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Interview with Italian director/producer Uberto Pasolini conducted by film critic Lalit Rao at 13th International Film Festival of Kerala 2008 Trivandrum (12-19 December, 2008)


Lalit Rao : Good Afternoon. My name is Lalit Rao. I am the editor

of www.cinema-poet.com website. Today, I have with me a special

guest Mr. Uberto Pasolini, a renowned producer as well as a

promising director.


Uberto Pasolini : Promising !


Lalit Rao : Thank you very much Mr. Pasolini for giving me a chance

to speak to you.


Uberto Pasolini : It’s a pleasure.


Lalit Rao : First of all, could you tell me about your transition

from producer to a director ? How did it come about ? Were you not

satisfied with your career as a producer ?


Uberto Pasolini : No. I am very satisfied with my career as a

producer. Even if I am not satisfied with it, that is something I

think I can do a little bit. I came into directing this specific

film because of circumstances. I first found a story that was

interesting to me. I then researched the story, got involved in

writing the script of the story and once, I had written the script,

I felt that the story belonged to me more than anybody else. And I

decided to direct it but there was no conscious decision of

stopping being a producer and starting being a director. I am not a

director. I just directed a film. These are two very different

things.


Lalit Rao : True. So as you told that you have been a producer of

many films which we feel are important in the history of cinema.


Uberto Pasolini : Well, one film may be “The Full Monty” and it is

not important in the history of cinema. It is one lucky film. One

very lucky film.


Lalit Rao : You are being very modest here. I must say “The Full

Monty” has inspired many generations of film makers.


Uberto Pasolini : Generations ! I hope not. May be a few people got

ideas. How many generations have gone by ? It was only ten years

ago. Thank you, very sweet of you.


Lalit Rao : But still in the history of cinema, if one looks

closely, if you ask me, there are not many producers who have

turned directors except for Barbet Schroeder who is a renowned name

because producing a film is a different department, directing a

film is a different department. So how did you prepare yourself to

direct this film. You might get interesting ideas but to direct a

film is an altogether different game.


Uberto Pasolini : Stanley Kramer, a very famous producer who made

some wonderful films may be. In fact, the most nominated producer

in the history of Hollywood. Anyway. How did I make the transition

? I was able to make the transition because I had a group of people

around me who sustained me in the effort of taking the story to the

screen. In fact, they made the film more than I have. I wrote the

script with a Sri Lankan, I was produced by a Sri Lankan, a

wonderful director called Prasanna Vithanage. The cast was Sri

Lankan, the crew was Sri Lankan. I was surrounded by a group of

very generous, very patient people that carried me through the

making of the film and that is how it happened.


Uberto Pasolini : It wasn’t so much preparation. Of course, before

we made the film, we watched/I watched a lot of cinema


Lalit Rao : What kind of cinema (did you watch) ?


Uberto Pasolini : Asian cinema, European cinema, cinema of the

dispossessed, cinema dealing with poverty, family, cinema dealing

with sports. All sorts of cinema to try and decide what language we

wanted to adopt. That was a process we had to go through certainly

to decide the style of the film, the tone of the film, the language

of the film but the film came about because of the efforts of many

people. It was those many people who were Sri Lankans on the whole,

a majority of them that made what is now a Sri Lankan film and

which is why it has been so well received in Sri Lanka.


Lalit Rao : Yesterday, I attended a press conference where you told

that you were inspired to make this film when you read in Sydney

Morning Herald, a small snippet about this handball team. If you

really look at it in a positive manner, this might be a treatment

for a short film, this small thing. So how did you develop the

scenario in such a way that it blew up to a 90 minute film ?


Uberto Pasolini : Well, I think actually that the interesting thing

about the original story is not the sport side. That is the

background . I felt immediately when reading the story about the

fact that 23 Sri Lankans had invented a national handball team of

Sri Lanka in a country where handball is an unknown sport to try to

get to the west. I thought that that story was giving us a

possibility of talking about all sorts of international, universal

issues poverty, immigration, the immigration laws of the west, the

desire of people to move for certain periods of their lives to

other countries to improve their lives at home.To deal with these

stories with the back on the back of the handball story so what I

was interested in understanding the reason, the motivation of

people who want to travel abroad. Therefore that is where the film

concentrates most of it to start. The film is 75% in Sri Lanka and

25% in Germany, may be 80/20.


Lalit Rao : 90/10, I would say.


Uberto Pasolini : May be 90/10. That is because we did not want to

make a sports movie. We did not want to make a farce about people

who could not play a sport and it was fine. We wanted to make a

film that used the original story, the true story to talk about

different issues and that is why it was possible to develop it into

a 90 minutes film. If, in fact, you are right, if we had only made

the German portion of the story just the arrival of a Sri Lankan

team that can’t play handball and then disappears then it would

have been a 20 minutes film. We were interested in what happened

before the arrival not so much what happened afterwards.


Lalit Rao : Mr.Pasolini. I watched your film yesterday with the

audience and I was really amazed by the response it got. People

were laughing, applauding, some people were even in tears because

this is a kind of a film which we in India call a full money back

guarantee film


Uberto Pasolini : Oh ! That is a great title. I want that. Full

money back guarantee.


Lalit Rao : A full money back guarantee film. The spectator does

not feel that he has been cheated. He has got the value of his

money back.


Uberto Pasolini : Let me write that down. A full money back film.

Excellent !


Lalit Rao : I will give you the Hindi expression “Full Paisa

Vasool”.


Lalit Rao : 100% full paisa, paisa you know ?


Uberto Pasolini : Paisa ? P E I.


Lalit Rao : P A I S A. Paisa is the sub unit of rupee. You have

Euro and centime. So this is paisa. 100 paisa is 1 rupee.


Uberto Pasolini : Yes, I understand. OK. Yeah paisa. 100% paisa

vasool.


Lalit Rao : 100% full paisa vasool film.


Uberto Pasolini : OK ! That is the best news.


Lalit Rao: So, well Machan turned out to be a full paisa vasool

film in the sense that it has comedy, it has humour, it has

sadness. All in all, it is a serious subject made in a very light

fashion. So my question to you Mr.Pasolini is that when you were

making this film, did you have a notion that it might turn out to

be a 100% full paisa vasool film ?


Uberto Pasolini : I didn’t because I didn’t know the expression. I

was hoping that the film would deliver on both counts meaning in

terms of entertainment both from an emotional and from a humorous

point of view and in terms of thought process in the sense that I

liked the film to make people think, to feel the issues that are

behind the film but also to go along the film enjoying and getting

involved in the characters and the story. So that was our hope when

we made the film. It seems here in Sri Lanka that we have succeeded

and to be honest at every festival we have shown the film whether

it is Los Angeles, North America or Europe the film has had a

similar response in terms of enjoyment and understanding of the

issue behind. What it didn’t have is the level of extraordinary

warmth that Trivandrum offered it and I suspect that has to do with

the quality of the audience at Trivandrum and not with the film. I

think that the audiences here are particularly warm, particularly

attentive, particularly generous to my film and I have seen them

being generous to other films too.


Lalit Rao : Mr. Pasolini, my next question is regarding the film.

Some sections of the audience found that the depiction of poverty

found in your film was a bit harsh.


Uberto Pasolini : Harsh ?


Lalit Rao : Yeah, it was a bit harsh in the sense that you showed

really very abject poverty. You showed people living near water and

railway tracks and something like that. So anything to say about

that ?


Uberto Pasolini : We shot in real places. We shot in three slums in

Colombo. That is what they look like. That is the kind of life many

people live and we didn’t make them up. So I am not sure how you

can be told that they are harsh. I have seen similar situations,

similar conditions, economic conditions in India, in Latin America,

in North America. I have seen them in Italy. What we did is that we

photographed real situations and I have also to point out that

within the film itself there are some characters who do not live in

those extreme situations. The reality is that a lot of people who

travel abroad from developing countries to the west come not from

the most dispossessed class of the society but sometimes almost

middle class. There are some characters from the film, a doctor who

comes from Pakistan, that is based on the real person I met. So the

mixture of persons is there for social background although the

majority of people, you are right, come from a slum in Sri Lanka.

Those are real slums.


Lalit Rao : Mr. Pasolini, your film talks about the tough question

of Immigration but there might be a point of view that in a way

this film is trying to support illegal immigration that in a

negative sense people can use different techniques, different

methods to get into the west.


Uberto Pasolini : Well, I understand what you are saying. The first

thing I would say is that I believe ……


Lalit Rao : Because I am talking from the perspective of the

audience who are not interested in Asian cinema. Imagine someone

who is a fervent European person whose interest lies just in EU.

That kind of person or those kind of people might perceive it as a

film making mockery of European union laws.


Uberto Pasolini : Well. That is good because the film wants to be a

mockery in so far as the people who were the real participants of

the real story who made mockery of immigration rules by avoiding

immigration rules through this crazy system. I strongly believe

that the philosophy behind the much of the immigration laws of the

west is mistaken. I think the west demands free movement of its

financial capital but does not accept free movement of the human

capital which is often the only capital which the developing

countries have.And I think that this is an unjust philosophy on

which to base immigration laws. One of the things that I was trying

to do in a small way was to remind people in the west that the

people that we see on the streets working in our fields, our

factories, our hospitals from outside from outside of the west have

all left behind a family, a culture, a language and their friends

everything that we take for granted. To me, these people in one way

or another are heroes, are very brave in making these journeys and

attempting to fight the system but more than that in attempting to

get to a situation where they can help their families. It is

something which western societies did many years ago. America is

colonized. It is made up of people on the whole by the people who

were in similar situations by the people who were leaving old

Europe for political as well as economic reasons. That happened a

100 years old. After the second world war,a lot of people from

Italy went to Australia, Latin America and to Germany. So Europeans

in the past have traveled to make their lives better and now it is

other countries who are doing the same and why not ? It is the

unjust economic and political environment of today that makes such

travel very often impossible. I am against these barriers and

although I think that the situation is extremely complex and I

wouldn’t want to pretend to think that it is possible tomorrow

morning to change completely and just open gates because the

infrastructure of the west would not be able to cope with the

numbers. I do believe that if the approach was taken from a

different philosophical view, immigration, economic migration could

be regimented, regulated. In such a way as to allow people who want

to have these opportunities for some period of time.And acknowledge

the fact that the Western economies do not function without

imigration whether it is legal or illegal. They simply would

collapse if it wasn’t for immigrant doctors, immigrant laborers,

immigrant nurses in hospitals, immigrant people who look after your

grandfather etc. It will simply not function. This is something

which is often forgotten by the very people who gain from the

immigration phenomenon in the west.


Lalit Rao : Mr.Pasolini, my last question to you is about your film

and its reception. Your film has so far tasted the reception in

festival and art circuit. Could you please tell me about the

commercial reception of your film ? Has it been shown in cinema

halls all over the world ?


Uberto Pasolini : Not yet. The film has only been shown.


Lalit Rao : What are you hoping from the commercial release ?


Uberto Pasolini : Right. The film has only been shown in Italy

where ..


Lalit Rao : Venice film days ?


Uberto Pasolini : Yes but in terms of commercial release it has

only been shown in Italy and Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, it is an

enormous commercial success. In Italy, it suffered from some

problems of distribution and it is less successful. We think that

we came out at a wrong moment. We made a number of mistakes in

distribution. We are waiting to see the release in new countries in

Germany, France, Canada, Switzerland to see how that goes before I

can really answer. But I hope that it will be shown in a small way

because it is subtitled, it is not an European film and subtitled

films have a limited release in general whether it is North America

or Europe. But I hope that it will get there and will be

appreciated and may be will make people think.


Lalit Rao : What about the festival circuit ? How many festivals

has it toured so far ?


Uberto Pasolini : I don’t know exactly. May be 10 festivals till

now and may be 10 more next year.


Lalit Rao : Is this the 11th festival ?


Uberto Pasolini : I don’t know. I have to count. Three in Germany,

Venice, Toronto, Sao Paolo, Dubai and I am missing something else.

One in France. This is the 11th festival. This is a big festival.

Some of them were smaller festivals.


Lalit Rao : I wish you all success for your festival participation.


Uberto Pasolini : That is very kind of you. Thank you for your

generous comments on the film and your interest.

Uberto Pasolini to the cameraman Hitesh Rao : And. Thank you very

much.


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