Zoe Saldaña in Locarno: «I want to become a director»

Zoe Saldaña met the Locarno Film Festival audience on Monday at the Forum @ Spazio Cinema. Before the conversation, moderated by English film critic John Bleasdale, the actress received a special Pardo from festival president Maja Hoffman and artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro.

Born in 1978 and raised in New York, Saldaña has also lived in the Dominican Republic and has Puerto Rican roots. «Sono una donna di colore molto orgogliosa e figlia di immigrati» (I am a very proud woman of colour and the daughter of immigrants), she said. Culturally she feels mainly Dominican. «Taking us back to their motherland was the best thing my parents did for me and my sisters», she explained, recalling that she grew up bilingual, in English and Spanish.

Before turning to acting she practised ballet for ten years, without ever going professional. Ballet, she said, means «getting up every day and conditioning your body to become something». From that time she kept the discipline and the relationship with her body. «When I lacked the words to communicate, ballet became a therapy, a friend», she added. It was also the step that carried her from one art form to another.

The roles and the choices

Audiences know her above all as Gamora in the Marvel saga and as Neytiri in James Cameron's «Avatar» films. For Jacques Audiard's «Emilia Pérez» she won, among other honours, the best actress prize at Cannes and the 2024 Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Asked how she keeps her feet on the ground, she replied that she has no two-year or five-year plan: «I am not ambitious, it stresses me. I am an artist and I will go on being one for the rest of my life.» On representation she was blunt: «The thing I have avoided is being cast in something because I am a person of colour. I want to be cast for my abilities, my track record.» She said she wants to create more opportunities for Latinos.

She described working with Cameron as an education: «His storytelling spoke to me when I was seven.» Of the directors she has worked with, Steven Spielberg among them, she said they all possess «an intrinsic level of inclusivity». She also acted in «Absence of Eden», directed by her husband Marco Perego.

Directing remains a postponed but specific plan. «I want to become a director, but first I want to be a mother to my three children and a wife», she said. With her sisters she has already chosen a book: it tells the story of an African-American couple in the post-war years and of a woman who does not know whether her husband is gay or straight. «I have never seen these themes told through the eyes of people of colour. If nobody else does it, I would like to be the director.»

At the end of the meeting she signed autographs, one of them on a Dominican Republic flag, and stayed for photographs with the audience.