Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera, capitalism, and working with Josh O’Connor

But La Chimera is about much more than one man’s quest to find his girlfriend. It’s about our relationship to the past, the vacuity of materialism, the magic of the unseen, the dark and light of humanity. The same can be said for Rohrwacher’s previous films – Heavenly Body, The Wonders and Happy As Lazzaro – which are soulful responses to the materialistic, patriarchal status quo. Her work can feel like stumbling across an enchanted film reel, dusty from years of neglect, but still alive with life. “I’ve got this desire to catch traces of memory, but not my personal memory,” she explains, speaking over Zoom from her home in rural Umbria. “It’s a shared, collective memory. It’s bigger than me.” 

A lot of people are saying La Chimera is the third part of an ‘informal trilogy’, along with The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro. What would you say are the threads that draw these films together?

Alice Rohrwacher: It was an involuntary trilogy. But there’s a dialogue between these films, because they’re all about our relationship with time and the past. The Wonders is about the commercialisation of the idea of the past, whereby a typical family becomes a TV phenomenon. It’s set in the 1990s, in the full swing of the Berlusconi era, where everything was about commerce and TV. In Happy As Lazzaro, we talk about the ‘cancelling’ of the past, because we see this community which is transplanted into a different time, thereby its past is all of a sudden erased and wiped clean. La Chimera is the last moment in this process, where we open up the tomb where everything sacred lies – everything that, up to yesterday, was sacred no longer is, and can be sold for money.

How do these stories come to you? How do you create enough space in your mind to develop them?

Alice Rohrwacher: There’s a quotation by Virginia Woolf which I’ll paraphrase: ideas are like plants. You must water them but not bother them too much, otherwise they can’t grow. It’s similar for me: I feel like an idea is growing, so I leave it and let it grow. At times, I go and see how it’s doing, but I don’t try to make it productive at all costs – especially at the beginning, an idea can be fragile. Each plant has its very specific growing dynamics, too. Some plants grow incredibly rapidly; Happy as Lazzaro was more like a mushroom, in the sense that it came to me from a morning to an evening. I saw it all in one piece, so all I had to do was sit down and write it. But a film like La Chimera has very deep and ancient roots. I spoke to the Tomboroli as a little girl; I was actually really afraid of them. I tried to befriend them over ten years ago to try and understand them. And I thought for a long time that La Chimera was an impossible film to make, because it was about objects. Then I eventually understood that it was not a film about objects, but rather about the aura of objects, as Walter Benjamin says – about the sacredness hidden within objects.

There are a lot of references to Greek mythology, folklore, and ancient mysticism in your films – the kind of thinking we’ve lost touch with in the modern age. Do you think people are looking for more enchantment in their lives?

Alice Rohrwacher: My films are not really constructed films, as much as remembered films. I’ve got this desire to catch traces of memory, but it’s not my personal memory. It’s a shared, collective memory, it’s bigger than me. And I think, not everyone, but some people feel that when they watch my films. There is a story on one hand, there are threads that you can follow, but there’s also a collective memory that makes us human.

I often feel enchanted by the world, so I try to share this gaze. La Chimera tells the story of an epochal shift – of which we are children – which saw everything become a commodity. The people in my region lived next to these ancient tombs for thousands of years, knew that they were there, but no one ever had the courage to go and steal from them, because we knew that the objects inside them were sacred. They belong to the souls, not the living – they could not be touched. And all of a sudden, someone said, ‘why not? Let’s just go and touch them!’ And it was a bit like when a child stops believing in Santa Claus. The hypnosis was broken. And in waking up, everything became a commodity. And so I think after 40 or 50 years of everything being a commodity, it’s now possible to say no, it’s not true, the invisible does exist.

“People lived next to these ancient tombs for thousands of years, but no one ever had the courage to go and steal from them… And then all of a sudden, someone said, ‘why not?’ It was like when a child stops believing in Santa Claus” – Alice Rohrwacher

The same can be said about collectivism and community in your films – it’s never entirely focused on one individual or ‘hero’.

Alice Rohrwacher: Well, I think this is the responsibility of a director. In a moment in which everything points towards individualism, telling stories that are all about the destiny of a hero alone in the world is not very productive, because it blows on the embers of this very individualistic old world.

La Chimera tells the story of a hero who cannot change his own destiny. This destiny is just like a train, it has to follow its course (and in fact, we meet Arthur on a train). He tries to flee from it, but he can’t do anything about it – like a mythological character, he incarnates, he is his own destiny. But even though the film does tell the story of this mythological hero, it tells it through a choir of people, like an ancient tragedy.

Do you believe in these ideas yourself? In fate? Are you a religious person?

Alice Rohrwacher: I don’t belong to any religion, but I like knowing and thinking that my life is connected to the life of the world – so not thinking only of myself, but rather thinking of myself within a greater design. Perhaps this is a religious gaze, but it belongs to an anarchic religion that has no ties with any institution. I think films give us the possibility to see, within the destiny of a single individual, the destiny of a collective group. This is what both fascinates and moves me so much about archaeology. The film gives us the chance to reflect on the fact that every civilisation comes to an end, which means our civilisation will also come to an end. This allows us to not only think of what we want to achieve, but also what we’re going to leave to the archaeologists of the future.

Josh O’Connor is having such a huge moment right now. What do you think makes him such a compelling movie star?

Alice Rohrwacher: Josh is a very curious, generous person, and although these adjectives may not seem important they are fundamental for an actor. He’s also got an extraordinary imagination, which is so important when working with an actor because you’re not working just with a body, you’re also working with an inner world. A film is always an encounter between these two imaginations. His imagination is like a forest; it’s rich, full of vitality. It’s not an ‘educated’ imagination, it’s totally free. He has this incredible potential. And since we were speaking of the aura of objects, it’s also important to speak of the aura of person: he has an aura that is totally timeless. He lives in this time, but he’s also beyond time, outside of time, and I think very few people in the world have such an aura. He’s also so friendly and fun. A genius!

And finally, your films study the nature of patriarchal, capitalistic societies. In your last two films, your main characters have been men who present a much softer kind of masculinity. How did you want to engage with the subject of gender, if at all?

Alice Rohrwacher: La Chimera is very much about the masculine and the feminine. I live in a country where the tragic effects of patriarchy on women are often narrated – and rightly so. But I was more interested in looking at how tragic patriarchy is for men themselves. I don’t think it’s good for men and I don’t think it’s good for women. In the Italian province I grew up in, it wasn’t possible as a young woman to have male friends, even if we really wanted to, because boys had to show that they were real men, to show that they were ugly and unpleasant and awful to women. This cage that they were in really saddened me. And so when we constructed the song about the group of tomberoli, we had to find an adjective for them. Initially we were thinking dangerous, mean, nasty, bad, but then I settled on poor, because there’s so much misery in their manic hunt for money and women. So I wanted to reflect on the fact that this patriarchy really has to be surpassed not only for women, but also for men.

La Chimera is released in the UK on May 10.