Albert Serra: "Having turned the young into idiots makes everything much more boring"

Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) does not have WhatsApp or any social network because he does not want to waste time on what does not interest him. This brings his cinema and his life together: to combat boredom, he imposes a military discipline on himself to fight against clichés. This way of working has led him to be one of the most recognized artists in the world and the kind of interlocutor with whom you always have a good time and get interesting ideas, while at the same time worrying about whether it is all a farce.What made you who you are?

— Certain people I met in Banyoles, especially older people, and readings. Risky, provocative, original people with an avant-garde attitude. And, at the other extreme, picturesque people, who represent what is popular without pretensions. Above all, I have had no influence from normal people.

Has this world disappeared?

— People have become uniform because they think of life in terms of communication. Karl Lagerfeld was amazed by social media: before, in companies, marketing was the lowest rung. People didn't want to do propaganda: they wanted to do things. Now everyone does propaganda for themselves. This repression kills life and art. I never think about the consequences of what I do: if you analyze things before doing them, it doesn't work.

When did you know that the artistic impulse would take shape in cinema?

— My goal has always been to have fun. It all started because, with the facilities of digital technology, making a film seemed fun. Later, layers of aesthetic ambition were added, but without diminishing the original playful spirit.

What does "playful spirit" mean?

— I make cinema to mock the world. It is very difficult to sustain, because it implies having no respect either for oneself, or for cinema, or for what you do. But it gives an interesting aesthetic, because everyone falls into the trap of wanting to control the result. Nobody works like this; nobody is capable of maintaining an attitude of mockery as sincere as mine.

And, however, you work a lot.

— I have no life: I don't have to give explanations to anyone, I'm not married nor do I have a partner. This makes consequences non-existent and everything present. Cinema allows you to live in an unreal way, with completely invented borders between the real self and the artistic one.

How do you move from mockery to aesthetic quality?

— An idea from Lévi-Strauss has marked my whole life: "Every culture nourishes itself from exchanges with other cultures. But, at the same time, a certain resistance must be opposed to them; without it, the culture would have nothing truly its own to exchange". You must nourish yourself from the world, but you must not adapt to it completely, you must offer resistance. The triumph of an aesthetic career is that the world ends up adapting to you: making them swallow your impossible aesthetic.

An idea of yours that I love: that you make cinema "without having anything to say".

— Even though they deal with controversial topics, my films have never been controversial, because there is no point of view and it is not clear which side the characters fall on: everything is radically ambivalent. The only vision that belongs to me is the methodology, the setup. Regarding the specific content, I am not responsible for anything.

What is the secret of this methodology?

— 95% of the aesthetic quality of what I do is invisible to the human eye during filming: everything is so subtle or so over-the-top that only the camera captures it, and then it appears during editing. The key is to influence what will happen during the filming of divergent, often mental, spaces.

Is that why you manipulate the actors with contradictory instructions, to the point of violating them?

— An actor gets inspired like anyone else. In theater there may be techniques, but in cinema what innocence achieves is infinitely more intense than any acting grammar. The difficulty is to be innocently yourself, which is synonymous with leading a quality life.

How is innocence induced?

— It is a subject that came up in my film Liberté. It seems that libertinism should impose itself naturally, because the expansion of the sexual drive is irresistible. But the libertines discover that, sometimes, it is necessary to force people to free themselves by force. Life is just that: to impose innocence, you have to be perverse.

And why is this important?

— Because artificial intelligence will always copy better than us. But it cannot do anything without data; the creator must erase the data they have in their head. Innocence is, by definition, inimitable.

You always criticize the self-censorship of artists, the fear of saying politically incorrect things.

— In reality, I live it with indifference. When I make critical comments about the world, they are completely gratuitous. Michael Caine said that his father had given him great advice: "You should only hate those you love; the rest don't even deserve your attention".

Is the world now more or less diverse than it was in the year 2000?

— Now people worry about themselves and before they worried about others. Before you would go to certain streets and bars and you would find artists there, and now there is no one. But what can you do? You don't need to live in any city or be part of any circle: your interlocutor is the world, and the power of the mind is enough.

What has been worrying you lately?

— May generations succumb and idealism disappear. Living like this is demanding and tense. I would like a way to maintain it that did not depend on youth or imposition: that would make a playful attitude grow in a natural and collective way. I am inspired by the sixties, the last moment when it all worked. But I am optimistic: if it happened, it can happen again.

Do you think you will be able to do something similar to what the elderly people of Banyoles did for you, who at 65 years old told you things that marked you when you were 18?

— The only thing that actively makes me angry is the destruction of the education system. We should be more serious and forceful with those responsible. Until the age of 18, a child does not have enough personal initiative to educate themselves alone. Only very stupid or very corrupt people could have promoted the obsession with computers of recent years. Having turned young people into idiots makes everything much more boring: it is pathetic.