Biography

French-Brazilian film director, producer, screenwriter and composer Maximianno Cobra was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At an early age, he discovered his passion for cinema through Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis (1927), beginning a lifelong fascination with German Expressionism. During his formative years, he devoted considerable attention to the major works of film history, and his understanding of visual storytelling was further shaped by Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). It was, however, his fascination with Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) that first introduced him to the extraordinary world of Shakespeare.

In Maximianno Cobra’s own words: "Discovering Shakespeare was an existential upheaval. He had the same impact on me as Bach’s music."

Beginning his professional career as an orchestral conductor, Cobra came to understand what he describes as the "essential value of the text as the epicentre from which a performing artist builds the spiritual and physical life of either a musical score or a character." During his early professional years, alongside his work as a performer and conductor, he attended acting workshops and conferences devoted to Stanislavski’s system, notably with director Sergio Brito and theatre practitioner Augusto Boal, founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed. From these experiences he learnt the necessity of reaching into and exploring "the dark and unknown regions of human nature; to allow every subliminal moment to emerge from within the processes of storytelling and narrative construction." This experience became fundamental to his understanding of how a director approaches the telling of a story.

At the age of seventeen, Maximianno Cobra received a grant to study conducting and composition in Europe at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Alongside his musical studies, he began to develop more systematically his interest in directing, first awakened during adolescence by Sergio Brito’s stage production of King Lear. His own first production as a director was likewise Shakespeare’s King Lear, staged in both English and French for a Parisian theatre company.

"Directing Shakespeare or conducting Bach is, each and every time, a symbolic rebirth. If we are willing to open our minds and hearts, they have the ability to transform both performing artists and audiences into phoenixes."

Following his graduation, Cobra toured France with the Hungarian State Opera and the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1993, Maximianno Cobra was engaged as producer and audiovisual director of a concert series for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture’s public television channel, featuring the Brazilian Philharmonic and the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra under his direction. This was followed by a European television and cable-network production, Ode to Joy: Beethoven - Symphony No. 9, Op. 125, which quickly became a bestseller. His experience of directing for the camera, rather than exclusively for the stage and concert platform, increasingly crystallised his ambitions as a filmmaker and led to the first draft of his screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

"I had a long and profound relationship with the play and, above all, with its timeless themes: the challenge of social hypocrisy, disillusion and annihilation against the poetics of friendship, love and beauty. Not to mention an early fascination, since I was a teenager, with Ancient Greece and classical Greek theatre."

In 1999, Cobra’s parallel interests in musical interpretation, recording and emerging audiovisual technologies led him to found the Europa Philharmonia Orchestra and Choir, conceived as a European ensemble bringing together leading orchestral musicians and choral singers for studio recordings and international projects making extensive use of new digital and audiovisual technologies. As its Music Director, Cobra developed an artistic approach in which musical interpretation and technological innovation were conceived not as separate disciplines, but as complementary elements of the recording process.

While continuing to tour Europe conducting the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, Cobra further developed his work as a stage director and, in particular, his engagement with Shakespeare, bringing to the stage productions of Richard III, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Macbeth. During this period, he also earned his PhD in musicology and music history from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) and was subsequently appointed Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Network Audiovisual Project. Under his artistic leadership, the project developed stage productions, audiobooks, documentaries and films. For his work with the organisation, Cobra received seven ICA Awards and five IAG Recording Awards.

In 2011, Maximianno Cobra directed the television series The Mahler-Klimt Project: A Gustav Mahler Centennial Celebration, followed in 2012 by the short film Sense: A Small Tribute to Federico Fellini. The latter enabled him to pay tribute not only to one of the great directors in the history of cinema, but also to an artist whose work had profoundly influenced his own passion for filmmaking from an early age.

"Maestro Fellini, like any true master, understood ‘a little more’ about the meaning of life than any of us."

In 2017, after more than a decade of work on his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Maximianno Cobra entered pre-production on Misanthropos or The Life of Timon of Athens. Following more than a year of auditions, during which he personally cast every actor, he assembled the film’s creative and technical teams and remained closely involved in its production design, costumes and musical score. After two years of rehearsals, the project entered post-production.

For Cobra, post-production represents not simply the technical completion of a film, but a continuation of the directing process itself. Under his close artistic supervision, Misanthropos continues to be developed frame by frame, with particular attention to image composition and treatment, dramatic rhythm, editing and the precise relationship between performance and cinematic space. In parallel, its extensively developed soundtrack integrates original music, sound design, voices, atmospheres and acoustic detail as integral elements of the film’s dramatic architecture.

This final stage of the creative process reflects Maximianno Cobra’s vision of cinema as a synthesis of the visual, theatrical and musical arts, in which each element is progressively refined until image, performance, rhythm and sound form a single coherent cinematic expression.
- IMDb mini biography by: Ellis J. Wells