GreenCine | article

I found a sharp commentary in the way you present England closing off its borders, becoming isolationist and xenophobic, scared of anyone from a different culture. And with the sense of hopelessness, you show the rise of extremist religious groups. You don't ever foreground it, but you see it in the streets as we walk past groups of people.

I think what happens is when you take hope out of the equation, and you can lose hope just being in contact with a brutal reality. It leaves a void and that void needs to be filled. And in most cases, either by your own choice or manipulated by groups, it is filled by ideology. The problem is that, because hope and faith are so connected, now ideology becomes a matter of faith and that ideological faith is not only religious, which is very obvious with fundamentalist religious groups, but it's also obvious with the secular fundamentalist groups.

The fundamentalist democrats that start seeing democracy as a goal, as a destination, not as a point of departure - it becomes a faith and cancels the nature of democracy. When democracy becomes about itself, suddenly you're just cancelling the whole thing because if you don't accept my religion, you're wrong, so I have to impose my will on you. I think that's one of the biggest dangers of the contemporary world, that ideology has become the big wall between communication of people, and it's because ideology has become a faith. Ideology should be a tool for discussion.

Not the framework for discussion.

Exactly. And it's so easy to say, but the moment you start a discussion it's so hard to step out from your own ideology. But it's even harder when there is not a sense of hope, because when you don't have a sense of hope, ideology is the only thing that supports you. That is why hope is so important. I think it's ridiculous to try and do a cautionary tale. That was cool in the 70s. Now there is no time of caution. There is only time for transformation and I believe that hope can be an amazing springboard for transformation, as long as hope is a hope from the standpoint of a realist position, not hope as just an avoidance of things.

You see with global warming, we know that it is happening, everybody knows and nobody cares. And every few weeks you hear someone say, "Yes, but don't worry, because now scientists are saying that carbon particles are going to create a kind of effect in the atmosphere that is going to cool out the air in the next couple of years." You get these things so that we don't have to worry about it.

I see this as similar to 70s films because in that era, before Star Wars, science fiction films tended to grapple with issues of contemporary society. Were there any films that you looked to for ideas of what to do, or perhaps more importantly, what not to do when you made your film?

If anything, I visited science fiction very early, before I started writing, just to say, "No, it's not over here, it's not over there." Obviously, from the same old Soylent Green to... what was the name of that one I saw... Z.P.G.

I was going to ask about Z.P.G. Like Soylent Green, it takes the opposite problem of overpopulation.

[Laughs] I'm glad you know Z.P.G. I had to get a DVD from Japan because I couldn't find one anywhere else. And I saw it and said, "No, it's not here." That's when I became certain that this was not that kind of film. When I started writing the script with Tim Sexton, I had him see Battle of Algiers. That was the model we were following; we were just doing it in the future, as if this thing already happened. I remember seeing Sunrise for the nth time, and I said, "Okay, that's the kind of stuff that I would love to do."

And then, because you are doing the long shots, you revisit Mikl�s Jancs�, just to realize that that is not the approach you want. I really love his stuff, but I realize, "This is a really abstract approach." You watch Brian De Palma and his amazing one shot deals and I say, "That's too narrative." De Palma's too narrative and Jancso is too abstract, and you say, "In a way, it's a little closer, if anything, Nostalghia or Sacrifice. The long takes, they have to respect a certain narrative but preserve a sense of transcendentalism, if that is a word.

I want to follow up on your sense of hope because you've made so many films about children and young adults and people who still have a sense of hope. I think A Little Princess is magical in a very human way.

That's the one I love. As I said, I never see my films after they are finished, but the one I love, my memories of it and everything, is A Little Princess. If I would rescue one of my movies, it would be A Little Princess.

It's a movie about a little girl who has such a sense of hope that in horrible circumstances she imagines a better place for herself. Even the first part of Great Expectations, when they are young, is all about the sense of possibility.

You mean the good part of Great Expectations. That's what you are trying to say. [laughs] I agree with you.

And Y tu mam� tambi�n is young adults with a sense of hope, with futures that are still full of possibilities in their minds, and at the end when they meet up, years later, they've accepted the limitations of their lives. But in the middle of the film they still see possibility.

For me, part of the idea of Y tu mam� was about hope and how it is oppressed by, again, ideology, because they find a mask. They are confronted by their own identity and they freak out so much that they have to invent a mask, and when you make your mask, your mask is made out of ideology.

So making Harry Potter is a perfect match for you because you have a connection with kids. So many of your films connect with the joy and the imagination and the possibility of youth.

If I care to connect with anybody, it's young people. It's a selfish thing, because they keep you relevant. It also has to do with the times that we are living in. I don't think that we, my generation I mean, are going to be able to solve any of the stuff that is going on. I think my generation and the older generation is paralyzed. They don't know what to do. You can see politicians so paralyzed about reality that they cling to old structures and they keep on telling you the same old things about economic growth and security because they cannot deal with the real stuff that is going on.

And I'm adding my generation. We grew up in a world that was alright, pretty damn good actually, and we started seeing the world going down the drain in front of our eyes and suddenly we know that we live in a different reality, and we have this stupid idea of trying to go back to that other reality. That is impossible. All this utopian thing of going back to the "original paradise" and try to create environments that replicate the past, those are impossible. But then we're so confused.

As opposed to young people. They grew up in this world already. In the end, it's going to be pretty much up to them what happens with civilization. That's the reason that at the end of Children of Men, same as infertility was a metaphor for a fading sense of hope, the Human Project is a metaphor for the possibility of the evolution of human understanding that I believe is happening mostly with young people.

I have faith that young people are going to come up with a Copernican revolution of our understanding and I think the only thing my generation can do, because I don't think we're going to come up with the solutions or the transformations, the only thing we can do is to start to make our choices from the standpoint of what is going to be beneficial for the next generation. If we can just accept that we're not going to solve anything and encourage the next generation to find their inner wisdom. But an inner wisdom has to come completely from arcane solutions. They have to be solutions that are unthinkable from our standpoint. They have to imagine new structures. And I think that's the only thing we can do.

Do you think you can encourage this through film?

I think that film cannot change reality but films can be a mirror, even if it's distorted, of your reality, just because it's your reality seen from a different standpoint. Maybe what they can do is get an influence or a trigger, the same way P.D. James triggered for me my own creative process, even if I parted completely from the book, going into immigration and all this stuff. It triggered my creative process. I believe that films can trigger the creative process in people. Creative process doesn't have to mean writing poems. Creative process is about trying to find frames of understanding reality, and when you start to find your own way, frames to understanding reality, there is a bigger possibility that you find solutions to the problems in that reality. I hope. [laughs] Let's hope.

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