The music was from Beethoven’s Sixth, the Pastoral Symphony, which was used in Soylent Green to create a strong contrast between thehigh-spirited music and the moment of death. So thequestion remained: how could we use the stage, the area around it, the pit, and the orchestrato perform this death at the end of the whole show? My solution was to have the orchestradie away with the music-that is, to instruct the musicians to leave the pit one by one andlet the music slowly dissolve into nothingness. My first decisionwas to avoid using an image from the film, because that would have been too easy. WhenI first saw the film, I was only thirteen and I cried for almost three days. Robinson, playing the character Sol, choosesthe light and music that are going to accompany his own death, which he refers to as “going home.” It’s a theater-like situation, and a very extreme moment, in the movie. And the challenge here was to translate the momentin Soylent Green where the actor Edward G. This wouldbe an interesting theme for an opera, since it’s still very…ĭominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Exactly. So my piece also addresses the issue of euthanasia. It’s set in 2022 and showsan overpopulated world where euthanasia has been made available to the public, and people canchoose how they want to die. For me, one of the crucial moments in cinema was the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green directed by Richard Fleischer. At any rate, Philippe thought I should goback to this film idea, and so I went through a variety of film endings to see if they couldbe adapted somehow for the stage. The death ofa main character always makes things more dramatic. This is true in operas they rarely have a happy ending. In French I often say, “Tout finit mal”-everything ends badly. You see, more than ten years ago I gave a lecture on “The Endings of Films.” I’ve always been very interested in endings. But, for me, the most interesting part was tryingto think of an ending. The idea was to bring them allon stage and build a kind of scenography. What were yourthoughts when you first heard of the work, and what is the genesis of your contribution to it?ĭominique Gonzalez-Foerster: My first thought was to incorporate existing works to theproject-together with music, light, performances, and objects. As you know, Philippe Parreno and I came up withthe idea of a group show in which artists are given time rather than space. Hans Ulrich Obrist: I’m so excited to have this conversation with you here in Manchester forthe world premiere of Il Tempo del Postino.
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