“Basileia”, interview with director Isabella Torre e and actor Elliot Crosset Hove

At 81th Venice Film Festival FRED Film Radio interviewed director Isabella Torre and actor Elliot Crosset Hove to talk about “Basileia”, closing film of Giornate degli Autori 2024.

The role of Aspromonte

Realism and supernatural elements. How did Isabelle Torre get the idea for “Basileia” ? Is there an element or an image that influenced her and her vision? Especially given the connection to her short film “Nymphs”. “I shot it, of course, before the feature, but I was already writing the script at the moment, so it was more or less a test for me to see if it was going to work. Everything you see in the film, basically, is being inspired by the area where we shot the film. I would say that it’s not just the backdrop, it’s actually another protagonist of the story. And the Aspromonte itself suggests to me this idea of having such a real, rough nature, a force of nature that’s taking over everything, that you feel so present and so touchable. But at the same time, it’s almost so real. Every time I would go there, the experience was different. Just because of the changing of light, or the weather, or a tree on the road, and you have to change route, and you suddenly discover something incredible. The fog, which is, I think, another character of the film. I’ve been spending a long time in Aspromonte before shooting the film, or even writing the script. And the more I would just go there, the more the images would come to my head, and step by step I started putting them together”.

Elliot Crosset Hove’s point of view

In the film Elliot Crosset Hove plays an archaeologist searching for hidden treasure. A very physical role too thanks to the sequences shot in the woods. “It’s been absolutely amazing. And I think the physical part that you’re talking about is that’s just a big gift, because the nature that Isabella was talking about does a lot of the work for you. As an actor, you just really just look at the elements, and then something happens to you. So it was tough, but in absolutely the most beautiful way. Isabella gave me confidence, and time, and love, and then I got to see her previous work, The Nymphs, and that was amazing. Because it gave me a sense of her style, and a sense of what we were going to do here. A very magical thing was that Isabella said to me before we started the shooting. ‘Just relax’. And that was amazing, because I felt that I was taken care of”.

The artistic references

Did Isabelle Torre have any visual references for the nymphs? “There’s a lot of art that inspired me. All the pre-raffaelliti work, but even Caravaggio, because of the light. I definitely drew a lot from it, and especially from the mythology, even though in the end they’re so different from everything that they have been in the past. We can call them nymphs, but they’re actually just creatures, ethereal beings, they’re a force of nature, they’re unstoppable. They might be lethal, but at the end of the day, they’re just trying to survive, adapt, and adapt the environment around them, and proliferate”.

Go with the flow

What Isabella Torre hopes people will take emotionally from “Basileia” ? “I really hope that they will take the chance of just let themselves go with the flow of not really knowing. Not necessarily defined everything that’s around us. The film is mysterious, it doesn’t explain everything, and it was important to me that it would stay like that. Because I feel like sometimes we try with our human minds to put everything on the right shelf, with the right tag. Especially right now, where tags are all over. But some things are just like mysterious and they’re important even because they’re mysterious”.

Plot