In an interview on Inspiration

Let’s turn to a comic novel written in 1880 by Brazil’s Machado de Assis.  Tell us about it and how you came to love this work.

Well, I just got it in the mail one day. Some stranger in Brazil sent it and wrote, "You’ll like this." Because it’s a thin book, I read it. If it had been a thick book, I would have discarded it.

I was shocked by how charming and amusing it was. I couldn’t believe he lived as long ago as he did. You would’ve thought he wrote it yesterday. It’s so modern and so amusing. It’s a very, very original piece of work.

The book turns mortality and amorous adventures into comedy and is infused with an ironic pessimism that seems familiar from your films. How did it influence you? 

It’s not that it influenced me; it resonated with me, in the same way as when I see movies by Ingmar Bergman. They mean something to me because of his preoccupations and his view of life. It rang a bell in me, in the same way that The Catcher in the Rye did. It was about subject matter that I liked and it was treated with great wit, great originality and no sentimentality.

The memorable last line of the novel reads: "I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery." You shrug off the notion that your work leaves an artistic legacy. Can you at least acknowledge a cultural one? What I have in mind is that more men today follow the model of romance established by Alvy Singer than those established by Romeo, Darcy, or Casanova.

When it comes to romance, when it comes to love, everyone is in the same boat.  The issues that Euripides and Sophocles and Shakespeare and Chekhov and Strindberg struggled with are the same unsolvable problems that each generation deals with and finds its own way of complaining about. I describe them in a certain way and entertained with them in my movies. Other people did it, in their day, using their own icons and idioms. 

I may have different cosmetics, but in the end we’re all writing about the same thing. This is the reason why I’ve never done political films. Because the enduring problems of life are not political; they’re existential, they’re psychological, and there are no answers to them – certainly no satisfying answers.

Machado de Assis is credited with inspiring magical realist writers. Judging from the previews, the protagonist of your latest film experiences some magic in Paris, as did characters in Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, and Scoop. Why do you so frequently bend the rules of reality in your films? 

As I said before, I do think we live in a nightmare and I feel the same way that Blanche Dubois feels: I want magic; I don’t want reality. I want the paper lanterns hung over the bare light bulbs, like she did. And if there is any way to escape reality, I’m all for it. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t any real way. You can distract yourself. You can go to baseball games and concerts and plays and have sex and get involved in all kinds of endeavours that obsess you, and you can even create problems for yourself, where they don’t exist, to avoid thinking about the bad problems. But, in the end, you’re caught. And reality inevitably disappoints you.