alain elkann interviews
Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn

THE IDEA IS THE START OF EVERYTHING. Anton Corbijn is a Dutch interdisciplinary artist. Born in 1955, the celebrated portrait photographer has produced some of the most powerful pop culture imagery of the 21st century. He is also a video maker and film director,...

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Pietro Valsecchi

Pietro Valsecchi

CAPTURING EMOTIONS. Pietro Valsecchi is an Italian film and television producer who founded the production company Taodue with Camilla Nesbitt.  In 1995, he won the David di Donatello for Best Producer for his film Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero). In 2016, he won the...

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Gilles Bensimon

Gilles Bensimon

PHOTOGRAPHING THE GIRLS. Gilles Bensimon is a French fashion photographer and the former International Creative Director of ELLE magazine.I was in London with the famous photographer Gilles Bensimon on a special day, because it was and it wasn’t his birthday. He was...

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Jimmy Robert

Jimmy Robert

CONSTRUCTING A SELF THROUGH ART. Jimmy Robert is a visual artist who places the question of the body, racialised, queer, at the centre of his work. Born in 1975 in Guadeloupe, he grew up in France before studying at Goldsmiths College in London and the Rijksakademie...

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Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai

DOCUMENTING OUR DISPLACEMENT. The filmmaker Amos Gitai was born in Israel in 1950 where his father Munio Gitai Weintraub was a prominent Bauhaus architect and his mother Efratia Margalit an intellectual, a storyteller and a teacher. Amos trained as an architect in...

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Clarissa Ward

Clarissa Ward

A MOTHER TELLING STORIES OF WAR. Clarissa Ward is a British-American television journalist. She is currently chief international correspondent for CNN. She was with CBS News, based in London, and before her CBS News position, Ward was a Moscow-based news correspondent...

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Marco Balich

Marco Balich

THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION. Marco Balich is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Balich Wonder Studio. Born in 1962, initially he studied to be a lawyer, but in 1989 Balich organised the extraordinary Pink Floyd concert on a floating stage in his...

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Diana Widmaier-Picasso

Diana Widmaier-Picasso

PICASSO THE MAGUS. Diana Widmaier-Picasso was born in 1974 and is an art historian, curator, and specialist in modern art. The maternal granddaughter of Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, she is the daughter of Maya Widmaier-Picasso. Diana holds master’s degrees...

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Miles Greenberg

Miles Greenberg

Flesh is my medium.  Miles Greenberg is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with...

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Roberto Cicutto

Roberto Cicutto

AN INCREDIBLE SUCCESS. Roberto Cicutto was appointed President of La Biennale di Venezia on February 2020, overseeing the city’s prestigious art and architecture biennials as well as the film, dance, theatre and music festivals. Cicutto is a native Venetian and a film...

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Jean Todt

Jean Todt

SAFETY FIRST. Jean Todt is a French motor racing executive and former rally co-driver. He was Peugeot Talbot Sport’s director and then Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 team principal, before being appointed CEO of Ferrari from 2004 to 2008. From 2009 to 2021 he served as...

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Salvatore Nastasi

Salvatore Nastasi

GUARDIAN OF AN IMMENSE HERITAGE. Salvatore Nastasi is Secretary General of the Italian Ministry of Culture. He has been at what used to be called the Ministry for Cultural Property and Activities since 2000, with a brief interruption when he was Deputy Secretary...

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Marina Valensise

Marina Valensise

THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLASSICAL LEGACY. The writer Marina Valensise was recently appointed CEO of the Italian National Institute of Ancient Drama (Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico, INDA) which manages the ancient Greek Theatre of Syracuse. Valensise was formerly...

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Andy Harries

Andy Harries

PASSION PROJECTS. Andy Harries produces television series including The Crown and Outlander. He is chief executive and co-founder of LEFT BANK Pictures, a multi-award winning independent production company launched in 2007 to make high-end film and television for the...

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Anthony McCarten

Anthony McCarten

IN THE MERCIFUL SHADOWS. Anthony McCarten is a novelist, playwright, journalist, television writer and filmmaker, best known for writing The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Two Popes. His play The Collaboration, with Paul Bettany and...

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Riccardo Scamarcio

Riccardo Scamarcio

IN CONTACT. Riccardo Scamarcio is an award winning Italian film actor and producer who has been working since the early 2000s. I met up with him in London, a few days after he and his co-star Alba Rohrwacher hosted the showing of the movie Three Floors (Tre Piani) at...

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Fabio Finotti

Fabio Finotti

A DESTINATION POINT IN NEW YORK. I am at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in the office of the Director, Professor Fabio Finotti, a distinguished Italianist. He is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of...

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Kim Jones

Kim Jones

ON THE ROAD WITH DIOR. British menswear designer Kim Jones is a graduate of Central St Martins. He has worked with high profile fashion brands including Dunhill, Louis Vuitton, Mulberry, Alexander McQueen, Hugo Boss, Iceberg, Topman and Uniqlo. In 2018 he joined Dior...

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Maurice Lévy

Maurice Lévy

THE POWER OF ONE. Maurice Lévy is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe, the French multinational advertising and public relations company that has overtaken all other ad holding companies to become the world’s No.1 agency group in terms of market...

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David Puttnam

David Puttnam

A GREAT COMMUNICATOR. David Puttnam is a British film producer, educator, and environmentalist who recently retired as a member of the House of Lords, where he served on the Labour Party benches for 24 years. His many celebrated film productions include Midnight...

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Laurent Le Bon

Laurent Le Bon

RE-IMAGINING A LANDMARK. Laurent Le Bon is the recently appointed president of the Centre Pompidou, the very important Paris institution focused on modern and contemporary art. He was previously the president of Musée Picasso-Paris.This interview is available to...

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Martin Bethenod

Martin Bethenod

A VERY ECLECTIC PERSON IN THE WORLD OF ART. Martin Bethenod was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection until October 1st, 2021. Director of Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana from 2010 to 2020, he previously held positions...

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Giordano Bruno Guerri

Giordano Bruno Guerri

GUARDIAN OF THE PATRIMONY OF A SUPERMAN. Giordano Bruno Guerri is an Italian writer, journalist, and historian. He is an important scholar of twentieth-century Italy, in particular of the Fascist period and the relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church. He...

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Pierpaolo Piccioli

Pierpaolo Piccioli

THE ARTISTIC VOICE OF FASHION. Pierpaolo Piccioli is Creative Director of the luxury fashion house Valentino S.p.A. based in Rome. His July 15 2021 couture show at the Venice Biennale of Architecture was acclaimed as being at a new level of meaningful collaboration...

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Lily Cole

Lily Cole

WHO CARES WINS. Lily Cole is a British fashion model and acted in films including The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus of Terry Gilliam. Her recent book Who Cares Wins features interviews with Sir Paul McCartney, Elon Musk and Extinction Rebellion co-founder Professor...

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Giovanna Buzzi

Giovanna Buzzi

HER OWN WOMAN. Giovanna Buzzi is a costume designer and fabricator. She is the owner of SlowCostume workshop for the creation of costumes for the theatre, cinema and television with her partners, Odino Artioli, Silvia Aymonino and Massimo Pieroni. They have done...

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Gabrielle Tana

Gabrielle Tana

MAKING THE DIG. Gabrielle Tana is a British film producer, most recently of “The Dig”, a Netflix January 2021 release in which Ralph Fiennes plays the amateur archaeologist Basil Brown and Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty, whose land he digs on. Tana and her fellow...

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René de Ceccatty

René de Ceccatty

TO BE A WRITER. René de Ceccatty is a writer of numerous novels and biographies. He translates Japanese works, and Italian works such as those of Giacomo Leopardi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia. He has also written biographies of Pasolini, Moravia and Elsa...

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Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore

HOW THE WORLD WE LIVE IN WAS CREATED. The historian, novelist and TV presenter Simon Sebag Montefiore has been reading extensively during lockdown. He recommends some delightful books and offers his perspective on Trump's failed putsch. LISTEN TO THIS INTERVIEW HERE....

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// FEATURED

Money Must Stay in the Family

The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.

// PUBLICATIONS

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