On the playground of the school. They are playing Ivanhoe or Zorro or The Crimson Pirate.
Later, they played the same games, but now as actor and director. The patient was the Actor and the psychoanalyst, the Director. Well, in a way… Or maybe it was the other way round?
Rambling through some classical Hollywood movies they liked… Picnic or Murder by Contract.
Remembering scenes from If… by Lindsay Anderson. Doing variations on Liliom or a Fred Astaire picture or even a silent film. And, en passant, winking at Andy Warhol. Someone called My Life as an Actor: “Woody Allen meets The Artist.”
The budget of My Life as an Actor was so low you could call it a no-budget film. Shooting and editing took more than three years. With, of course, a lot of interruptions. My co-director is Emile Poppe. He is also acting in the film; the cast is all friends I convinced to participate. Anyway: My Life as an Actor is a family affair, like my previous films: Casta Diva, Naughty Boys, Pink Ulysses.
I am Dr. Schönberger, a psychoanalyst. Some of my patients are boring, I must admit. But I like Florin-the- Actor. Because with him therapy is just: chatting. Chatting as a kind of therapy?
Adrian Mirza, the Actor, is doing something like a long audition – he is on screen from the first to the last minute. And as an actor he regrets that the ‘old genre films’ are not made anymore. An actor of today for films of yesterday.
This is a film about our love for cinema, a result of our practice of cinephilia. Our love especially for classical Hollywood cinema moved us to celebrate its glamour and intensity and to play our own version of the game Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Eric de Kuyper