Art is responsibility, and always carries the risk of failure, cult Italian actor Toni Servillo said at the Ischia Film Festival Friday.
    Speaking after it was announced that his seventh collaboration with The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino, La Grazia (Grace), will open the Venice Film Festival on August 27, the 66-year-old from Afragola north of Naples expansive about the "bipolarity" between cinema and theatre, "responsibility as the foundation stone of art", and the "acute moments of blazing awareness, epiphanies, which we sometimes try to ignore".
    Servillo, who won the European Film Award for Best Actor twice, in 2008 for both Gomorrah and Il Divo and in 2013 for The Great Beauty, as well as winning the David di Donatello for Best Actor four times from 2002 to 2013, said "responsibility is the reflection of this beautiful profession especially because it requires the presence of the public.
    " A poem, a painting can exist even without an audience, but cinema and theater cannot, without this interaction they would be impossible.
    "Pirandello with great awareness - said Servillo - believed that the audience was so much part of the dramaturgical mechanism that he defined it 'the vision of those who attend'.
    "Even Shakespeare thought that the reactions of the audience were a dramaturgical fact that was considered in a new version of the same work".
    Asked if there was "bipolarity" in frequenting cinema and theater for years, the Consequences of Love, Loro and Hand of God star said: "I was born with theatre and I made my first film at forty in 1992: 'Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician' by Mario Martone.
    "From then on there was the frequentation of the two languages ;;that help each other, also to understand certain complexities of life.
    "So no bipolarity, but the happiness of being able to move between two languages, nourishing both".
    What can't you stand anymore, he was then asked.

"The 'as long as it works', because it is a terrible limit that hides market logic.

You don't do this job as if it were any other occupation, so I can't stand this push into the market that forces you to believe that something must necessarily work.
    "You have to have the freedom to look at what you do with the risk of failing, of making mistakes, otherwise the territories of art are increasingly narrowing".
    Asked which character he would have liked to play, Servillo replied: "Fred from Youth. Being passionate about classical music, I was disappointed when Paolo Sorrentino wrote a film about this conductor and didn't choose me. When I later discovered that he had chosen that giant that is Michael Caine, I withdrew in good order".
    Who do you rely on in times of crisis? "To the value of friendship. Being able to share a slap on the back, a compliment, an encouragement with people you love is the most important thing.
    "This also applies to theatre, which has its greatest mastery in the group of people with whom we started. Measuring the ambitions of one and the other, the capabilities of one and the limits of the other, this is walking together".
    Aside from 'L'abbaglio' in Roberto Andò's film, what are today's 'dazzlements'? "Believing that massacres and rearmament are the solution to problems and that there really isn't a climate emergency.
    This is letting yourself be blinded and not looking reality in the face". What can you say about Sorrentino's new film, La Grazia, which will open the Venice Film Festival as a world premiere in competition on August 27? "I've never talked about a film before the director talks about it, so it's Sorrentino's turn. I can only say that it's my seventh film with him and that it was shot in an atmosphere full of enthusiasm as it was for The Consequences of Love."
   

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