Veteran film festival chief Marco Müller took over the reins of Taormina in April, giving him a short window to pull together the ongoing 70th edition . After a week that has included the world premiere of Saint Clare starring Bella Thorne, the Italian premiere of Warner Bros/Universal’s Twisters and Baltasar Kormakur’s Touch from Focus, as well as a high-profile visit from Sharon Stone , he still appears to be on the fence about returning next year.
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“The festival harvest is like the weather, so sometimes you just have to shake the tree and the beautiful fruits come into your hands,” Müller told Deadline. “This year, with the strike in Hollywood and the fact that I signed my contract around April 12, the fact that both Warner Bros and Universal went for Taormina for me is a good starting point for the future — if ever I would have a future here.”
He did allow that anniversary editions “are always a headache because people are always expecting it to be very special.”
Regarding that future, Müller, whose Taormina contract is up in late August, said, “I don’t know, I’m quite happy because I started producing again.” Based in China for the past four years, Müller is active in working with local titles and also is the head of the Film Art Research Center at Shanghai University.
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He calls coming to Taormina “really a test for me” but laments that there’s still “a lot to do here.” Because of the success of the second season of The White Lotus , which filmed locally, tourists have flooded the hilltop Sicilian town, and “Taormina has become an expensive place.”
And that has affected audience turnout, Müller contends.
“I don’t believe in audience as an abstract entity,” he says. “You really have to be very clear about what you do and decide who your target audience is. For me, the target audience of a festival has to be mainly young people, and here the average spectator is 40-45, which is a problem.”
Getting students and the younger crowd to come to Taormina from neighboring cities has been challenging given the cost of gas, parking and restaurants, Müller says. “In the past, there was huge camping site outside one of the main city gates, it was a different story,” he sighs.
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Müller explains that during his tenure at the Locarno Film Festival, the size of the screen in the Piazza Grande was doubled and that “for many years we had an average audience of 6,000-7,000 people per screening.”
He adds: “I was jealous of Taormina when I was at Locarno because I always told myself, ‘If only I had the Teatro Antico’ — it’s the ideal place.” And yet, he feels, “Here it would take a long time to find a way to get the young viewers back.”
What about a date change so that the festival doesn’t fall smack in the middle of the high tourist season? Müller says he’s been talking to studio execs about what dates would match promotional needs and that there have been suggestions to move Taormina back before the 4th of July holiday in the States.
A positive this year has been the selection of eight Sicilian films that had their world premieres here. Explains Müller: “I thought, ‘I’ll try to understand what I can do with Italian cinema and then eventually I really found out that there are so many new voices.’ … Luckily, when you show Sicilian films, you have an audience.”
Either way, he says he’ll make a decision about re-upping at the end of August.
Going back to production “is the kind of excitement that I need without having to shoulder the responsibility of a gigantic machine as a successful Taormina festival would be,” he says.
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