Italian director Liliana Cavani
told ANSA Monday that she found it "difficult to think of
Italian cinema" without Bernardo Bertolucci, who has died at the
age of 77.
"We really loved each other, we talked and met very often, a
life-long friendship sustained by a common vision of the cinema,
without borders, free, a boundless expressive space that was the
dream of our generation," said the director of The Night Porter,
85.
Cavani was bound to Bertolucci by their common roots in the
leftwing and Communist "furnace" of Emilia, which Bertolucci
told so well in his masterpiece 1900.
She is from Carpi while he was from Parma, both iconic towns
on the Via Emilia.
"I considered myself his lucky charm," she told ANSA after
the great director's death.
"What I always admired about Bertolucci were his courage, his
never-banal ideas, his bulimia for knowledge.
"And then the ambition, the good kind, to build big dreams
which allowed his cinema to be super-national, and gigantic also
in for production values.
"His casts were always international. Bernardo liked talking
about important issues in private and public life".
"He was a pillar of Italian cinema and right up until the end
saw it with this global vision".
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