World famous director gives exclusive Prince interview

As the lights dimmed, the Oscar award-winning movie for Best Foreign Film in 1989, "Cinema Paradiso," inspired a lost way of viewing cinema that is portrayed in the film. On screen, Sicilian men, women and children from another time fall into an enamored spell, as the camera's eye turns round on them to capture the vicarious thrills of a lost way of cinema spectatorship.

As part of an ongoing tradition of Italian artists gracing the university as guests of Professor Maronne Puglia's class (ITA 310), the director of "Cinema Paradiso," Guiseppe Tornatore, took his seat in the Jimmy Stewart Theatre to watch, for the first time in a decade, his own film as a spectator. That evening, the crowds spilled out of the theatre, looking to sneak in or even bickering to find a space to sit or stand. The meta-cinematic commentary and the filmmaker's burning love for the moving image evoke for this contemporary audience a warm nostalgia for the cinephilia of the past.

The director's cut of "Cinema Paradiso" (the very first version that was screened in Italy), tells the story of one man's love affair with film from age six to 40. In this cut, the love story between the protagonist Salvatore and his first love, Elena, is resolved in a poignant encounter almost 30 years later when they share the kiss that time and Salvatore's mentor, Alfredo, had denied them.

When the lights came on to finally dispel the mystique, Mr. Tornatore surveyed the crowd, taking it all in with a sense of sardonic humor. "It is a special attitude of Sicilian culture . . . to not be euphoric and to be suspicious of success," he said, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Princetonian. In this calm and measured way, he took the stage and gave the audience a glimpse of his life as a filmmaker and his approach to filmmaking within the context of all six feature films screened at this week long retrospective of his work.

"I think the way I make movies is very easy, and very connected to the way I feel," he said. These feelings stem from a lifetime of looking at life, capturing with a still camera from the age of nine or 10 "the movement and gesticulation of the people." This first led to his interest in making documentaries of which he has done twenty to date. Later as he moved on to making feature films, he drew from this rich palette of real-life characters and moments stolen from their everyday lives to enrich the emotional lives of his characters and the manner they are portrayed on screen. His bit characters have the appeal of those in a Dickens novel – with a few strokes he sketches war veterans, whores, mafia men and lunatics who come to life with a sense of familiarity and joy. "I believe that [for] every question that arises on the set, every answer is . . . inside the characters," he said of those who live in his movies. "All the other parts, the style, the way I work, changes [for] the different stories," and for this reason, "each of [his] movies is always the first."

Tornatore's distinctness as an auteur lies in the blend of innocence and experience in both his approach and in his characters. He brings a new eye to every production and chooses the style of the movie on the basis of what is necessary for the film. His genius is in his subtlety of directing choices: from carefully chosen details like the recurring motif of bells in "Cinema Paradiso," to the truly artful acting of Roman Polanski and Gerrard Depardieu in "A Pure Formality." The devil is in the details, and Tornatore is right there with him, calling the shots.

The protagonists that inhabit his films share a similar mix of innocence and experience. They struggle for a language that eludes them, and find their voices only when it is irredeemably late. They are not simple characters, but are inhibited by some dreadful secret or simply a shy reserve. The audience is lured by their intelligence and cunning, but sympathizes with their stumbling ineptness. This is no doubt the appeal of Tornatore's protagonists Onoff ("A Pure Formality"), Joe ("The Star Maker") and Toto ("Cinema Paradiso"), who prove human, all too human in spite of their conniving.

For a filmmaker whose work stems from such a personal place (Tornatore has written every feature film screenplay he has directed), his characters and their concerns reveal far more than sitting in on a Q&A session or a brief interview can. Perhaps that is why he, like Onoff, has refused interviews for the past three years (until a week ago). The parallels between Tornatore's art and his life can be even more hauntingly ominous. Could Tornatore have predicted his own success and foresaw his same disimpassioned attitude that Toto displayed upon receiving news of the accolades his new film was receiving?

The turn of events in Tornatore's career is a fulfillment of his fantasy, a coincidence crafted by persistence and artistry. What he did foreshadow was the same mellow, almost sad attitude of Toto, that Tornatore was "surprised to recognize" in himself.

"At the last moment, when the film is going into final print, there is only one person [who] is unable to understand the movie: the director," Tornatore said. "Because he has shown the movie thousands of times, and he is so inside the movie that it is impossible (for him to understand it)." He attributes his melancholy to his Sicilian suspicion of destiny, but mixed up in those feelings of the evening when he sat pensively upright as a spectator in a film he had chosen not to see for nearly a decade since its completion, was a tinge of nostalgia.

"I think that every movie is, for a director, like a snake, all the skins he loses in his life . . . So when I watch a movie that I made eight, 10 years ago, it is like I am looking (at) one other of myself that doesn't exist anymore." Now, as he watches the film again, Tornatore finds himself caught in the web of that warm nostalgia he himself had weaved for others. With an almost wistful sigh, he says that "with the distance, you can understand the mistakes, but you can finally understand the good things you made." "Cinema Paradiso" is undoubtedly regarded amongst the best films that have graced the silver screen in recent times, and Tornatore, a master illusionist.