Is it true that you viewed Nostalghia only once before bringing it here to the Cannes Film Festival?
Yes. And I was extremely pleased with it. I feel that it is my most successfully realized film, the one that best expresses my interior world. The protagonist even became my alter ego of sorts. He contains all my emotions, my psychology, my nature. He is my portrait in the mirror. Why don’t you want to talk about your film? That’s not accurate. I don’t wish to recount the plot of the film, which, in and of itself, means nothing. What interest is there in knowing that it deals with a Russian writer who comes to Italy to carry out research about a countryman of his, an artist about whom all traces were lost two centuries ago, and that he encounters an Italian professor and a blond translator? But I can try to explain what the film tries to say. It is the expression of an emotion, the one that is most deeply rooted in me, that I have never felt so strongly as when I left the Soviet Union. It is for this reason that I say that I could have filmed Nostalghia only in Italy. And we Russians,
