For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Oscar Lessons interview with director Alice Rohrwacher about helming Le Pupille from Backstory Magazine’s issue 49 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Writer-director Alice Rohrwacher on collaborating with Disney and producer Alfonso Cuarón for her uplifting short set during Christmas in World War II-era Italy
By Danny Munso
Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has earned a reputation as one of the best indie auteurs in not only her home country but throughout Europe. Her three feature films have all premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with 2014’s The Wonders (Le meraviglie) winning the Grand Prix and 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzarro Felice) taking the award for Best Screenplay. So it is perhaps not a surprise that she was the first call Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón made as part of a new initiative he undertook with Disney. Under the agreement, Cuarón would produce several shorts set around the holidays, with each helmed by a different international filmmaker with a unique vision. The first of those—Rohrwacher’s Le Pupille (The Pupils)—has been a resounding success. In keeping with Rohrwacher’s tradition, it premiered at Cannes as well before playing at other festivals throughout 2022 and finally landing on Disney+ for the holiday season. As a cap to the movie’s accomplishments, it garnered Rohrwacher and Cuarón Oscar nominations for Best Live Action Short.
When Cuarón phoned Rohrwacher, she didn’t have to think long. Her mind went straight to a letter penned by one of her favorite authors—Elsa Morante—to literary critic Goffredo Fofi, regaling him with a true story that took place at an orphanage in the 1940s. A group of young boys are gifted a magnificent cake—a zuppa Inglese—but are told before they eat it that they should give up their piece as an offering to Jesus. One boy at the table refuses, noting he is not a good boy, he is bad. “I immediately thought of the letter,” the filmmaker says through a translator. “When Alfonso called me up to see if I wanted to make a film about Christmas, it was the first thing that came to mind. I had in my head the picture of this cake, this zuppa Inglese—this colorful cake getting into this institute at a time of difficulty during the war. So I thought it would be a nice challenge to discuss topics like religion, obedience and war in a lighthearted way.”
From the start, Rohrwacher made a key change to the story that was in the missive. While Morante’s letter was about an orphanage full of boys, her film would be centered on young girls. She instituted the change with the blessing of Fofi and Morante’s heirs (as the author passed away in 1985). “I made that change because I think in this moment of history, it is important that disobedience comes from girls,” she says. “This is a moment when many young women and girls in the world are trying to react against a preset order that does not grant them the freedom to express themselves. So I thought that this film shot in 2022 had to be dedicated to girls and have the girls be the protagonists.” Le Pupille takes place in the middle of World War II at an Italian orphanage in 1943. It’s Christmas Eve and a young girl named Serafina (Melissa Falasconi) and others are hearing prayers of churchgoers when a woman asks them to pray for her fiancé who has taken up with another woman. Because they do this, the woman bakes them a zuppa Inglese to eat for Christmas dinner. However, the facility’s Mother Superior (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister and frequent collaborator) has other ideas and wants to gift the cake to the bishop. So she asks the girls to sacrifice their own piece if they want to be good girls. Serafina, however, thinks she’s wicked and doesn’t want to share her piece of the cake. In the end, Mother Superior gifts the cake to a local chimney sweep for him to share with other workers in the town and the girls all share parts of Serafina’s piece.
Rohrwacher is a very fast writer but notes the script for Le Pupille was exceptionally quick, even by her standards. Amazingly, she had completed a first draft of the script the very morning after receiving the initial call from Cuarón. “I immediately jotted it down because it was crystal clear in my head,” she says. “With my writing process, that is often the case for me. Sometimes I can plan for months, but when I actually start writing, it’s very fast.” One major issue Rohrwacher did have to deal with was the original letter itself. Because she is such a fan of Morante, she wanted the writer’s own words to be a part of the film. “This is the first time I started a script from something that already exists, so I wanted to respect the words, the document and a story that was already there. My first thought was, How do I put the words of the letter into the movie? I didn’t want to have voiceover. I didn’t want to have writings.” Her solution proved an elegant one. In the film, the children sing parts of the letter to bookend the story. “I thought the most beautiful way to celebrate words is to sing them.”
Because of the setting, the film can’t help but be viewed as a slight comment on religion, particularly since it’s not the first time Rohrwacher has explored the subject. Her debut film—2011’s Heavenly Body (Corpo Celeste)—took place as a young girl prepared to receive her confirmation. It is a topic Rohrwacher thinks about often. “I was brought up in a Catholic country, although my family is not religious, and I’m not a religious person,” she says. “But I believe the spiritual side of mankind is important and the invisible world is just as important as the visible world. It is very important in this film, as well as in my other films, that religion can be seen as some form of destiny. In the film, the girls say destiny works in mysterious ways, and ultimately the cake gets shared between girls, dogs, chimney sweepers and homeless people. This is the joyful side of spirituality—being a family. Then there’s the side of religion that is linked to power, and here you see the power of Mother Superior and the other sisters. It is all about obeying somebody. That part of religion is more problematic, but ultimately I think this film is full of joy.”
Alice Rohrwacher
Le Pupille is set during a particularly dark time in Italy’s history, with the end of WWII still a couple years away. The war itself is mostly kept to the background, only making its way into the orphanage via a radio report the girls listen to at night. This was a deliberate choice, as Rohrwacher wanted the war’s presence to mirror that of the COVID pandemic that had us all—including the girls starring in her film—stuck inside for over a year. “The film somehow describes the direct experience of the girls during the pandemic,” she says. “There was a healthcare war being waged outside the window, and the girls only perceived it through the radio or TV or what they could see through the windows. The war is seen in the same way in the movie. There isn’t a direct link. I thought it was important to narrate their experience of being locked in a place where hell is happening outside. But they’re still children who want to dance, sing and eat cake. They want to be lighthearted in a very dark and difficult time.”
Rohrwacher admits directing 17 girls was challenging at times but for an unexpected reason. The group were all cast as the orphans, with none of them singled out to play Serafina until several weeks into rehearsal so the director could get a feel for what each of the young performers could do. Eventually, Falasconi got the role, though Rohrwacher was sympathetic to the others and worked hard to cultivate a supportive environment. “I was very mindful not to create jealousy or envy,” she says. “I really wanted to make sure the girls understood they were all equal and all important. I didn’t want them to be competitive. Serafina is special, but without the other girls, she would be nothing. We tried to create something positive, and that was perhaps one of the harder things we had to do.” As far as shooting during the pandemic, Rohrwacher says the girls and their families’ safety was front of mind each day and that the precautions and insular feeling actually made for an uplifting experience—much like the finished film. “Everyone wanted to be together, to make this movie good. But it was also just a way for all of us to be with one another.”
When awards season comes to a close, Rohrwacher will turn her attention to her next feature, for which she has a story but is still in the early planning stages. Though it’s too early for her to talk specifics, she always has the same cinematic goal. “It’s hard to talk about it now, but my hope for it is that it’s alive,” she says of the looming endeavor. “I never say I hope it’s nice or I hope it’s beautiful. What I wish for my films is that they are alive and kicking.” As viewers of Le Pupille or any of Rohrwacher’s oeuvre already know, such an accomplishment is never in doubt.
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