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Welcome to Locarno Meets, an original Locarno Film Festival podcast brought to you by UBS. Established legends of cinema and exciting new talent chat about art, life, movies, and everything in between. Locarno Meets has featured memorable discussions with veritable legends of cinema like Shah Rukh Khan, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Ken Loach, Harmony Korine, Irène Jacob, and many more.
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Over the course of a more than 45-year career, Willem Dafoe has played everything, from the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man” to Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”. But crucially, he has never rested on his laurels, and continues to collaborate on ever more bold and daring projects with a new generation of emerging filmmakers.In Locarno to present Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s caustic “The Birthday Party” on the Piazza Grande, we sat down with Dafoe on Locarno Meets to talk about how you should find your own role when on set, working with David Lynch on “Wild at Heart”, juggling the demands of Hollywood and the arthouse, and getting fired from the set of “Heaven’s Gate” for laughing at a dirty joke.
Our guest this week on Locarno Meets is Bill Condon, the man behind some of the biggest movie musicals of the modern age, from “Chicago” to “Dreamgirls” to “Beauty and the Beast”. He joined us to talk timeliness, down and dirty prison dramas, working with Jennifer Lopez’s tight schedule, and how it all combined in his latest film “Kiss of the Spider Woman”, which was the closing film of Locarno78.
An eye-popping, heart-pounding genre film that premiered at Locarno78, “I Live Here Now” is a very funny, very scary, and very weird debut movie from Julie Pacino. This week on LocarnoMeets, the director joins us to talk about pink paint, David Lynch, and being traumatized on the set of “The Devil’s Advocate”.
This week on Locarno Meets we're joined by the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who – in a remarkable and emotional in-depth discussion – talks about leaving Iran, the retribution she faced for debuting in Hollywood with “Body of Lies”, the Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī) movement, making the extraordinary and disturbing “Alpha” with Julia Ducournau, and finally the joy – and physical toll – of making high-octane action movies.
Joining us this week on Locarno Meets is Eskil Vogt, the Norwegian screenwriter and filmmaker best known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier that include the celebrated “Oslo, August 31st”, “The Worst Person in the World”, and this year’s “Sentimental Value”. We chatted with Vogt about that ongoing creative partnership, the difficulties and revelations of working in middle age, and working with children on his own film “The Innocents”, which premiered in Cannes in 2021.
Our video podcast Locarno Meets is back for its third season, and for the first episode we sat down with Emma Thompson to talk about her new thriller “Dead of Winter”, which is now released in the UK following its world premiere at Locarno78, as well as her theory of adapting Jane Austen, her origins in sketch comedy, and bundling her Best Screenplay Oscar through airport security. Locarno Meets: a Locarno Film Festival original podcast – brought to you by UBS – where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies, and everything in between.
For our final episode for season two of Locarno Meets, we were delighted to be joined by actress Caroline Goodall, whose illustrious career has seen her turn in remarkable performances in now-classic films by many of the greatest names in contemporary cinema. Goodall was in Locarno to promote her latest film, the Piazza Grande-playing “Sew Torn”, directed by the prodigious young director Freddy MacDonald. We spoke with the marvellous actress about working, in this case, with a gifted filmmaker in his early twenties, as well as reminiscing about some of her major films, like “Schindler’s List”, “Hook”, “The Princess Diaries”, and Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac”.
Close your eyes for a moment and think of the sound a lightsaber makes. Think of the sound of Darth Vader breathing. Think of E.T. saying he wants to phone home. All those sound effects are the work of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt.At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, Burtt was in town to collect the Vision Award Ticinomoda, given to celebrate his exceptional career as a sound artist in Hollywood. From a childhood spent tape recording the sounds of movies from television to his pioneering effects work with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Ben Burtt has lived a life through sound.
Producers don’t always get their day in the spotlight. At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, the Raimondo Rezzonico Award was given to legendary indie producer Stacey Sher, who is responsible for a genuinely eye-popping line-up of iconic movies. Just to name a few: “Pulp Fiction”, “Erin Brockovich”, “Reality Bites”, “Out of Sight”, “Mathilda”, “Mrs. America”, “Contagion”, “Man on the Moon”, “Gattaca”, “Django Unchained”, “The Hateful Eight”, and recently the Hugh Grant-starring horror film “Heretic”. Anybody with a career like that has plenty of stories to share, and when Sher joined us on Locarno Meets, she certainly didn’t disappoint.
This week on Locarno Meets, we caught up with Italian star Luca Marinelli, best known to international audiences for his roles in “M”, “The Eight Mountains”, and “Martin Eden”. Marinelli was in Locarno to serve on the main jury at the 77ᵗʰ edition of the Festival alongside some of the leading lights of auteur cinema. We took the opportunity to sit down with the charismatic and thoughtful actor to discuss his early influences – including watching De Sica and Fellini movies as a child –, his extraordinary performances done inside and outside of the Italian film industry, and his criteria for what makes a good movie.
An exemplary character actor with a distinctive face: that’s how Tim Blake Nelson is perhaps most often described. Yet beyond memorable roles in films by Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and Terrence Malick, Nelson is also an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, responsible for a handful of impressive works in a variety of genres.This week, Nelson joins us on Locarno Meets while serving as a member of the jury at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival and presenting the boxing drama “Bang Bang” out of competition at the Festival, following a successful debut at Tribeca. We took the chance to speak with the great actor about the appeal of genre, his boxing influences, and his ability to disappear into a role, whether through a physical transformation or by learning – as he is now doing – to convincingly play the mandolin at age 60.
Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner has one of the most immediately recognizable signatures as an auteur. Her films are known as much for their formal austerity as for their daring subject matter; they are films that – to use her phrase – “do not shout so loudly”.
Those are also the kinds of films that Hausner, as Jury President at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, did not want to overlook in favor of louder, splashier titles. When she met her fellow jurors for the first time, Hausner stressed that it was important to consider films whose emotional power develops inside the viewer more slowly, accruing over time.
We sat down with Hausner for a conversation on Locarno Meets to delve into her process in making films, her taste in cinema, the more than 30 takes it often takes to get a scene right, and her philosophy as president of a festival jury.
What are the ethics of AI art? Can it ever be a tool of artistic liberation or are AI systems inherently extractive? Should artists surrender knowledge of these tools or should they try to master them so they are put to better use? These are some of the questions that came up in our conversation with filmmaker Paul Trillo, who has been experimenting with AI technologies for years.
He was in Locarno as a guest at the ‘Future of Survival’ conference organized in parallel to the Festival itself, and we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to speak about this controversial and disruptive technology with a world-renowned artist for whom it is a signature tool of expression.
The Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra is an experimental artist in the truest sense of the word. Time and again, Pêra has embraced still-nascent technologies without hesitation and with enormous playfulness, as with early digital video or 3D. Whatever the technology, he then tries to use them as a “toy of consciousness”, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley.
In this conversation on Locarno Meets, Pêra discusses his latest work, “Telepathic Letters”, an AI-generated feature film based around a fictional exchange of letters between Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and American fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. This memorably gonzo experiment had its world premiere at the 77th Locarno Film Festival (August 2024) and was one of the most talked about works in the program.
In 1994, a young Swiss-French rising star named Irène Jacob and a legendary Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, travelled to Locarno to present “Three Colors: Red” on the Piazza Grande, in front of an audience of thousands of jubilant spectators. 30 years later, Jacob, now herself an established legend of international arthouse and commercial filmmaking, returned to Locarno to present the film while being honored with the Festival’s prestigious Leopard Club Award (2024).
We took the chance to sit down with Irène Jacob on Locarno Meets to reflect on the legacy of this monumental work and her remarkable and risk-taking career in the years since. In 2024 alone, Jacob has created indelible new films with Amos Gitai and Rithy Panh, each of which premiered to rave reviews at the Berlin and Venice film festivals. No matter the assignment, Irène Jacob continues to forge her own path – a deeply original one – within and through the landscape of international cinema.
French-Algerian-Palestinian actress and filmmaker Lina Soualem has spent the past few artistically productive years co-writing a TV series (“Oussekine”, 2020) as well as directing the celebrated films “Their Algeria” (2020), about her French-Algerian grandparents and their fraught relationship with their homeland, and “Bye Bye Tiberias” (2023), about her mother, the celebrated Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, and the women of her family who stayed in their village in the Lower Galilee despite the effects of war, occupation, and erasure.
After premiering at the Venice Film Festival and having a successful distribution run arund the world, her film was nominated to represent Palestine at the Academy Awards in 2024. But Soualem was at the 77th Locarno Film Festival not primarily as a filmmaker but as a judge: she sat on the jury deciding the Swatch and MUBI First Feature Awards.
While she was in Locarno, we took the opportunity to sit down with Soualem on Locarno Meets to speak about how exactly she approached the work of navigating the complex relations of family, displacement, emigration, grief, and – yes – making films.
Following a successful premiere at South by Southwest, 24-year-old Swiss-American filmmaker Freddy Macdonald, the youngest directing fellow ever accepted to the American Film Institute, brought his audacious debut feature “Sew Torn” to the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
We caught up with Macdonald on Locarno Meets during the Festival to discuss the unique genesis of the film, its many wild narrative twists and turns, as well as to unpack the influence of the Coen brothers on his work and talk about what it’s like to develop a film with one’s Dad.
“I think a lot of my work is about aspiring to something lofty. And then failing at it. Which I find funny”, says Alice Lowe, director and star of ‘Timestalker’, showed on the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
In a free-flowing conversation on her influences and artistic aspirations, Lowe – a major star of UK sketch comedy of the 2000s, director of “Prevenge” and co-writer of “Sightseers” – sat down on Locarno Meets to talk through the sheer Britishness of her latest time travel comedy extravaganza, influenced by everything from Sally Potter to Powell & Pressburger to “Doctor Zhivago”, and getting her start at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival walking through a giant tambourine.
Joining us this week on Locarno Meets is Ehsan Khoshbakht, curator of a major retrospective focusing on Columbia Pictures during its heyday of 1929-59.
A centerpiece of the 77th Locarno Film Festival, this 44-film program redefined and recontextualized the legendary Hollywood studio during the tenure of its famously tyrannical president and co-founder: Harry Cohn.
In our wide-ranging conversation, Khoshbakht spoke about the work of assembling the retrospective using Columbia’s weekly release schedules in partnership with the Sony-Columbia archive, about Cohn’s complex legacy, and about the unusual amount of freedom afforded to auteurs and women creators at the studio during its Golden Age.
After “All We Imagine As Light” triumphed at Cannes this year, taking home the Grand Prix, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia headed to the Locarno Film Festival to serve on the main competition jury alongside the likes of director Jessica Hausner and star Luca Marinelli. While she was in town, we invited her to join us for a chat on LocarnoMeets.
Kapadia took us through her journey from “A Night of Knowing Nothing”, her non-fiction masterpiece that won the Best Documentary Prize at Cannes in 2021, through to her new film, which marks a decisive turn to fiction. For Kapadia, the very act of making cinema is a political one, springing from the urgent dynamics of real life in a complex social, political, and class system like India’s.
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