Don’t call Albert Serra’s new film, “Seize moments de ma vie” (“Sixteen Moments of My Life”), a concert film. Premiering out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival, the film documents a one-off performance by screen legend Ingrid Caven at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. “I will never shoot a concert unless I’m involved in the music,” Serra told Variety. 

The band were Molforts, the Catalan musicians who provide Serra’s soundtracks and Caven has been friends with the Spanish director for over fifteen years. Famed for her performances in the sixties and seventies of many European film classics as well as being the muse and frequent collaborator of her sometime husband, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Caven is also a recording artist and Serra requested that they collaborate together with the musicians writing the music sending it over on CDs and Caven improvising over the music. 

“Over the years the musicians and Caven wrote 16 songs, going back and forth. All this process, but they didn’t communicate directly. This is the point. They only communicate through the music itself. They didn’t talk.”

Not so much the director as the MC? “I had all these things in front of me, I could hardly see the stage.” 

This is how Serra also directs his films, such as “Liberté” and “Pacifiction.” “Everything is based on non-communication with the actors. I like when things happen without really working on meanings or on the outcome. Subconscious. Like old school Hollywood, you know, everybody has to do what they have to do, and we don’t need to discuss for hours. This was a similar concept.”

The film continues Serra’s interest in performance. His last film, the documentary “Afternoons of Solitutde,” took as its subject a young and celebrated bullfighter and focused intently on him to the exclusion of everything else. So in “Sixteen Moments,” there are no cut-aways to the audience. “You have genius musicians on stage, and you want me to shoot some idiots watching them? No,” says Serra.

The music is a mixture of autobiography sung in a way that drifts between opera, cabaret and Edith Piaff. At the very beginning we see Caven coughing before taking the stage. “Every performance is kind of life and death, and it’s unique: it’s fatality. Cinema is perfect for that, because cinema has the same logic. One moment of the film has passed, you cannot grab it, it’s passed. The experience of cinema, it’s the logic of live music or live performance. It has passed, and you cannot recover it. It’s very coherent with this fragility of creating musical life. You know that not everything is perfect. Not everything is under control always. And maybe this is part of the motion and the magic.”

Having done a film on bullfighting and a singer, would there be another kind of performance he would like to document?

“No, what would it be?” Serra says; then breaks into a grin. “I will do a musical comedy. This is something that has been a lot of times in my mind. I think I will end up doing it because I like this idea of musical comedy that’s positive. The spirit of something that is light: poetic and positive. Nowadays, with all this reality of the war and these problems and frictions and tensions and whatever, I’d like to make a “Brigadoon” style musical. Maximum happiness. The opposite of what I’ve been doing all of my life.”

He also says that he wished he could’ve directed Maria Callas and Elvis Presley. “Elvis should have done dramatic roles, and with the right director, he would have been an amazing dramatic actor. And another idea I had was to make light comedies with Maria Callas, because she did only very very dramatic stuff with Pasolini. Very static like this opera and this intensity and this mythological stuff and very heavy. Why not make a comedy with her?” 

It might not be boasting. Serra’s films have featured some iconic performances, such as Jean-Pierre Léaud as Louis XIV in “The Death of Louis XIV” and Benoît Magimel in “Pacifiction.” Of the latter, Serra says: “It’s the best performance of his career. Whatever people say: no, this is the best performance. I know it. I’m 100% sure.”

From Wednesday, Serra is back in the editing suite working on his new film “Out of This World” which he hopes to have completed by the end of the year. “It’s 65% done.” 

The film stars Riley Keough and F. Murray Abraham as part of an American delegation traveling to Russia in the context of the Ukraine war. “It’s not a war film, it’s about economics. You’ll see what happens in the film, where it goes at the end. It goes to the best scene of recent cinema. This I can tell you. So you will have to wait until the end.”

That sounds like a headline. “Yes! And the second headline is ‘You will have to wait until the end.’”