Friday, 22 July 2016 21:43

Mika to the GFF jurors: “Be enfant terrible”

It was a French girl to give the go-ahead to the debate with Mika in Sala Truffaut today at the Giffoni Film Festival. Touched to tears and thrilled to bits at the same time, she curiously asked the Lebanese singer, who is naturalized British, where the inspirations for his songs come from. “I write about everything that I don’t know – he said – because it’s much more interesting writing about something you don’t know”. As for love songs, instead, Mika seems to see them from a different perspective: “I also think that any kind of love songs are even better when you’re not in love. Every kind of love song is an imaginary world. You write about what you wish you had”.

Songs may vary, of course, but the creative process remains the same and it is related, as Mika suggested, to something everyone should always hold dear: the “enfant terrible”, that follows an artist wherever he is, since the very beginning of his creative stream. “You write songs in your underwear and you sing with the toothbrush in your hand – affirmed Mika – however, suddenly the process you had in your bedroom becomes something public and you have to figure out how to preserve your progress. You just get on with it and it’s totally connected with energy. It’s not about youth. You know you’re old when you try to be young. And it’s not about young energy, it’s just about being enfant terrible. You throw yourself in a kind of unconsciousness”.

The jurors didn’t drop the right to free expression from their questions, that Mika answered inviting them to feel always free to be the person they really are. Especially when it comes to be famous, “I took a conscious decision to present a side of me to the world”, he stated. This side of his character was confirmed to the jurors to be as true and sensitive as they had expected: “You should present a version who enables you to be as transparent as possible, to be as free as possible, to marry who you want to marry, to be the person who you want to be, to make the music you want to make”, Mika exhorted. However, meeting with success and being a hit with the public have surely the other side of the coin. Embracing the young jurors with his positive approach to life, he revealed that “living off the stage enables me to leave the dangerous part of the stage on the stage and not in my real life”.

Last but not the least, Mika didn’t underestimate the power of learning from people surrounding him: “People that changed my life are teachers and my mum is part of those people who changed my life”. Visibly excited and grateful for the affection showed by the jurors, Mika received the GFF Best Talent Award before leaving the Cittadella del Cinema.

MORE NEWS