In his Cannes 2022 dispatch, Jonathan Romney wrote “Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO is a flamboyant, visionary work: its execution—including drone shots set to blazing red filters—and wayward, fragmented narrative showed an energy shared by that little else at the festival. Corny but true: the wildest, youngest film in the lineup was made by an 84-year-old director up for anything.”

With EO making its U.S. premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, we sat down with Skolimowski over Zoom to discuss his radical reimagining of Bresson, which follows a pure-hearted donkey set adrift in a cruel world. Though the filmmaker—known for classics like Walkover, Deep End, Moonlighting, and The Shout, among others—wasn’t able to attend this year’s festival in person, he was happy to field our many questions about his latest, a powerfully empathetic work of striking beauty and visual imagination.