Reelin' in the years

Bertolucci decided to make The Last Emperor in 1984.

"My first trip to China was that year, when I made agreements with the Chinese authorities. Then we returned for a look around in 1985, and we came back three months before filming in 1986," he says.

His 1972 hit, Last Tango in Paris, earned great success but was also regarded as scandalous. Some say Bertolucci was escaping from this when he took on The Last Emperor.

It was following Last Tango in Paris that Bertolucci embarked on his trilogy of "faraway films".

The first was The Last Emperor, followed by The Sheltering Sky starring Debra Winger, with its North African desert vistas, and then Little Buddha, filmed in India and Bhutan.

"I was so fed up with Italy in the 1980s that I needed to explore a different reality," he says.

China Daily was the only newspaper he read during the shooting of The Last Emperor.

"I had to hold the newspaper at arm's length to be able to read the letters. Close objects would appear fuzzy or blurry, while distant ones would remain in focus. It was there, reading China Daily, that I realized that I was aging," he recalls.

Bertolucci's new film, Me and You, is an intimate tale based on a novel by Italian writer Niccolo Ammaniti.

The protagonist is a restless and discontented adolescent, Lorenzo, played by Iacopo Olmo Antinori, who is making his acting debut.

"I liked the story of Lorenzo; I liked this innocent lie told inside his home. It is reassuring because he hides in the basement of his own home, which becomes a sort of protective and safe area."

Every scene was shot just a minute from Bertolucci's home in Rome, in the painter Sandro Chia's studio, which was set up to look like a basement.

"I was able to arrange it in a way that unity of place, and that umbilical cord that stretched from my house to the set, were not affected," says Bertolucci, who ironically calls his wheelchair "the electric chair", which in the movie world refers to a camera dolly.

"It is a punishment from above, for having used too many tracking shots in my films," he adds.

As a boy, Bertolucci wanted to be a poet. "Yes I did, just to emulate my father (Attilio Bertolucci was one of the greatest Italian poets of the 20th century)."

Bertolucci did in fact publish an award-winning book of poems in his teens.

"But later, I stopped trying to be like Attilio, for I found my own language, cinema."

But his perennial restlessness of youth is still there, represented by Lorenzo in that basement.

"Yes, it was always like that and so it will be," he says.

Contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.

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