by Dov Kornits
“I’ve done Cannes, Venice…” Greta Scacchi says about her experience on film festival juries. She’s in Australia to head up the jury of the 2017 Italian Film Festival, with the winner recently announced as Pure Hearts.
“I think it’s very healthy doing juries, because in this business success is measured, everyone just loves quantification to the point that we’re persuaded that there’s no value or success in things that haven’t been seen by vast audiences,” Scacchi comments when we met at Verona Cinema during her visit to Sydney. “We get this idea that it’s all about box office numbers. And it’s not! Artistic things are a quality… when I started off in the theatre, if you create something magical that resonates in people’s hearts, it could be an audience of 50. If that moment was recognised and it touched someone, who’s to say that an audience of 50 million is any better? It’s not! Doing juries, you realise that there is no rule about what is good and what is bad. When it comes to art films, those films that aren’t necessarily designed to have the biggest box office, they’re not spoon feeding the audience and require participation.
“This is the beauty of these Italian films, because they are designed by people who are passionate to convey an idea, a feeling, an issue for discussion; they don’t spoon feed or give you the answers. They invite you in to a thoughtful process. Those films that are going out to be measured by box office success, they tend to want to convey to a very broad audience everything that they’re trying to say, including giving answers. There’s none of that ambiguity or lyricism or that elliptical quality. And I think these Italian films are very elliptical.”
Scacchi appears in one such elliptical Italian film that is playing at the festival, albeit in just one scene. Tenderness (La Tenerezza) by Gianni Amelio (The Stolen Children, Lamerica, Open Doors) is about a retired barrister who befriends a young family, all the while not speaking with his own adult children. In amongst the human drama is a social one, with a powerful comment on the current influx of refugees into Italy and their impact on Italians. “This selection of films generally gives you the feeling of the economic stress that Italy is in,” comments Scacchi after seeing many of the films at the festival as part of her juror duties. “There’s this ‘malessere’, the opposite of well-being… There’s a despondency.”
The Italian character and particularly its cinema is very dear to Scacchi. “When I was first discovering films, I was 16 in Perth and had just started watching Italian films and I became very proud of being Italian. And as soon as I came back to Europe, I wanted to be in the Italy that I saw in Pasolini, De Sica, Bertolluci, but most of all the Taviani Brothers, I thought to myself ‘I would make tea for these guys’, anything to work on their set. And ten years later they were making their first film in the English language [1987’s Good Morning Babilonia] and were looking for actors who they could communicate with in Italian, but could act in English.”
To many Australians (including me!), Greta Scacchi had always seemed like she was an Australian actress, which, she admits, is perfectly fine by her. However, currently London based, she also admits that the Italians think she is one of them. So, what’s the full story?
“We moved to Perth when I was 15 from England,” she tells me. “I was in Italy for my first four years, then England for the next 11, then Perth for two years whilst my mother’s husband was professor of Italian at the University on a two year sabbatical. And then we all went back to England. My mother and her husband decided she wanted to move back to Australia and for me, home was where my mother was. He took a job at Latrobe University, so they were in Melbourne for 15 years, then Sydney for 15 years. I did have a chunk of time living in Melbourne and Sydney too.”
And then there’s the Randwick story – “my great great uncle founded Randwick, and there was a historic house that we campaigned to save. So, I’m actually fifth generation Australian,” she says with a thick Australian accent to make her point.
1987 turned out to be a turning point for Scacchi. Apart from the Taviani Brothers film, she also made heads turn in White Mischief (1987). In 1990 she played opposite Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent, and in 1992 she was June Gudmundsdottir in Robert Altman’s comeback film, The Player.
“He didn’t particularly like the writer, and he wanted to do his own thing,” says Scacchi of working with the legendary Altman. “He happened to be shooting in all those locations where all the agents and actors go for meetings, restaurants on Sunset Boulevard where Burt Reynolds happened to be there, and he’d ask if Burt wanted to be in it. And friends would turn up. As the shoot progressed, he realised that he had any Hollywood star eating out of his hand. That reality is not exposed and is not revealed in the way that the mentality of the Hollywood system works, where they’re always quantifying and measuring box office success. For Hollywood, he was washed up because his box office hadn’t been so good for many years, so they didn’t think he was worthwhile; but the actors, we all loved him. So, he gradually got the courage to put the net out further. So, in the film within the film, ‘who are the big stars of the time – Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts – let’s ask them if they’ll come and do a spoof for a day for nothing’, and they said yes. And it grew to the point where Cher would turn up just to appear as an extra for free. It actually backfired on us actors because since that film Hollywood fees have gone right down. For films of a lower budget we all have to accept a lot less. The powers that be in Hollywood, since The Player have realised that we actually love what we do and that we’ll do it for love… so that’s not so good. But Altman got a chance to see that however the banker’s value things, the reverence for him from the profession was overwhelming.”
And what of the future for Greta Scacchi? As she prepares to board a flight back to London to prepare for a role in a French film, it really is la dolce vita. “I would say that while being a mother for the last 25 years – my daughter is 25 and my son is 19 – juggling acting and being a mother was rather stressful. I disliked it and I was fretting a lot, because I couldn’t fully immerse myself and didn’t think I was a good mum. Now I’m much more inspired by it all because I have the energy and I’m not hurting myself or anybody else. It’s nice, I get my travel paid for and allows me to maintain my peripatetic lifestyle.”
