treated the festival audience to a clip from his upcoming directorial work “John Zorn III.” The third part of his series dedicated to the prolific musician – 12 years in the making – will be shown at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in March, this time focusing on Zorn’s collaboration with Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan.
“In Claudine’s text, there was this piano that the mother uses to connect with her daughter. I also played the piano when I was a kid. I lived in Moscow with my parents and my mother enrolled me in a music school: I was the only foreigner. I did play quite well but when I came back to France, I got lazy. It was fun to imagine what could have happened if I continued.”