Q&A with Theo Angelopoulos

The Greek filmmaker discusses his life and the first part of his planned epic on the twentieth century.

Jan 26 2005

The Greek writer-director Theo Angelopoulos won international acclaim with 1975's 'The Travelling Players', which firmly established him as one of the masters of the serious art-movie. More recently, 'Ulysses' Gaze' picked up the Cannes Jury Prize in 1995, while 'Eternity and a Day' won the Palme d'Or three years later. 'Trilogy: the Weeping Meadow' is the first part of a planned epic about the twentieth century and its legacy.

How did you get the idea for the Trilogy?

The century was coming to an end, and I started thinking about all that had happened. The century had basically started with war – the first world war. There'd been the aesthetic revolution of modernism in literature, painting and the other arts. There'd been cinema – it was the century of cinema. And it was my century too, of course; it included my childhood, my adolescence, my dreams, my loves, my films… And I wanted to try and see what was left of all that. It had been a century which at one point had been filled with hope, and never in history have we seen such changes in the world. But when the century ended, it left a bitter taste … and it ended with war, even in Sarajevo again. And the idea of socialism in the East had gone, and there was racism everywhere, and more wars being waged in the name of democracy.
But it was also the century of my mother, and the century of women. While men made war, women suffered war. My mother was always dressed in dark clothes, because of her many losses. I had a sister, two years younger than me, who died at the age of 11; that was my own first contact with death.

How did that affect you?

It was a crisis; I went through a period of believing in God – my mother was a devout believer – and it lasted until I was 18, when there was a second crisis. I then lost my faith; it was when I took up studying law – very reluctantly. I'd been writing poems since the age of nine or so; the first one had been for my father, who disappeared during the (Civil) War. The first ones were published when I was 16, but then I began to feel that writing was an inadequate means of expressing myself. And that's when I really discovered the cinema; I started going to the movies at 10 in the morning, and I'd see everything, no matter what. When I was at university, I was more like a visitor than a student, because I was always at the movies. And at some point I decided to leave, and as soon as I'd done my military service, I asked my friends to scrape together some money for me, and with their donations I bought a ticket to Paris. That's all I had. But since then I've known that the only thing I can do, and want to do, is make films.

Were all the parts of the Trilogy written before you started filming?

Yes, but now I'm going to change them a bit, especially the second. I haven't told anybody else this yet, so you have a scoop, but I'm now thinking of combining the second and third parts, and then writing a new third part, set in the future… maybe in 2050 or thereabouts. I feel there's something missing still. It may be something to do with the linear structure; it's as if I have a need to work with the subject of time. I always say that time is never really the past, present and future; it's always the present. And the past is only there to illuminate the present. Maybe I'll feel different when I'm older! But that's why in my films the past and present are all mixed up; they co-exist. And I think that I shall now be working more along those lines again in the second part of the trilogy.

This part is unusually linear compared to your other films.

There's just the imaginary flashback to the two brothers as children, which is a projection of a memory. But generally it's true; this film wasn't done in 'my way'. That said, I do like it. It's as if I 'receive' a film, like music. It's a film of water; it's like flowing water. And that's how it came to me.

Why did you focus on a woman this time?

Because female characters are generally more closely associated with tragedy. Especially in the period the film deals with, women were the ones who stayed behind, who lost the most, while their men went off to war or left to live abroad. My first real encounter with this was when I made my first film, 'Reconstruction'; I went to film in a remote village, and I basically found only women there. The men were away in Germany, working as labourers. There were just some old men, children and women. It's not quite like that now, because things have changed, but in the period we're dealing with… And even now, my wife [producer Phoebe Economopoulos] always 'follows' me, is in my shadow, even though she's a completely modern woman, with a strong personality…

Did you build the village especially for the film?

Unfortunately we couldn't find what we wanted. This region was inhabited by a lot of emigrés and immigrants from 1922 onwards. There were of course also many Greeks, but because they'd lived under the Ottomans they spoke Turkish, especially the women. And we wanted to have this population (in the film) on the shores of a lake; and we found an artificial lake, fed by a river coming from Bulgaria. But it's used to water the fields in Bulgaria, so in the summer the water vanished, leaving this immense hole, which actually looks rather like a steppe in the Ukraine or Kazakhstan or somewhere like that. When I saw it I thought it was perfect, and asked how long it stayed like that; I was told three months or so, as long it doesn't start raining.
With a Hollywood budget it might have been different, but this was the only way to get the flooding I needed. Either I had to abandon the film or build it. So we took the risk, built the village just as the buildings would have been – actually there had been a village there already, but it had disappeared in a flood in 1953 – even to the extent of using old tiles. We built around 100 houses. And just as everything was almost done, there was snow! Everything iced over, the steppe looked more like Siberia, and we couldn't start filming. I was so worried! And when the thick ice finally melted a month later, we started shooting.
We'd just finished shooting the first part (of the film) when the current started to rise; we waited a little and soon the village was flooded. But for the final scenes, we needed the village to be destroyed, and we didn't have enough time, so we had to wait a whole year and go back. In-between we shot the scenes in Thessaloniki. And when we went back, the water level hadn't gone down at all, because there'd been so much rain! And we found the houses were already crumbling into the water; it was like a ghost village. But happily the main house we needed still had two floors standing.

Isn't the story inspired partly by the stories of Oedipus and the Seven Against Thebes?

And of Antigone, who here became the mother of the two sons. So it's a distant reference – as they all are, really – but they're only there for those who want to use them; they might help you read the film on a different level, but they're not necessary for an understanding of the film. It's the same with the character Alexis – there's a reference to Oedipus in that he’s with his father's wife, but here he's innocent, because he loves her and she loves him. This is more about patriarchal authority, and going against the established order of the village.

Isn't it your own voice that we hear in voiceover at the opening of the film?

Yes. I envisaged the film as a tragedy, and each tragedy begins with someone introducing the story. It creates a certain distance as you begin to relate events.

Explaining the film in the productions, you claim that modern Greece wounds you – how so?

A poem by Sepheris says, 'No matter where I am, Greece wounds me.' It's due to our past, all that poetry learnt at school. Until I studied in Paris I hated all that, but then I re-read Homer's Odyssey. And it filled me with nostalgia for my country and my culture. The poem still haunts me, and is central to my work. So for me, Greece isn't a geographical space, but a civilisation: a text by Plato or some other writer. That's what's universal. So when I'm faced with the realties of today's Greece, it hurts.