The youngest-ever filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Director was celebrated in the Italian city where silent films moved their first steps, just a fortnight after Tim Burton’s visit. It is in the very Museum of Cinema — where the figure of the Moloch, featured in the 1914 epic movie Cabiria, currently stands — that the Oscar and Golden Globe Award-winning director for La La Land received the Stella della Mole Award.
During the Masterclass he discussed his creative process with film critic Grazia Paganelli and Museum Director Domenico De Gaetano, who emphasised the way the American filmmaker “delves into the emotional and psychological impact that ambition can have, while also offering a nuanced portrait of the ups and downs of chasing your dreams.”
The Masterclass — curated by Marco Fallanca — took place in the evening of October 24th in the Temple Hall of the Mole Antonelliana. There was an institutional welcome by Vice-President Gabriele Molinari, who also remembered the recent passing of Gaetano Capizzi — the illustrious founder of CinemAmbiente, the Italian film festival dedicated to environmental filmmaking.
This occasion somehow represented a homecoming for Damien Chazelle, who attended the Torino Film Festival in 2009 and won the Audience Award with his feature debut, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. In fact, with a shy demeanour, the Providence-born filmmaker accepted the Stella della Mole Award saying: “Grazie mille, it’s a huge honour to be back in Turin, where I won my first award.”
The Masterclass began by evoking the making of that very first film, that stemmed out of his passion for music. Damien Chazelle explained how he used to play jazz in his youth and was fascinated by bygone eras: “You live in a romanticised version of the past. I like to make movies where you feel the tension between what you want and the reality of things.” In this movie he adopted almost a Neorealistic touch and consolidated his longtime professional partnership with music composer Justin Hurwitz.
They met at Harvard as roommates and band members and since those university days they’ve worked together on all of Chazelle’s pictures.
The independent psychological drama Whiplash took Chazelle’s passion for music to a higher level, as it disclosed the harsh environment of professionals he experienced first-hand: “When I began to play I enjoyed it, I had fun but eventually if you want to continue professionally you understand you lose that joy, the complex moment begins.” The director explained the brutality of the training that so empathetically transpires from the character played by J. K. Simmons — that won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Damien Chazelle delved deep into describing his sources of inspiration, that range from Jacques Demy’s musicals to the contemplative atmosphere of the Nouvelle Vague, as well as the scores by composers such as Nino Rota and Michel LeGrand. The apotheosis of Chazelle’s music-inspired oeuvres is epitomised by La La Land, a musical that he described as capable of “capturing the tension between expectations and reality, which is a complex and melancholic moment.” He further underlined how “Musical can be moving, it’s not frivolous. It has a very deep meaning that concerns the difficulties we all have in facing reality. We are delusional dreamers.”
First Man takes to outer space Chazelle’s investigation on the juxtaposition between prospect and actuality. He thus explained: “There are things I wanted to convey that had nothing to do with the moon-landing. I thought of mythology with Orpheus going in the afterlife. I found some irony and a poetic element in the way you dedicate so much time to one goal, and when you reach it there is a disappointment, with all the sacrifices and loss that have gone into it.
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The Masterclass ended with his most recent and flamboyantly spectacular film: Babylon. Damien Chazelle explained his process directing his cast, including his wife Olivia Hamilton, who accompanied him to Torino with their 10-month and 4 year-old children. “For this film, I liked the idea of putting together different schools of actors, like in Les Enfants du paradis where it’s not just an ensemble: each actor feels like they are coming from a different world, and they have an entirely different approach to their craft.”
After the Masterclass, Babylon was especially screened at Cinema Massimo, to fully celebrate one of the most influential auteurs of our time. His presence in Torino was the perfect opportunity to retrace the history of the seventh art with the cinephiles in attendance, as Enzo Ghigo, President of the museum said: “His love for the Golden Age of Hollywood shines through in the prodigious excellence of his films: the same love for classic narrative cinema and contemporary world cinema that we want to celebrate in our museum, transmitting it to the public and visitors.”
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