Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Screening of Hermia and Helena with introduction by HFA Director Haden Guest and Matías Piñeiro and post-screening discussion. Monday April 10, 2017.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

April 10, 2017. The Harvard Film Archive screened Hermia and Helena. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are HFA Director Haden Guest and filmmaker Matías Piñeiro. Take note that the recording begins after Haden Guest has been introduced.

Haden Guest  0:24 

...whose first three Shakespearean films, Rosalinda, Viola and The Princess of France, radically channel the language and the imagination of the Bard into brisk, often breathless, and thoroughly enchanting tales, centered around young women modeled on Shakespearean heroines, tales of young actors, and writers, and artists, and drifters, falling in and out of love. The dizzying intricacies, duplicities, and mistaken identities central to the universe of Shakespeare's comedies also shaped Piñeiro’s stories, as does the dialogue that the characters recite and inhabit, not in English, I should note, but in Argentine Spanish.

Piñeiro’s latest film, Hermia and Helena, marks a profound and important shift in his Shakespearean cycle. For a while Hermia and Helena is clearly inspired by the Bard’s today perhaps best-known comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is also Piñeiro’s first to shift, and slightly displace, the deeply Argentine heart of his cinema, by largely, although not entirely, setting the action not in Buenos Aires, but in New York City. This is the city where Piñeiro himself is now based, and has been for a number of years. And so we are tempted to read an autobiographical register in this fact, and in the unnamed Institute that brings the film's heroine, strikingly played by Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz, from Buenos Aires to New York City, just as our good friends and colleagues, who I also want to thank tonight, at the Radcliffe Institute, brought Matías Piñeiro to Cambridge. And yet, Hermia and Helena is also clearly an expansion and deepening of the world forged in his previous Shakespeare films, once again centered around a headstrong and fiercely independent young woman, although now she is a little older, filled with a little more doubt and self-questioning. Hermia and Helena is marked, as well, by a new calm, a new meditative pace, a new melancholy tone. I note the film's opening dedication to Setsuko Hara, one of Yasujirō Ozu’s greatest stars, and an emblem, of Ozu’s profoundly humanist interest in quotidian life and in the infinite complexities and contradictions of love. Hermia and Helena, in fact, moves Piñeiro even closer than he has been before to Ozu’s intimate cinema of quiet moments, even as it plays with a distinctly North American, and perhaps New Yorkian, vernacular.

I want to thank Matías Piñeiro for being with us tonight. It's a real honor. And we'll have a conversation afterwards about this film that will be open to, of course, questions from the audience. But I want to thank as well, very dear friends to the HFA, and those are our colleagues and friends at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Want to thank, in particular, Paola Ibarra, who's here tonight, and they're our cosponsors. Let's give them a round of applause, as we also welcome to the podium Matías Piñeiro!

[APPLAUSE]

Matías Piñeiro 3:37 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming here tonight. Thank you, Haden, for that beautiful introduction. I was very much taken by it. I'm, yeah, it's very moving, to go back a little bit in our life and see all these different stages. And I never thought about that word, “engage.” I like that word. You know, to talk about this, this thing that I've been doing for a couple of years now, this idea of “engaging” Shakespeare into the films. I never thought about that word. And I think I may have to take it now, and use it. Um, you know, after all The Stolen Man?

[LAUGHTER]

The first film? Okay. Thank you so much. It's good to be here again. It's a beautiful little palace, this one, in Cambridge. It's a place where I came when I arrived to the U.S. six years ago. It's an important place that been following me, that has been part of my life, also, when I stopped living here in Cambridge. And I'm very happy to come back every time. Last time I came here with Martín Rejtman. And before we show the films, and then I was here for the Radcliffe Fellowship, that was a very important moment in my life. It was quite a turning point, that I enjoyed a lot, making new friends, making, yeah, discovering someone new in me also. And I'm thinking, again, new ways for making my films. You know, how will we keep on making films? And so, when I moved to the U.S. back then, in 2011-2012, for doing the Radcliffe Fellowship, I didn't connect that with my filmmaking. You know, I thought that coming here to U.S. was the opposite from being a filmmaker. I was a filmmaker in Buenos Aires, where I had the crew, and the people, the actors, and the city that I like to photograph. So when I was displaced, I was leaving my filmmaking side. No, I can think about filmmaking, I can come here and write and edit a film, that I actually did that, and research, and I was doing that during that year at Radcliffe, and it was great. And I met great friends, like John Aylward, the composer, that I'm still in touch with or Emma Wasserman, that is a theologist that I'm still– I saw her a month ago. So those friendships still are on, and actually, John Aylward, who was also a Radcliffe Fellow, some of his music is in one of my films, too. So. But still, this was always like a diplomat. No? Someone that travels, and that doesn't fully set roots. Because I always said, okay, I will keep on going to want Buenos Aires, and will keep on making my films that way. But after a couple of years, after four years, I made a group of friends and acquaintances and people that somehow made me feel, not that I was in Buenos Aires, but that I could do a film in the U.S., you know, and it was the cinephile friends of mine in New York. One of them, Graham Swon, came to me and he said, “Oh, if you would like to show, to do a film here in the U.S., I would love to produce it.” And, it was at that moment that I said, “Oh, maybe I can.” But maybe if I can have Agustina Munoz, one of my actresses, because I tend to work all the time with the same people. And maybe Fernando, the DP, can come. And maybe we can shoot one day in Buenos Aires, and then that became five days. You know? And in that way, the film started being one of my films. You know, one of not only my films, it's the film that we do together, with this group of people that we've been doing films since 2005. So in that sense, it was nice to make the family grow. You know, the family grew. And incorporated elements from my life, as you say. This idea of the institute, this little phantom, when you'll see, you'll see that the institute is more a phantom than an actual institution, but it's there. It’s the institute. It's a word that has its weight, and from which we can divert, you know? And we can go somewhere else. So I'm very happy to somehow have, I came back, you know? Somehow, like, I don't know if full circle, but a little bit. And I'm very happy to share the film here with you. I remember some faces from when I came here, like a lot of years ago, a couple of years ago. So thank you so much for, for coming. And we'll be back for a conversation afterwards. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  8:45 

And now the discussion, with Haden Guest and filmmaker Matías Piñeiro.

Haden Guest  8:51 

As promised, Matías Piñeiro!

[APPLAUSE]

Matías Piñeiro 8:55 

Thank you.

Haden Guest  9:02 

So Matías, before taking questions from the audience, I thought we could have a little conversation up here. And language is so important, so integral to your cinema. And I feel like language is, it's more than dialogue. Language defines the worlds in your film. But language, also, at times, it has a presence of its own. Words are repeated, words become gestures, or become performance, the texts themselves. And in this film, we have a character of a translator, so even underscoring the presence of language. And I wanted to speak though, about the kind of translation that takes place of your vision, of the world that you invent with the English language. Because it seems to me that we definitely have a different pace, a different tone, a different quality in the New York scenes. And that's especially underscored and heightened by these constant flashbacks that are to the world of Buenos Aires, where there’s this kind of rapidity, there's this instantaneity of connections between the characters, and it seems there’s a much, a slower tempo, but also just a different kind of meaning in the English language in this film. I was wondering  if you could speak about the challenges, then, of translation for you, as a filmmaker, you're working, in this case, in New York, and in English, as well as Spanish.

Matías Piñeiro 10:34 

Well, thank you for staying and for watching the film, first of all. And this is the fourth film that I've done with the comedies, with Shakespeare's comedies. And so in each film, I tried to have a different angle in how I will deal with this material that the plays are. And so, when I was thinking about a film that was going to take place in two countries, in two cities, in two languages, the idea of the translator came very easily, with no effort at all. In the previous film, it was this idea of the radio. You know, this group of people were meeting, they’re this crew, this troupe, theater troupe, that were meeting again, after one year of not making anything together, you know, to make a radio play. And that was The Princess of France. And in this one, with this idea of this dual element, I thought that translation may be a good angle to work with. And this idea of the word, the importance of words, the weight that they can be, and how can words be an image. And how can words, as images, can be like sort of eraser. Because when we see, in an image, a word being printed, it’s not something easy to watch, it's something that is breaking the image. We're not that used to having words in the image. And I like that idea of having words, as the work of a translator, instead of having scenes where she would be translating, or making as if she would be translating, I’d rather copy/paste the book in which the translations were done and put them in the film somehow, and somehow show them and document them and include them in the film.

Then there was this idea of Agustina, was doing a fellowship herself in the Netherlands. So that's why, also, it's her, and not Maria, or Romina, or Valeria, or many other actresses that could be in the film. It's her, that she has been working or she has been dealing with having to talk in English and having to be in this sort of context. So it's not only the Radcliffe, it's also her own fellowship, in a way. So you start like messing around a little bit more. And, and so, this is something that I didn't realize [until] during the editing, that I tend to have dialogues in which things go very fast. You know, they talk fast. But it's not that I want them to talk fast because I want them to talk fast. It's just the way it is. It's the way the dialogues are written and the way they perform and the way it's being paced. But then when you have something from the real world appearing, such as changing your language, things change. And all of a sudden, all the English sections get much more time, like it slows down. And I have a friend saying this is kind of a mean joke that my previous two films are almost, like an hour and something. And this friend was saying that the film was longer this time, because they had to talk more slowly.

Haden Guest  14:10

[LAUGHS]

Matías Piñeiro  14:11 

Because of the [LAUGHS], of the English thing. But at the same time, it's something that I didn't realize, but then it makes this film particular in relationship to the others. So, she has to talk in another way, in another rhythm. And that rhythm will show, you know? Like, when they go to Buenos Aires, it becomes this sort of, like, Katharine Hepburn thing. And then when they are in New York, it changes.

Haden Guest  14:35

Hal Hartley, more. [LAUGHS].

Matías Piñeiro 14:36

Yeah, there's that. [LAUGHS] Yeah, I hope! I wish. [LAUGHS] So, and then, there's some ideas that I have from the very beginning. The ideas of the fades was an idea that I have from the very beginning, because I never worked with that, and usually, my previous film brings me the ideas for the next film. So in Princess of France, there's one single moment where there's a little fade that goes longer. So I said, okay, let's do that more, because

Haden Guest  15:06

The fade.

Matías Piñeiro  15:07

The fade, the....

Haden Guest  15:09

The dissolve.

Matías Piñeiro  15:10

The dissolves.

Haden Guest  15:11

Right. Yeah, yeah.

Matías Piñeiro  15:12

The dissolves. And, and maybe there's something there to be explored. So that was an idea that I had. And then the idea of the translation brought me the idea of having words written in the screen. And actually, my first idea was this thing of the, sort of live...translation. In the moment where the two cities fade, it was at that moment that I wanted the text to be translated as if it would be—I don't know if it's called like this here, the magic screen? Usually, like, kids have this thing that is like a screen and you can write and it appears in the television, you know? Or, I don't know, have you seen Numéro deux, the Jean-Luc Godard film, that he writes and he says, he does like this, he writes, and that something is written immediately? So I like this idea of the magic board that you would write and it would appear in the screen. And I tried it. And it was bad, very bad! Because you have to make an animation of it. You have to animate it. And I wrote a script for some animators to do it. And like, so a quarter of a second after, you put the comma and then you pause for half a second. And then you cross this other– I wrote and it was so fake. It didn't work at all. It looked super fake. And at that moment I got a little bit angry because it was one of the ideas that I had from the very beginning. And what I did is, it shows in the film, that is, I wrote it in an A4 paper and took a photograph with my phone. And I sent it to my email and I put it into the film, directly. And you see that, the thing that appears like that. Like kind of brutally. But much better! The animation thing was fake, was like trying to pretend as if that is being written, pwhhhh! Like, no! It was better if it was just these documents, these pages, that I work with, it's my handwriting. It's not the character’s handwriting. You know? I don't care about that, in a way. And at the same time, it's not an essay about translation, the film, either. I know that. So it's more distinctly that this graphic element that appears and again, this idea that I feel that words in the screen puncture the image. No? It's not like a moment of fluidity. It makes an image hard; it punctures the image. And I like that. I thought that something of a fiction thing can be worked around that.

Haden Guest  17:59 

Those are moments, though, when it's also a dream space, too.

Matías Piñeiro  18:03

Yeah, also.

Haden Guest  18:04

Where Agustina, or–

Matías Piñeiro  18:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haden Guest  18:05

–Camila, is also dreaming. And this is another dimension that is opened up in this film. The sort of the oneiric dimension, the dream dimension. The film is full of letters that go astray, and one of those letters takes the form of a film. The film within a film. This, I think it’s called Camila. And I wonder if we could talk about that, about that moment, which, again, you know, totally took me by surprise. Because this is– And yet it– yeah, I'd love to hear you discuss how this film fits, as a kind of letter, right?

Matías Piñeiro 18:45 

Yeah. I like this idea that this character was going to have very little space in the film. It was going to be like a layer, like a very thin thin layer, like Gregg doesn't exist almost. But then, all of a sudden because we were going to see something that he did, something that is detoured, we were going to see him very deeply. You know, then suddenly, in that short film, he is like a love letter to the main character. No? So when you see him, he's nothing, he's like a layer, like a thin layer. But I like this idea of putting together this idea of something very thin, towards something that goes very deep because he's expressing this desire, and these doubts, and this message in a bottle in a way. And then I also liked this idea of the element, like these sort of bubbles or Russian dolls, you know? Inside of narrative, different sort of narratives. And I never done this thing of suddenly interrupting. I have, I have my narratives are somehow like, not so linear somehow.

Haden Guest  19:51

Right, fractured, or–

Matías Piñeiro  19:52

Yeah. And the other ones, they jump, they go too fast or whatever. So I thought that I'd never done this thing of suddenly the film being interrupted so much. And then, also, I thought that maybe it's not something that you catch very, very quickly. But the idea that this was something that he did in Buenos Aires, that they met while he was doing, also of this world of fellowships. This world of that, you know? This happens a lot. I did the fellowship, next year, Nicolás did the fellowship. And then the other year, Mati was doing the fellowship.

Haden Guest  20:25 

And then Lisandro Alonso.

Matías Piñeiro 20:28 

Yeah. And then Hyun Kim did the fellowship before me and she told me a lot about it. And this sort of like, tradition of friends and people that you admire that somehow build your life in a way, also. Because we end up being here. And so it was a little bit of that. And also, that is something that had to do with the film. But then it also, there was a biographical element, that the Museum of Cinema of Buenos Aires, they have asked me to do that the source, the material, is coming from that.

Haden Guest  21:06

And credited as such.

Matías Piñeiro  21:07

Yeah, because I actually did a film that is like a parallel sister, like a twin film to the one that you see that is called Gregg.

[LAUGHTER]

That exists like parallel because I thought that it needed to exist parallel. If not, it would be too fake in a way. So, it's the same edit and the same text. But it's me, in Spanish, talking to a “Gregg.” And that’s because they have asked me to do the film. They have asked me to make a film with footage from this series of films of 40s and 50s. And, the thing is that they have asked me two years ago, to do a very similar thing to this. And I said, yes, I would do it, and then I never did it. And that's the guilty element. Like three years ago, they asked me, would you like, there's a lot of Argentinian filmmakers making, like, intervening...?

Haden Guest  22:10 

Interventions, right. Into the archives, right.

Matías Piñeiro 22:11 

Interventions into these materials, into the archives. And I said yes, and then I was finishing Princess of France and I couldn't do it. And then when I was thinking [about] this film, I had this idea of communicating what this character felt or his interiority, his intimacy through the idea of his film, what he does. And also showing as a filmmaker without a camera next to him. You know, like, he's someone like, like you... And so, let's say, you're a filmmaker and I put next to your close-up, your short film. So you're a filmmaker. I don't need you to show you, having meetings with producers or in the middle of a of a shooting. Just like that, it's okay. So, I didn't do that. I needed to communicate this, his relationship to her. I needed to have this short film that would be independent to Hermia and Helena. And at first I said, okay, we shoot something, no? So I should be shooting something in order to make this short film. So it should be different from Hermia and Helena. Because if not, it's obviously my film, not Gregg's film. So I started thinking, okay, maybe I can do something in 16. Because I have never done that, I have never worked with the results, maybe I can do something with 16. And maybe it should be black and white. And maybe... And then I said, this is fake! Again. And what, like, so I should do like a 16 millimeter black-and-white with an old man naked in the jungle?

Haden Guest  24:02

[LAUGHS]

Matías Piñeiro  24:03

That is the opposite from what I do. You know, maybe I should have called Ben Rivers.

[LAUGHTER]

Matías Piñeiro 24:11 

He would be doing it much better than me. So I felt that it was fake! It was stupid to do it. And then I remembered, I went back to my guilt complex. And I remembered the people from the Museum of Buenos Aires that are amazing people, also. And I was wrong. I was wrong by saying yes and then saying no. No? So it was bad to do that. It's horrible. It's as if you asked me to do something and I say yes and then I say no. So I asked them if I could do it then. And they told me no, now it's too late. But we're going to do something new. We're going to do it with film schools, it's called, like, a cinema film school, something like that. That cinescuela. I don't know what it means, exactly? But it was a new series on this intervening in films. And so  I said, Okay, it's footage that I didn't shoot, it’s this thing of the found footage that I’ve never done. I can do it myself, and it doesn't feel so fake. Because I also thought about asking friends. I thought about asking Lois Patiño, like a very good friend of mine for some footage. He also does films very different from mine with landscapes and with time. But then I thought that also it was strange. And so, suddenly, the idea of the Museum of Cinema came back and it came back, like, from a very origin of it, that it would work. And I started working on it and I did it myself. And somehow, then, I felt that I needed to do one that was mine. And actually, Gregg, the film that it's signed by me, it's also signed by Gregg Collison.

Haden Guest  25:54

I see.

Matías Piñeiro  25:56

By the character. It’s like a co-direction that I did with the character.

Haden Guest  25:58

But after the film ends, there’s also this use of negative imagery. It's as if the sort of avant-garde spirit of the film starts to...

Matías Piñeiro 26:08 

Yeah. Maybe it’s my New England [LAUGHS] influence.

Haden Guest  26:13 

[LAUGHING] I see. Well

Matias Piñeiro  26:14

Maybe you're responsible?

Haden Guest  26:17 

[LAUGHING] Or Saul, Saul Levine is. And–

Matias Piñeiro 26:19 

But then it was film. This is video, it’s different, also.

Haden Guest  26:23 

Right, right. I was wondering if we could– One of the most, I think, poignant texts, in this film that's full of texts, is these questions, that Camila writes for her father. They're almost like a screenplay of sorts. So I was wondering if we could talk about the figure of the father who is, in fact, played not by an actor but by a filmmaker. Because in a sense, this is the meeting of, right? The–

Matías Piñeiro 26:51 

There are two meeting. There are two reasons why she comes to the U.S., somehow.

Haden Guest  26:55 

Exactly, exactly. And so, but it's also the, the meeting of, again of the two worlds of New York and Argentina coming together.

Matías Piñeiro 27:05 

Yeah. Yeah. It has to do with Dan Sallitt not being an actor. I mean, a filmmaker. And–

Haden Guest 27:14 

How did you come to Dan Sallitt?

Matías Piñeiro 27:17 

Because I saw his films at the Anthology Film Archives. They did a retrospective a couple of years ago. And I was very shocked by his films. I really liked them. And I felt that they were very different from what I was used to from the American independent cinema. It was very strange. And it felt closer to what I was doing even though we're very different. I felt that there was something in how it was produced, that it was similar. There was something that I felt close [to]. Even though he's very, very different and we [have] very different taste if you follow him on Twitter, you will know. [LAUGHS]

Haden Guest  27:56

I don’t.

Mathias Piñeiro  27:58

But still, I respect and I enjoyed and I like his way of producing this. He's a great filmmaker. He does these films, he has this parallel job, he raises monies by himself, he [does] everything by himself. And he's doing these fiction films, you know? And he's taking, like, six years or eight years to do each of the films that he wants to do. And I see a lot of courage in this way of working and then doing the film that he wants. So actually, you know, he said at the shooting, when we finished the shooting, that he felt that he was– He's a scriptwriter of his own films. So he knows about that, about scriptwriting. And he said, "oh, this is like scriptwriting but live, while the shooting is going on. This thing that we're doing is not much about acting, is much more about scriptwriting live." I worked with many people that were not actors in the film. But in his case, I knew that he could not say lines that I had written, that it was not the same as having other people that they could do that. In his case, I thought that that was– If you see the film, also, he is introduced very slowly. And because we shot, also, in that timeframe. So it was helping him to get into the film. At first he’s a name that someone says. Then it's a voice. Then he’s someone in the distance, silent.

Haden Guest  29:34

Then he’s in the reflection, right.

Mathias Piñeiro  29:35

Then it’s only a voice. And then he's close. And then, finally, you arrive to the scene. Because he's not an actor. And so you need the film to get used to him, in a way. And in that sense, I thought this idea of the questioner, of the interview, somehow. And we thought that the questions together. So the questions were established.

Haden Guest  30:02 

I see. You made them together, with him.

Matías Piñeiro 30:03 

Yeah, together with Agustina, with him and myself. And then the--and we talked about the answers. How they could move. But we didn't rehearse that. I knew that he was not someone that I could do blocking as I can do with Keith or with Mati or Agustina or Maria. With him it's very like to be sitting down. Because he wouldn't be able, he doesn't have that, he doesn't enjoy that as Maria enjoys it, or Mati or even Dustin enjoys it. And I'd never done that, I usually like moving around. So I think okay, let's exercise this idea of stillness, in a way, and not be shaken by it. So it was this thing of having prepared some things and then letting go other things. I think that there was a very nice connection between the two of them. That was just something that we thought. I thought about him a lot. I thought that he could be Agustina’s father. I knew that I needed someone that wouldn't be like a sort of prototypical American face or prototypical father, you know, like a sort of Santa Claus or like a sort of Paul Newman, you know?

Haden Guest  31:17

[LAUGHS]

Matías Piñeiro  31:18

Like a sort of fatherly figure or you know, someone that it's a little bit off. And in him, I found that thing that is a little bit off. And not exaggerating it at the same time. And then he's a great person. And he's a big cinephile. So he has seen like, Agustina’s films, the ones that we did together...

Haden Guest  31:44

Right.

Matías Piñeiro  31:45

...and also the other ones. So he was someone that was interested in Agustina. And so I think that, oh, also, there was some sort of, I think that he could do a film with Agustina one day. And actually, he's shooting a film now. And I pushed him to do a film with her. But because of the script, it couldn't be. But maybe a future film will... he will think of her. And I think that there was also this thing, the questions, it’s like a casting, in a way. I think that he was interested also in that way. There's some sort of interest in director and actress. He was a little star-struck in a very weird way. Because Agustina is not a star. But he felt that he knew her a lot. And he did research on her. And he was interested in her. And this made him uncomfortable. And I think that that uncomfort helped for the scene, also.

Haden Guest  32:38 

I love the fact that she doesn't actually ask all the questions that we see written. They go totally off, off script too, which is–

Matías Piñeiro 32:44 

Yes. She chooses, I choose.

Haden Guest  32:45

Exactly. That was wonderful! And as I mentioned before, I mean, the film is full of letters that go astray. And it seems to me that these are sort of emblems of desire that goes astray. I mean, your films are full of these characters who are set out to have this clear path and mission and then they depart from it. And I'm wondering if you could speak about this, because in certain sense, it's related to, I think, the sort of logic of Shakespearean comedy and yet at the same time it seems that you're taking it a step further. I mean, the moment of the rejection of Gregg, that does seem to sort of relate more to Shakespeare and her act of sort of putting them to sleep. There seems to be something else. I guess I'm just thinking about the ways in which your films explore desire to be quintessentially inexplicable. And I was wondering if that's something you might want to speak about.

Matías Piñeiro  33:48

Yeah. There's something about the idea of life is disappointing! [LAUGHS] The thing of desiring something and not getting it and how can you express that? How can you still express desire even if it's not committed or like satisfied? And there is a little bit of that. I don't know exactly how we chose. But when I was thinking the film, the postcards, is an object that gets this fetish, is a fetish, in a way, no? That it has all this energy inside of people wanting to meet or promising to meet and having these secret vows or whatever and then suddenly someone can go the other way. You know? And she came all through Montana and Maria was not there. And so it does have to do with this idea of how desire gets satisfied or not.

Haden Guest  34:51

Or displaced.

Matías Piñeiro  34:52

Or displaced. Yeah, then it moves and then it moves. And in the case of Camila, Agustina’s character, there is this thing that you don't know exactly what happens in the end. And I like a little bit how we don't care much about that. Because she seems to be writing to Mati at the first and then you just come, you just came from this scene with the father, so it's not that you have Mati so present. But I like that suddenly Mati appears again but then we see her with Lukas and they seem to be okay. And then the important thing is not the decision of this character but what was left behind, in a way. And that mood, that feeling, that melancholy, in a way. Because in the end, we finished with Carmen with the one that we started the film, that we don't know anything about her. It's also very thin. But I think that maybe, this distance, no? These detours all of a sudden can produce this melancholy, in a way, or a certain emotion. It's not like a big emotion but something that even if it's mild, it can be deep. And yeah, there in the Gregg moment that is like a sort of entracte of the film, in a way. It's where it's shown more bluntly. No? And it's somehow following some ideas of the play, this thing that suddenly you see someone and you fall in love and then you were in love with someone else and that changes. It’s playing a little bit with that. It's a very blurry moment of the film where you don't know exactly what is happening and what is reality.

Haden Guest  36:42

Or if they’re asleep, or if they’re–

Matías Piñeiro  36:43

Yeah, exactly, because the music keeps on playing. So, I like these moments where things are not very clear. But it has to do with that, with how desire circulates and in this place, in this play, sorry! In this play, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is very important especially with all the young characters, that is–

Haden Guest  37:03

All the potions, too.

Matías Piñeiro  37:04

Yeah, the potions and how she desires him but he desires her. And then some part comes and makes and inverts it and so I'm not following it straightforwardly but I take this motif of desire suddenly changing.

Haden Guest  37:19

The logic of desire.

Matías Piñeiro  37:20

Yeah, yeah, so. This is very more evident in that middle section of the film. But then it's also this idea that Mati– Like Daniele is supposed to be Carmen's lover in a way and then Agustina is following Carmen’s steps, is somehow falling in love with Mati in a way. I mean Daniele, sorry, I’m mixing names–

Haden Guest  37:48 

The Mati Diop character, right.

Matías Piñeiro 37:49 

Yeah, sorry. I know that it's messy but it's also meant to be.

Haden Guest  37:54 

Who was also a Radcliffe Fellow.

Matías Piñeiro 37:55 

Yeah, for instance. When we talk about the relationship between the Institute and so on. Mati’s an amazing filmmaker, is an amazing actress. Graham Swon told me that we could make a film together. I knew that Mati was here. I saw her film, I really liked it. I saw her also working as an actress and I liked it too in Ben Crotty’s film, in Claire Denis’ film. And all of a sudden it was very exciting to invite her to join in. And so these things about people from all over the world coming to Cambridge becomes very important. No? It's not only my story of my experience here, that it's actually not. Because I didn't receive any postcards.

[LAUGHTER]

[LAUGHS] I was going to New York to see my boyfriend, husband. That was my story. But, and it's not, but it's also like Agustina’s, that it was in the Netherlands. Or Mati, that at least she was actually doing that now. And no one went to Montana. [LAUGHS] And still, we can do this fiction around these factors, around the Institute, around this idea of fellowship, this idea of generations of artists, filmmakers, young people, older people, going around the world like, yesterday I was in Oregon, today I'm here, tomorrow I’m meeting you in New York, something. What is this thing about these people moving around? You know? What is this thing? It's a little bit crazy, also. So yeah, maybe desire also follows that craziness.

Haden Guest  39:35 

Let's take some questions from the audience, questions or comments for Matías Piñeiro. Do we have any? At all? Yeah, right here. If you’ll wait for the microphone that is coming to you, that'd be great. Thank you.

Audience  39:51 

Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. I'm just curious about your choice of music. Scott Joplin. I love the music. I was just curious as to why you chose it.

Matías Piñeiro  39:59

Yeah. When I thought that I was doing my one American movie, this thing about making, taking decisions that you haven’t taken before, like things that I haven't done in one film, let's try to make them in next one and somehow make a chain reaction, in a way, between films. And usually when I work with music, I don't like having music, like it's in Hermia and Helena. Because I like music, I like seeing, watching people performing. So I usually include music that way. So I said, because I have done five films like this, maybe it would be nice to see what is the other way. So when I started thinking about what music can I put and knowing that I was doing my one American movie, I say, let's choose an American. Let's choose music that would bring this idea of America. And I think that Scott Joplin, at least for me, was very much that. You couldn't get more American than Scott Joplin. And at the same time, when I was 20, I played the piano a little bit. And I played Scott Joplin. “Weeping Willow” was a– I was playing that on the piano. And I really liked it. And I always thought that it could be part of a film. You know when I was almost 20. And that it should be part of a film. And then I made the film... in order to put the music. And then, at first, I wanted to put only one song, not many. And it was “Sugar Cane,” the one that is played on the piano. [These are] things that I only use for me, it's not for you to see. It's also that's my engagement with Shakespeare. It's not that I want you to see, but for instance, the idea of having a father in the film has to do with Egeus, with the Father in Midsummer Night's Dream, that is the guy that puts everything in motion. If he would have let his daughter marry the person that she would like, there would have been no play. So he's very important in the play, even if he doesn't appear a lot. So this idea of the true reason for her, la-da-da! For me, for scriptwriting reasons that are very internal, very private, it worked for me. So, in the music thing, in the music department, “Sugar Cane,” when you play it, you have one hand in an octava, in...

Haden Guest  42:47

Octave.

Matías Piñeiro  42:48

Yeah, in an octave. And the other one that comes back and forth. You know? That it's a little bit like the structure of the film. You have Buenos Aires, that it's here...

Haden Guest  42:58

[LAUGHS]

Matías Piñeiro  42:59

...that is one day, and you have New York, that goes like this. I tried to shoot that, in that scene in the piano and I didn't succeed.

[LAUGHTER]

You know, I wanted to show the structure of the film in that moment. And then I couldn't do it. But I could capture other things that I needed and it was okay. And that's why the scene is there. You know? But then I thought that it was a music that I've always wanted to include, it was some music that I liked and enjoy and I felt it was as American as I could get. And then I even have an idea for a shot that I didn't succeed in fully putting in.

Haden Guest  43:37 

Any other questions or comments? No? Well, then, I'll ask you please to join me in thanking Matías Piñeiro.

Matías Piñeiro 43:50

Thank you. Thank you

[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]

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