In Conversation: Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli on Likemeback

In Conversation: Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli on Likemeback

Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli’s new intimate drama Likemeback, is a film that explores social media's impact on young women during a sailing vacation. We sat down with the filmmaker to discuss his experimental approach and what he learned about today's digital generation.

Why did you choose to set a film about social media on a boat?
Because the sea is also a no-man's space. You have no signals of society, it's a void. It creates this interesting contrast where the characters are physically isolated but mentally connected elsewhere through their phones.

How did the social media aspect become central to the story?
Today with social media you are always physically in a place and mentally somewhere else. So it was interesting for me to investigate how the real and virtual world invade each other and how the virtual especially can interfere with the real. Then I thought, let's try to do this experiment. I call it an experiment because it was very distinctive.

Can you tell us about your approach to making this film?
I wanted to make a small budget film before making a bigger film which would require more time. It's a small crew and working in a sort of collaborative way with the actresses. The whole point for me was to get a glimpse of this new generation, get as close as possible. This is not something that is going to pass, social media is their lives, it's the way they live. It's how they grew up and it's their second nature.

Were you tempted to judge this generation's relationship with technology?
From my point of view I could be easily judgmental and I like to challenge myself not to be judgmental with things around me. One way is to know better. This idea of working with females, instead of writing my story as an 18-year-old today, I thought it better to create a dialogue where I know less and they bring more. Rather than me writing a monologue about kids today, I felt there would be more possibility of exchange and collaboration this way.

Do you think this generation lives too virtually?
For me it's not negative. It's a movie that is so close to their age that only when I made it and spent a lot of time with them, the actresses, I realized that it's the way they live. And only us, who don't live there, can think that this is negative. What I'm trying to say is that it's their life. We had our own life and they have their life and we have to start accepting it, maybe creating a bridge of comprehension, a dialogue. My half-sister who is 14 watched the film and she never once mentioned the phone as an obsession or that it's disturbing that they're always on the phone. She said things like "oh, she was mean to her." It's almost like the phone is not even present. It's embedded in their hands, it's second nature. It's a given.

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