12/07/2022 - We talked to the Greek actor about his directorial debut, in which he stars alongside Angeliki Papoulia

Also taking over as a male lead alongside Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis shows a small town in the middle of nowhere, where lonely people keep waiting for their loved ones. Unable to move on, they can’t scream about their pain either, forced to respect silence from 6-9. We chatted to him about his aptly titled Karlovy Vary competition entry Silence 6-9 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christos Passalis
film profile].

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Cineuropa: How did you create the strange atmosphere in this film? You don’t explain too much – you just enter this world.
Christos Passalis: I like that term, atmosphere. It’s something you can communicate to your collaborators without explaining too much. That’s the nice thing about it. You see a picture, listen to music and say: “Ok, this is the film.” But you can’t really explain it with words – only great authors do it. We started writing this film [with Eleni Vergeti] in bits and pieces, starting from the things that we liked. I am not mysterious as a person, I am not cryptic, but when it comes to films or poems, there is no need to spell everything out. Sometimes I think that our logic is going to destroy us – we need to find our emotions first.

With stories like these, you have to make sure that the relationships feel real, even when the world that surrounds them is crazy. Terry Gilliam used to be good at that.
Angeliki and I are in our forties, but our characters’ relationship made me think of puberty instead. There is this clumsiness that exists between them. I wanted to show a more innocent – whatever that means – relationship between two adults. The truth is, unless there is a good reason for it, I can’t really watch two people kissing on screen. I never understand why they do it! They don’t, although they are obviously in love. It has nothing to do with puritanism, but it needs to make sense, or these scenes end up being the most boring. Unless we’re talking about something like Don’t Look Now or Mulholland Drive.

There is a sense of hopelessness that many also refer to when describing the situation in your country. Do you see this story as political in any way?
Talking about politics directly would be boring. It’s not my aesthetic. In my view, it should be done in a subtle way. There isn’t a direct relation to what we are experiencing now, but this political turmoil that makes its way into the film was crucial. These two people end up in a place where there is this social unrest and arguments. They are pressured by external forces.

You describe some pretty serious subjects, but there is some humour as well. I was in Italy recently, and it said in a hotel: “Silence from 2-4pm.” It seemed so random, just like in your film.
This is a story about a very absurd world, but we really follow rules like these! Our existence is based on that. When someone tells us not to cross a line, we don’t. We think there must be a reason behind it. In Greece, during the pandemic, we had to send out messages if we wanted to take a walk. The script was written before the pandemic, but some elements of our recent reality came into it, too. The state, the government, they introduce these rules, and we follow them. I don’t know why, but we do. In this sense, artists are useful sometimes – they are the ones questioning it.

Do you think you will act and direct again?
The script was written for a certain actor, but it didn’t work out. At one point, I made the decision to do it myself. I don’t know if I would do it again, although it’s a wild dream: acting and then being able to see it immediately on the monitor, and then decide if I like the take. I have been working as a theatre director since 2004 and also acted in those plays. I am familiar with watching myself. It wasn’t that exotic, although we are talking about two different mediums. I was happy, enthusiastic and afraid, all at the same time.

Almost every mention of your film has featured these words: the Greek Weird Wave. It has been useful in the past, but is it still the case? Or does it feel lazy to you?
It’s funny because I actually used the term “lazy” in another interview at Karlovy Vary. When you talk about Greek films, implying they all belong to one “wave”, it is lazy. It’s a lazy approach to the peculiarity of every film. There is a new wave in terms of a new generation of artists, who talk differently about our reality, but I don’t like to slap labels on things. My goal was to create a world I would like to inhabit, no matter how dystopian or utopian it may seem. I would like to exist there. But, as I said, understanding is overrated. All of my favourite films can only be “understood” on an emotional level. I can’t say what they are about; I can only talk about the inner journey I went on while watching them. I don’t know what Last Year in Marienbad is or what Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are about. It’s important to put the viewer to work.