Julien Temple at the Rome Film Festival

Source: Fondazione Cinema per Roma / Festa del Cinema di Roma 2025

Julien Temple

Julian Temple, the UK filmmaker renowned for his films about the figures from London’s 1970s punk scene, uncooperative subjects such as The Sex Pistols (The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury) , The Clash’s Joe Strummer (The Future Is Unwritten) and Pogues’ legend Shane McGowan (Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds), told a masterclass audience at the Rome Film Festival this month why he turned his camera on Italian industrial heir, photographer, art collector and philanthropist Johnny Pigozzi, I Am Curious Johnny.

Temple’s feature documentary, which made its world premiere at the festival, centres on the life and times of Pigozzi. Born in France, he inherited a vast fortune from his father, the founder of Italian automobile brand Simca – and is now an international citizen, splitting his time between Los Angeles, Rome, Paris, the South of France and his own private island in Panama. 

Pigozzii was an early investor in numerous AI startups. I Am Curious Johnny uses one such application. Made two years ago, the film includes segments where Pigozzi talks to an avatar of his father, who died when he was 12, leaving him “part of his fortune”. Pigozzi asks his father’s avatar questions about what he thinks of his achievements, whether he is disappointed with him for not being an industrialist and other emotional questions.

“It was made when the beginning of the implications of AI were becoming clearer,” Temple explained. While there are good things and bad things about AI, “to talk in cliches”, the filmmaker said he wouldn’t rule it out as a tool.

“There is a sense that you can play AI as a creative instrument right now, but the problem with that is to how to retain human control.”

Temple acknowledged he enjoyed using it for I Am Curious Johnny, partly because it was the first time, to his knowledge, anyone had deployed this particular AI trick of talking to a long-deceased relative on an iPad.

In the film, Pigozzi makes the tongue-in-cheek claim to have invented the selfie in the 1970s, always travelling with a film camera and taking pictures of himself with his friends, the richest and most famous stars from Hollywood and rock to socialites, media billionaires and tech bros.

The film has a litany of talking head contributions collated from Zoom calls during the pandemic and images of Pigozzi with famous friends from the world of film, music and fashion, including Michael Douglas, Mick Jagger, Diane Von Furstenberg and Andy Warhol.

 I Am Curious Johnny is produced by Jeremy Thomas via his UK outfit Recorded Picture Company, Temple’s Nitrate Film and P.J. van Sandwijk at Storyteller Productions.

Bowie lyrics

Over Temple’s 40-year career, he has directed features including Running Out Of Luck starring Mick Jagger, Absolute Beginners with David Bowie and Sade and Earth Girls Are Easy, a film blending musical, science fiction, and comedy genres. Then there’s music videos for The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Kinks.

During the lively Rome conversation, Temple also revealed he had been an early-AI form adopter and had shared it with David Bowie, a regular collaborator with Temple. 

“I can’t type and I can’t read my own handwriting, so speech recognition is my thing,” Temple said.

When voice recognition first came out in the late 1980s, Temple spent a year teaching it his voice by reading Lewis Carroll’s ’Alice In Wonderland’.

“I read until it started to recognise my voice, but then it made the most incredible mistakes, rhyming one word, replacing another for completely different words. Some of them were brilliant,” he said. “I gave it to Bowie so a lot of his lyrics in the 1990s were saying something really boring, but the speech recognition made it a mad rhyme you’d never think of.” 

The filmmaker admitted those Bowie lyrics might not have been the artist’s best, but they were fun.

Temple concluded by musing as to why the film he is most proud of in his storied career will be his next.

“You have to be proudest of the next one that you haven’t done,” he said. “If you can try and do something you haven’t done before, try and convince yourself you really don’t know how to do it each time, so that you’re solving the problem from square one with each film, I like that.”

 

 

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