by Erin Free
With his debut feature film Brando With a Glass Eye, Greek-born Australian writer/director Antonis Tsonis has crafted a work of rare power and originality driven by the singular passion of a true creative…
As the first Greek-language feature in Slamdance’s Narrative Features competition, Brando With a Glass Eye made history in the US independent film circuit. The film went on to win Best Feature at London’s New Renaissance Film Festival (NRFF) and was the only Greek film selected in the “Opening Nights” category of The Athens International Film Festival (AIFF), also achieving a rare dual Official Selection at both AIFF and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. This bold, daring work has attracted international academic and critical acclaim: NYU’s Weird Wave Archive, produced by Marina Hassapopoulou (Assistant Professor, NYU Tisch School of the Arts), dedicated its first-ever special issue to a single film, calling Brando With a Glass Eye “a pivotal work in contemporary Greek cinema and a new chapter in the evolution of the Greek Weird Wave.” Loukas Katsikas, critic and Artistic Director of AIFF, called it “the biggest surprise in Greek cinema in recent times.”
Yet the film’s real power lies in its originality and the mystery at its core. Directed by Greek-Australian Antonis Tsonis (and produced By Aussie director Wayne Blair, who helmed The Sapphires) and shot on the streets of Athens, the film blends poetic realism, meta-cinema, and irreverence, challenging every expectation about acting and identity. Brando With A Glass Eye is the swirling, compelling tale of Greek mechanic Luca (Yiannis Niarros), an aspiring actor with a murky family history who might just have a chance at being accepting into the legendary Actors Studio in New York City. Obsessed with the inspiring words of famed acting coach Stella Adler, Luca is a young man for whom the art of performance is just about everything. But when Luca and his younger brother Alekos (Kostas Nikouli) engage in a poorly hatched heist, wealthy young scion Ilias (Alexandros Chrysanthopoulos) is shot and winds up in hospital. In a curious grab for redemption, Luca befriends the injured Ilias, who is totally in the dark as to who his highly theatrical and highly strung new pal really is. Ilias’ uncle Vasilis (Giannis Tsortekis), however, is instantly suspicious of his nephew’s larger than life new friend, and starts to do a little digging of his own.
In this exclusive interview, Antonis Tsonis (who has previously directed the impressive shorts, Feathers, The Firebird and 3000) digs deep to discuss process, risk, and the unexpected life his film has found on the festival circuit.
As a Greek-Australian filmmaker making a Greek-language film in Athens, what kinds of tensions or freedoms did that dual identity create? And how did having someone like Wayne Blair involved help shape the journey?
“Returning to Athens to shoot my first feature was deeply personal. If there’s a duality in me, it’s in the kinds of cinema and theatre I love: Ancient Greek tragedy, American film noir, Italian neorealism, French austerity, and American independent filmmaking. That’s my starting point. Working in Athens meant navigating tensions, especially guiding theatre actors into an auteur-driven, method-obsessed process. Yet being from the ‘outside’ gave me freedom. The cast, crew, and international audiences told me they loved how I shot Athens, not as a postcard, but as a character. For me, Athens is poetic realism. Its so-called ‘ugly’ side is painted with suffering and sincerity. I walk the city through the lens of an immigrant son’s eyes, carrying the pride and values I inherited from my father. From that place, rooted in where I come from, I could open myself to collaboration and friendship. Wayne Blair’s presence was exactly that. His advice, ‘Get it in the can,’ ‘Rewrite on set,’ and above all, ‘Just shoot it’, freed me from self-imposed imprisonment. Wayne also brought generosity and boldness to the whole team. I’ll never forget that image: a Greek son of migrants walking the streets of Athens with an Indigenous Australian, telling a story about a Greek method actor. A kind of bizarre Midnight Cowboy. Wayne as Joe Buck, me as Ratso Rizzo.”
Yiannis Niarros delivers a towering, shape-shifting performance as Luca. How did you discover him, and what did you two build together during production?
“Yiannis and I met in LA at a film festival. We talked, said we should make a film together, and became friends. What followed was an uncompromising trust. Yiannis is a celebrated Greek theatre actor and a gifted musician. His musicality and sense of rhythm helped him become Luca. It reminded me of Brando’s theatrical roots, and how the passage between stage and film can shape a performance. The connection between theatre and film was something I was very aware of. Brando famously performed A Streetcar Named Desire hundreds of times on stage and then played the role on screen for Kazan. In Yiannis’ case, it was more about how his musicality and theatre background aligned with my instincts as a director. I feel that I am an actor’s director. Everything begins and ends with the actor for me. And in that sense, the cinematographer, Joerg Gruber, and I almost took a documentary-style-Cassavetes approach: set pieces and planned sequences that let Yiannis truly play, so we could capture something alive. Joerg’s handheld cinematography is very particular – a Russo-German style that is structured but deeply instinctual. It marries beautifully with the philosophy of an actor’s director. Everything is about giving the actor a dynamic stage, and then capturing a dynamic performance in return. At times, Joerg’s handheld is floating, drifting, barely perceptible…the audience doesn’t even realise it’s handheld. That kind of invisible precision is rare. We also agreed with Yiannis to shoot the whole film before the final monologue, so he could live the story before reaching Luca’s last moments. He had to play an actor trying to be a method actor, constantly shifting between irony and genuine feeling. Sometimes he performed tragedy disguised as poetic drunkenness; other times, sincerity hidden behind irreverence. What set Yiannis’ task apart was the unique challenge of coding satire with emotional realism, never letting the satire drown out the underlying truth or his awareness of Luca’s fated, tragic circumstances. And this, above all, was the most important thing to me concerning Brando With a Glass Eye and its treatment of method. For the audience, it reveals that this challenge – holding satire and emotional realism together – is not only a technical achievement for Yiannis, but a thematic one. It’s central to the entire film. The film never draws a clear boundary between Yiannis the actor and Luca the character. Characters in cinema are never truly alive or dead; they exist in a perpetual state of becoming, shaped by our gaze each time we return to a film. We see different things with every viewing, even though it’s the same film. The demands on Yiannis were enormous, but his performance has been acclaimed internationally.
Brando With a Glass Eye channels a certain 1970s visual language – those earthy textures, long lenses, even the Serpico beard. Were you consciously referencing that era, or did it emerge more intuitively?
“The 1970s look was a deliberate choice. It’s closely tied to the film’s central paradox – performance versus authenticity. I wanted to approach Marlon Brando indirectly, at times through an Al Pacino lens. The film is layered like a babushka doll with meta-narratives. One of these layers is the tension between trauma-based acting and imagination-driven acting. Legendary method acting teachers Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler took opposing paths. Strasberg encouraged actors to mine their wounds; Adler believed in the supremacy of imagination and called their mentor, Konstantin Stanislavski’s, emotional recall technique dangerous for the actor. The film also explores Luca’s psychological realism, as he tries to escape the death of his mother as a source for acting and turns instead to his imagination. Stella Adler, in this sense, becomes his saviour, offering him imagination as a pathway to find his actor’s soul. Luca, in the film, is pulled between these poles. Luca tries to use imagination instead of trauma, but the result is often absurd, even grotesque. The process becomes a critique, not just of acting, but of the actor’s journey itself. That’s catharsis for me. The 1970s aesthetic doesn’t just evoke a cinematic era, it represents the inner, grandiose world of Luca himself. At first, this world seduces us with texture, bravado, and style. But it gradually reveals itself as a broken dream, one Luca must outwit to survive. The psychological reframe – his turn toward imagination – becomes an ironic antidote to his self-sabotage. In this way, the visual language agitates Luca’s internal architecture: the fantasy, the ruin, and the flicker of escape. Even Brando dismissed acting as art, saying, ‘We are all actors,’ or that only Rembrandt is real art. That irreverence lives in Luca, who dresses like Pacino to mock his director, storms the streets, and stages imaginary gunfights. It’s all part of a ritual: to violate performance, violate the method, and through irreverence, arrive at something real. It’s in the film’s last two scenes that Luca’s search for authenticity culminates. His New York monologue, ‘Mama come to me in a dream last night’, is his triumph, the collage of the film. Imagination, his saviour, guides Luca as he assembles the broken pieces of his life – memories, humiliations, dreams – into the persona of a 19th-century plantation owner, turning experience into performance. Through method’s ‘what if’, he performs an invented history, he re-narrates his story, revealing truth not through confession, but disguise. It’s as if Luca restores a shattered mirror – fragments from the scenes of the film returning to place – until he can finally see the plantation owner’s reflection, not his own. In these moments, Brando With a Glass Eye pulls focus – sharpening, like the iris of a camera or the human eye, on the cost of seeking an actor’s soul. The 1970s visual language – the textures, the long lenses – projects Luca’s journey: from satire to redemption, from performance to something internal. In the end, Luca escapes his heroes like a bandit, searching for emotional truth as fate closes in. Stripped of everything but his Serpico beard, Luca becomes a parable. Only then does he finally acquire the actor’s soul.”
Brando With a Glass Eye became the first-ever Greek-language film selected in Slamdance’s Narrative Features competition. What did it mean to bring Greek cinema to that platform and what was the experience like on the ground in Park City?
“It was exciting to bring Greek cinema to Slamdance. Honestly, I’m still unravelling it. I’m proud the film became part of the American independent circuit. It was also selected by other US festivals, like Richmond International, Manhattan Film Festival & at Rhode Island, which meant a lot to me and the Greek cast and crew. The experience was unforgettable. In Utah, with snow falling outside, I watched the heat of Athens and the sweat of Greek actors projected to an American audience. Two Italian directors, Fabio D’Orta (The Complex Forms) and Giuseppe Garau (The Accident), were also in competition and we became friends and joked it was a Mediterranean cinema coup. Our production designers and props team flew out from Greece, and their presence was like a family reunion in the middle of Utah. The Q&A’s were a highlight: the audience stayed so long we had to be kicked out. Later, buried in coats, Fabio, Giuseppe, and I defended each other’s films over burgers, arguing against our worst critics: ourselves. But walking with my new Italian friends through Park City’s dark, empty streets, night after night, always talking about film, was pure magic. It was walking through the snow and stapling each other’s posters onto billboards on cold, Park City nights that I realised how deeply American audiences had connected with the story. I felt they understood the ‘boulevard of broken dreams’ at its heart.”
Greek film critic and Artistic Director of the Athens International Film Festival, Loukas Katsikas, described Brando With A Glass Eye as “one of the greatest surprises of Greek cinema in recent times.” Were you conscious, while making it, that you were crafting something that might endure or spark this kind of response?
“I knew the film was bold, risky, maybe even strange, but I wanted to make something authentic and playful, following wherever the film wanted to go. Method acting already occupies a kind of mythic space in cinema and popular culture. For me, any film about an actor chasing authenticity through method naturally drifts between satire and danger. If the film now finds a special following, perhaps it’s because those myths are still very much alive. I’m proud that actors, especially, have connected with the film. Actors have best understood that, in Brando With A Glass Eye, the satire is a code for emotional accuracy in method. The actor’s search for a soul is, to me, the ultimate act of respect. I’ve grown even fonder of actors through making the film and meeting actors from around the world at festivals. I hope the film will continue to generate enthusiasm, intrigue, and discussions that pause to consider the actor’s circumstances in the context of their contributions to art and to the public. This has become more and more important to me as I mature alongside the film’s journey. It was a personal risk, not knowing how actors would respond. But that risk is at the heart of Brando With A Glass Eye, a film that began as a cinematic conversation with actors about acting, and whose unresolved questions now resonate with wider audiences.”
There’s a strong physicality to the film – shot on location across streets, stairwells, balconies. What were the realities of shooting in Athens, and how important was that lived-in texture to you?
“Athens is both a battleground and a playground for the actors and me: blunt, indifferent streets, sun-baked buildings, claustrophobic stairwells, and working-class balconies draped in shredded green sunshades. The ever-present police set a beautiful trap that Luca mocks with irreverence but also longs to escape. It’s a city shaped by its political and social turbulence, past and present. Luca dreams of flying the coop, but he’s wingless. Over time, the standoff between Luca and Athens revealed itself as a mirror. He and the city are both ancient and enduring, defiantly nostalgic and beautiful. The texture of Athens becomes an inner costume Luca cannot shed, even when he dresses as if he belongs to another, bygone era. He drifts through a fever dream, like a 1970’s American independent film, sometimes noir, as if making it up as he goes. Still, everything is driven by a vivid, merciless logic: everything aimed at the bullseye of his dream, New York City. Yet it all unfolds in modern, bustling, unimpressed Athens: its gritty reality, its ancient spirit, the National Parliament, the Greek flag flying, the grand marble staircase leading down into Hades itself, Syntagma Square. It suffocates Luca from the outset, but somehow, he is walking on clouds. Shooting on the streets brought unpredictability and energy. Every frame was alive.”
You don’t spoon-feed the audience. Do you see ambiguity as a challenge, a provocation… or something else entirely?
“Clarity in film is comforting, but it can also be a kind of death. Ambiguity is what keeps cinema alive. As Bresson said, ‘Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.’ What’s most important is often hidden, waiting to be discovered by each beholder’s imagination. One might consider that the idea of film is itself a provocation. Luca himself feels his very existence is a crime, a kind of provocation. In Brando With A Glass Eye, the most important is always shifting, always alive, but always returning to the one idea: the actor’s own longing to find a soul. This, for me, is intimately connected with satire as a rite of passage to emotional accuracy, for the sake of art, catharsis, and emotional realism. In a strange way, Brando With A Glass Eye is about the actor’s ‘crime’ of searching for a soul. (The botched heist is not the actor’s crime.) I could not think of a bigger compliment for an actor. In Brando With A Glass Eye, Luca commits two crimes: first, a personal, existential crime; then a creative, artistic crime. The audience senses that the actor’s search for a soul is a form of provocation that leads to revelation, redemption, and sometimes, as in the film, to both liberty and tragedy at once. In this moment, provocation becomes something else entirely. In Brando With A Glass Eye, whether through satire, surrealism, neorealism, poetic realism, romanticism, grit, or even cringe, provocation is always a means, not an end. Satire, for me, however, is one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of the method actor, but it matters in method only when it seeks a soul, coded with emotional realism and brought to life by imagination. What I love most in Yiannis’ performance is how he can be satirical even in moments of stillness. It’s in these quiet instants that his emotional accuracy shines through, embodying the actor’s quest for a soul.”
What was the toughest moment in production? And what surprised you – either in yourself, or the process?
“I’m not sure if this was the toughest moment, but it was definitely one of them. We were on set, with a very tight schedule, and a wild wind swept in just as we were about to call action on an external scene at Ilias’ grand home. The day before, we had filmed Luca dancing on the lawn in perfect, windless calm and now, continuity was impossible. Production said we couldn’t reschedule. I walked onto the lawn and did what any desperate director does…I prayed! I told myself, ‘You can’t fight the wind, Antonis.’ And that’s when I realised the wind had won. My cinematographer, in his serious German accent, looked through the viewfinder as Yiannis’ hair flew completely vertical and said, ‘Antonis, many productions pay big money for wind machines to get a shot like this.’ The result became a beautiful image for the film, set to Livitsanos’ orchestral score. Later, I called the scene ‘Dancing in the Wind.’ Reflecting on it now, there’s a dark comedy to it, a Peter Sellers image: chasing after the wind, demanding it stop, getting knocked over, then dusting yourself off and shaking hands with the wind: ‘You want to go for drinks after we get the shot?’ I guess what surprised me the most were moments like this, where I had to throw paints on the canvas so as not to lose the picture!”
Some critics have mistakenly attributed the film’s monologues to Tennessee Williams or from Marlon Brando films. What do you make of this?
“They are mine. A film about souls creates more souls. Authorship is always uncertain. Brando With a Glass Eye plays its hand with a poker face. Misattribution is misunderstanding, but it also means the work has its own life. I welcome it as part of the film’s mystery.”
Finally, what is next? Has Brando With a Glass Eye changed the kind of stories you want to tell?
“Brando With a Glass Eye has only deepened my love for cinema and for the actors who bring it to life. I’m still drawn to films as catharsis, a place where self-devouring characters wrestle with existence, and where surreal and emotional truths collide. I believe cinema, like the ancient Greek tragedies, reveals hidden tensions and searches for meaning, even touching on the spiritual. In film, even nothingness is alive. This is why I say: God loves film. These are the stories I want to tell, and I’m fortunate to share this work with my wife and producer, Tia Spanos Tsonis. We are inspired by filmmaker couples like Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Sean Baker and Samantha Quan, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas… filmmaking duos who have dedicated their lives to this art. It means even more to us that both Nolan and Baker also began their journeys at Slamdance. Cinema is both sacrifice and privilege, an art that transforms us even as we give everything of ourselves to it. As for what’s next, I’m working on a new feature…one that I hope will honour this dramaturgy and continue my existential search for a soul on screen. I remain with cinema, in pursuit, always.”
The film screens on Sunday 14 September 2025 at Event Cinemas Cairns Central, tix here; and Wednesday 17 September 2025 at Lido Cinemas Hawthorn, followed by a Q&A with Tsonis hosted by Nick Lathouris, tix here.
Click here for our review of Brando with a Glass Eye.
