«Enough eccentric roles I dive into a green fairy tale among the pelicans of my Australia» – Corriere.it

by time news

“I know Shine Has it changed my life? Yes, I no longer have curls and I have become older », says ironically Geoffrey Rush. With that film in 1997 he won the Oscar, interpreting the true story of pianist David Helfgott, crumpled on the keyboard, suffocated by his father’s aggression and violence, ended up hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic. And then the actor gets serious and lists some splendid possibilities the statuette gave him, “”Shakespeare in Love“, the musical Bran Nue Dae about the natives of my country, having brought a figure like Einstein on TV… ».

It is inevitable to speak of “Giuseppi” Tornatore, with whom the actor worked in “The best offer”. First of all, Rush lists the Italian directors he fed on as if they were the Azzurri at the European Championships: «Visconti, Comencini, Fellini, Bertolucci, Bolognini, De Sica, and today Garrone, Guadagnino». Then he mentions the costume designer Millenotti, the make-up artist Luigi Rocchetti… «I have a real obsession with your cinema. Tornatore was a dream come true, when he came to Melbourne to talk to me about the film, I took him to the best Italian restaurant and the waiters welcomed him like a king, maestro, what is he doing here? Another time at the table at my house there were 13 of us and he started saying no-no-no, I can’t sit down, it’s bad. He asked if my son James, who was 16, could be added. ‘


But now we’re here for “Storm Boy – The boy who knew how to fly”by Shawn Seet, who in 2019 went to the Giffoni Festival (the actor is much loved by teenagers for being the pirate Barbossa in “Pirates of the Caribbean”) and that Medusa releases on the 24th in 250 copies. Based on a classic children’s fiction by Colin Thiele, “it is a coming-of-age story that is still read in schools, and which already inspired director Safran in 1976”.

It is reasonable to compare it to the Little Prince? “Yes, the comparison is there”. It is the story of the friendship between a boy and a pelican, called Mr Percival, with an ecological background: «We wanted to connect with today’s environmental issues». In remake, the very young protagonist (Finn Little) has become a grandfather, a retired businessman (Geoffrey Rush) who helps his granddaughter (Morgana Davies) to avoid an environmental disaster in South Australia’s remote Coorong National Park. “The values ​​he bears concern each of us – says the actor – it’s a completely different role from those eccentric characters I always have to deal with in the cinema”.

In the film she evokes her granddaughter from her lonely and forgotten childhood, spenton that isolated and uncontaminated coast “of wild beauty”. He was cut off from the world until one day the world came to him. There was born the friendship with Mr Percival, who in the film is one of the three chicks orphaned by the mother killed by the hunters (the feathered “actor” is now at the Adelaide Zoo). The Amarcord will push the grandfather to return to fighting against business destined to pollute the region. “We talk about respect for nature, and if in the past the enemies were hunters, today the environment in that region is compromised by mining. And then we talk about respect for Aboriginal culture and for animals ».

Co-stars are the long-beaked birds. “Flap your wings, follow me, it’s like this », the boy says to the pelicans, on the beach in front of the ocean as he tries to give his first flying lessons. Every now and then the birds went crazy, the script bent to their improvisations. “They’ve been trained, they’re not pets. But it was enough to pick them up and everything was fine. The pelican is a totem in the culture of the aboriginal people, the earth is a sacred place, we have respected them even if it was not easy with the thousand cables and equipment of a set ».

June 20, 2021 (change June 21, 2021 | 10:29)

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