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“I finished high school at 17 and since you had to be 21 to enter the Official Film School (EOC), I told my father, who was a military inspector, that I wanted to study Fine Arts. That didn’t seem like a serious career to him. My older brother was already in Architecture and I decided to follow in his footsteps. What I never did was forget about the movies. The script is like the plan that is made of a house and its realization is like the subsequent direction of the work ”.
Biography
“Many of my films are autobiographical”. His friends or situations lived by him have been a source of inspiration. It occurs in the most in Isla bonita, which he starred in, and La línea del cielo, in which the tribulations of Antonio Resines trying to sell his photos in New York were a reflection of his own experience in that city to which he traveled to write a script , looking for funding to shoot it and to learn English.
Censura
“I already suffered experiences of absurd censorship with my first short, Tomorrow comes the president, which I filmed in 16 mm and very amateurish. I was studying Preu and it was so difficult for me to think about the administrative paperwork that I shot it and then asked what procedures had to be followed to legalize the film. I had to submit the script for censorship and they denied it in its entirety, although it was not subversive at all but manners, because Franco appeared in one scene. I never got to teach it ”.
Decor
“I enrolled in the Official Film School (EOC) in 1971. It was the last year in which entrance tests were taken because the Faculty of Information Sciences had already been launched, which succeeded it. There were 18 places per specialty. Some 250 candidates chose Directorate and Decoration, only seven; I was inclined to fill the quota of the latter and since I was already studying Architecture they accepted me. I immediately became friends with fellow directors, such as Imanol Uribe and Miguel Ángel Díez (Luces de bohemia), and I saw them shoot, but except for those days I have never received directing classes ”.
Style
“My film training comes from the Nouvelle Vague. First, by François Truffaut. Then there is a time that Jean-Luc Godard enthuses me because of the freedom he had, but after May ’68 he began to explode. Also Alain Tanner in Switzerland, who made a similar cinema. Then Rohmer appears, which is perhaps my greatest reference. That was the transparent camera, the complete opposite of the expressionism of Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. I am educated in architecture at the time of Rationalism, of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. In the least is more. In simplifying ”.
Watermarks
“When I have done them almost nobody has noticed them. In Tigres de papel, for example, there is a nine-minute shot, with the camera that does not stop moving in a kind of very slow semicircular travelin, while the characters are interchanged ”.
Generational
From the progressives of Tigres de papel to the modern ones who experience new forms of romantic relationships in Polyamory for beginners, passing through the late-night hippies of Bajar al moro, he has shown his sensitivity and capacity for observation to reflect the social changes of each moment. “I am impressed by the everyday. It is as if it had an antenna to capture what is beginning to take shape before it is fully set. You sense it and you say: Wow, here is a breeding ground ”.
Children
He is separated from the producer Beatriz de la Gándara, we got married a few days before starting the filming of La mano negra. They have two children, Pablo, 33, to whom I have transmitted my vocation for art, is a painter, and Lucía, 21, who is studying Chemistry at the university.
Interpreter
“I have always been attracted to being an actor. I started doing it at Film School, in the internship films of my colleagues who were studying Directing. Then I appeared at the end of Tigres de papel for imitating Truffaut, who did it at the end of The 400 Blows (1959), and Hitchcock, of course. I keep doing it, in Polyamory for beginners you can see me with the group that practices tai chi in the park ”. The surprise was that he was nominated for the Goya as Revelation Actor for Isla Bonita (2015). “I am very excited because this is like a passport for the future”he joked.
Jargon
‘Polyamory’ (Love relationship with more than one person).
‘Trieja’ (When there are three).
‘Unicorn’ (Bisexual girl with a straight partner).
‘Cowboy’ (monogamous who seeks exclusive relationship with polyamorous).
‘Vertex’ (It is at the same time with two or more people, but separately).
Klaus Kinski
Werner Herzog’s fetish actor turned the already problematic filming of The Dragon Knight (1985), the most expensive blockbuster made in Spain so far, into hell, with a budget that soared to 300 million pesetas and a cast that included Miguel Bosé, in the role of extraterrestrial, Harvey Keitel and Fernando Rey. The project ended at the box office with a debt of 50 million, which he was able to pay thanks to the success of La vida Alegre, his next film. In 1991 Kinski died and he dedicated an anthological obituary to him in the newspaper El País, in which he made a hilarious description of the brutal behavior of the interpreter, who tried to rape the protagonist and broke Fernando Rey’s rib, and concluded: “Many people believed that he was crazy. I do not believe it that way. He was a spoiled, spoiled and rude child. Had he been an older person, he could only qualify as a son of a bitch. But now he has died and has left us. Let us rest in peace. ”
Lottery
He has directed, among others, announcements of the Niño draw, ICO Bonds, Carrefour (with Blanca Portillo), Laiker, Imagenio (with the soccer player Raúl), Nintendo Brain Training (with Amparo Baró and Javier Cámara) and Línea Directa. “As a result of a commercial I made to promote Spanish cinema, I received offers to advertise, which I thought were good and help financially.”
Madrid
“I have done very few comedies, and Madrid even less”. He is not without reason. He is one of our most cosmopolitan filmmakers. He has shot in New York (The Sky Line), Mexico (Miss Caribbean), London (The Butterfly Effect), Cuba (Havana Quartet) and Paris and Budapest (The Picasso Band). Even in some of his projects filmed in Spain, he has done so with international casts, alternating between Spanish and English: The Dragon Knight, Al sur de Granada and Los años barbaros. “The Madrid comedy comes from the fact that when Tigres de papel premiered at the San Sebastian Festival, everyone started laughing, I imagine that because they identified with what they saw, although to those of us who had made it it never seemed to be a comedy. And yes, it was shot in Madrid, but because it was much cheaper ”.
Novice
His list of discoveries for the big screen, seduced by the appeal of new faces, reaches Quim Àvila, in Polyamory for beginners, and includes Carmen Maura, Verónica Sánchez, Daniel Guzmán and Verónica Forqué, “To whom I gave his first leading role.”
Oil
“Painting is my first love; architecture my official wife, and cinema, my lover, my eternal traveling companion “, declared when his secret passion for the plastic arts was made public when he exhibited his work at the Kreisler Gallery in Madrid, in 2009. “I always liked drawing and when I was 14 years old I wanted to dedicate myself to comics. I especially liked the American ones, like Flash Gordon, The Masked Man or Mandrake, the Magician. The desire to tell stories was already there. I studied oil technique with Carmela Santamaría as a director, but mine is a vacation hobby “. With La banda Picasso (2012) he paid tribute to the genius from Malaga, whom he admires.
Producer
“I started producing my films and after Tigres de papel (1977) and What is a girl like you doing in a place like this? (1978), I did something unusual, produce another, Fernando Trueba and his Ópera prima (1980). We were neighbors, we laughed a lot and I had written with him La mano negra (1980), whose financing was delayed, which left me free time to do so. When I already had a more stable production company, more or less after Alegre ma non troppo (1994), I produced regularly with Beatriz de la Gándara, then my wife ”. This year 2021 the couple has received the EGEDA Gold Medal in recognition of their work in this field. They were after the first feature films by Mariano Barroso (My soul brother), Daniel Calparsoro (Jump into the void), Azucena Rodríguez (Between Reds), Icíar Bollaín (Hello, are you alone?), Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Bardem and David Menkes (More than love, frenzy) and Daniela Féjerman and Inés París (My mother likes women).
Fifteen
“With those years I discovered my vocation. I was in the fifth year of high school. I sneaked into the school cinema forum, which was for the elderly, and saw Truffaut’s 400 Blows, with a protagonist, Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was my age and to whom things similar to me happened. He let me play that cinema so different from the westerns and musicals that I saw and that I liked so much. I had something that you felt you could do, contrary to what happened to me, for example, with one of Hitchcock’s films, which I loved, but it did not occur to me that it was within my power to do something similar. I became a repipi child, who read specialized magazines, especially Film Ideal, and went alone to the cinema because no friend wanted to accompany me. Two years later, when I was at Preu, I directed my first short film ”.
Recurrent
Deception and lies are recurring themes in his films. “It’s something that I don’t realize. In any case, comedy demands it. The tricks of the impostor, who says what is not true, offer many possibilities to create conflicts, plots and comic moments ”.
Sound
I believe that Tigres de papel was the first film to be shot in its entirety with direct sound, and also one of the first made when the censorship had disappeared, which allowed the dialogues to be colloquial. “Before, the only taco the on-screen censors tolerated was ‘heck.’ Since then I have always filmed with two cameras at the same time so that the same surrounding noise can be heard in the shot / reverse shot, which then avoids surprises when riding. This also gives more freedom to the actors, who do not have to be aware of saving the raccord. I like that the technique helps the interpreters, and not the other way around ”.
TV
“As I had absolute freedom in my first experience in the medium, the series Today’s girls, I was encouraged and repeated with Ay, Señor, Señor !, El pacto and others.”
Town planning
At the end of his studies in Architecture, he worked for several years as a municipal architect in the Madrid town of Villa del Prado. “Among other works, I also did a pair of seven-story towers in Alcalá de Henares, of which I am very proud. It was great that before they turned off the main road they could see each other passing by on the way to Barcelona ”.
Shoe
One of his most memorable gags was when, in La vida joyful, Antonio Resines threw out of his car what he believed was a shoe forgotten by his lover, but that in fact belonged to his wife, who when going to get out of the vehicle looked for him without explain why he couldn’t find it.
This article appears published in the issue of PHOTOGRAMS for May 2021.
PHOTOGRAMS
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