THE PARENTS’ ROOM

Interview with Diego Marcon

1) Your film seems to be based on a real event. Could you explain the choice and the process of creating the music and lyrics?
I started to explore the use of the music as a structuring element for a piece with previous work of mine, Ludwig, from 2018, a video entirely made in CGI. Before that, I worked with a few other animation techniques, such as direct animation, cut-out animation and traditional animation. When I started to think about The Parents’ Room (January 2019), I wanted to realize a film in stop-motion, trying to minimize the faltering movement typical of that technique, which I never liked very much. So I thought that if I could use a set in human scale, and dress up some human beings as puppets, this problem would have been solved. The subject of the film then shaped in a very natural way around this idea.

2) You choose to have your characters wear grotesque masks. Why have them appear this way?
An important reference for Lorenzo Cianchi (the creator of the special effects) and me has been The Nutty Professor. There you have some great hyper-realistic masks. Our aim was to create masks like those, hyper-realistic masks.
For now, I don’t have any desire to confront myself and my practice with performers and acting. Making the performers wear full covering masks and prosthetics avoids the possibility of any facial expression. Everything turned out to be pretty weird then.

3) Stasis and suspension are very important in your film, both at the beginning and the end. Why choose this type of rhythm ?
The Parents’ Room is meant to be a perfect loop, but a theatrical version forces to clearly decide a beginning and an end of what was designed as a perfect circle. This is something that might radically change the perception of a work. I think that in such a short time, a lot of stuff happens in the first part of the film, both in the image and in the sound, and that in order to to be perceived with more strength all that needed space.

Interview by Nathan Letoré