Stanley Tucci: ‘I didn’t want my artist film to be like watching paint dry’

Stanley Tucci knew his film about artist Alberto Giacometti had the potential to be like watching paint dry.
Geoffrey Rush puts in a stellar performance as the Swiss sculptor and painter in Final Portrait, with Armie Hammer playing his friend and biographer James Lord.
Set in ‘60s Paris, director Tucci employed lots of silences and motionless scenes, as Lord poses for a portrait by Giacometti.
“Because you have a very static film, in a sense, the camera needed to be moving at all times, even if the operator’s just standing there,” the Oscar nominee told Cover Media during a Q&A for Final Portrait. “There has to be movement and energy to the camera. Because the actors are basically doing nothing, and it could be like watching paint dry. So you need to have this kind of energy.”
To achieve this, the actor and director, who also penned Final Portrait, used two handheld cameras that moved simultaneously.
One of themes in the feature is how art is never really finished, and Tucci says he often feels the same when making movies, though he jokes he’s forced to stop the editing process when his cash stops flowing.
“You hit a point… the reason you hit a point is because somebody’s paying for you to edit, and eventually they say you have to stop editing because you don’t have any more money left,” he smiled. “So come hell or high water, you have to stop editing. Unless you start funding it yourself.
“But the other thing is, you do come to a point where you say, this is good, this is a start. We’ve gone far, we could go further. But we’ve gone far.”
Final Portrait, which also stars Clemence Poesy, began hitting cinemas earlier this month (Aug17).