Jeff Goldblum happily poses with his co-stars Tye Sheridan and Hannah Gross, and director Rick Alverson at the photo call for their film The Mountain held during the 2018 Venice Film Festival at Sala Casino on Thursday (August 30) in Venice, Italy.
The story follows the young Andy (Sheridan), who is employed by Dr Wallace Fiennes (Goldblum) as a photographer in his asylum as he attempts to advocate the lobotomy procedure. The movie also stars Hannah as Susan, a young women brought to Fiennes by her father to be lobotomised.
“I think Rick is a genius and this is a brilliant movie and poetical,” Jeff expressed at the press conference. “I’m an idiot so I love to know what you are talking about here. For me, it’s so rich, but I do love the ideas of the particularly human – but even more particularly American – utopian dream in its misguided elements, as Arthur Miller wrote about in Death of a Salesman, when a sculpture is too ambitious for notoriety, attention, glamour – empty glamour – and deluded fantasy, in too much proportion.”
“We saw how that can go very bad. In this movie, one of the most barbaric mistakes, the lobotomy, is depicted, and the American quick fix and narcissistic need for attention and assembly line solutions of an unnatural, inorganic kind… not factual kind,” Jeff added. “As it overlaps with the victims of deluded fantasy in the realm of spiritual aspirations, and in the particularly American variation of that, as it’s cropped up so abundantly since its inception. I’m provoked and inflamed by all of that, I think they’re important subjects to me and to us, I dare say. In the coming days I’d love to talk and hear more about those things.”
