For me there is a situation
that is very difficult to separate from cinema,
I think it's been like that since I was a kid,
with the first film I saw that was 'Superman'
I am talking about amazement.
And amazement is something that can be
easily worked on in fantasy,
but in a real story like this or 'The Impossible',
can be achieved because they are stories where the characters
see how their lives turn upside down, a 180-degree turn,
in a second.
And that moment interested me a lot,
and from there, how to work on the story.
I think it has to do with that, with that feeling I always have.
That feeling that I always have associated with cinema
of amazement, of fascination, of a sense of wonder,
of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Well, Pablo Vierci's book shocked me.
It's a reading that shocked me.
I remember I couldn't stop reading it.
I went to sleep late at night after being reading it
and the next morning, when I opened my eyes,
the first thing I did was pick up the book and keep reading.
It had a lot of impact on me because at the time I was preparing
'The Impossible' and it helped me a lot to understand
what was going through the head
of someone in a survival situation.
Just as 'Viven / Alive', which was the book known so far about
the tragedy, is a book that was written a year later,
They were very young and hadn't had time to process what happened.
And Vierci's book was written 36 years later
and is a more introspective book, which raises more questions.
I wasn't so much interested in the facts
as in the experience of being there with them.
For me it was an exercise of getting into the shoes
of the characters and empathizing with them
to understand the decisions they made.
So I was rather looking for images,
sensations, gestures, than facts.
The facts had already been told several times.
Two films had been made, two documentaries
and ten books had been written.
Then I already knew the story
and, even when we were working on the script,
if there was a sequence that I had seen in a movie
or read it in a book, I rejected it,
because it was material that I already knew.
In that sense, everything preconceived,
everything we prepared at home,
was less interesting when you sat down to talk to the survivors
and they told you the details
or even on set with the actors experimenting with them.
As Pablo Vierci says in the book,
“It's not so much what happened, but what happened TO them.”
What I have tried in this film is
that those moments that I enjoyed most in 'The Impossible'
or in 'A Monster Calls', where I saw the actors
and I no longer knew if they were actin,
if it was really happening in front of the camera,
this way of blurring the line between performance
and what happens in front of the camera,
that amazed me so much that I've tried
to take it to the maximum here.
David Lean was blamed his whole life
for making spectacle films and it took many years for him
to really be vindicated.
They were character films
where the landscape and the epic combined very well
with the intimacy and psychology of the characters.
And it's something that I have always, for myself,
more or less consciously, done in movies.
The landscape always reflects the psychology of the characters.
I came from shooting 'The Lord of the Rings',
which is very evident when you read Tolkien's literature,
but it has always been in the movies.
You have a toolbox, and I have always used it
trying to achieve the maximum possible expressiveness.
It's cinema. In fact, today there is a lot of cinema that looks like TV,
because it doesn't use the real expressive possibilities of cinema.
When I've worked in Hollywood, on 'The Lord of the Rings'
or 'Jurassic World', the process is very measured.
These are very large productions,
any mismatch means a lot of money.
I had a feeling of needing freedom, to try, to experiment,
and here I took it to the maximum.
We would start shooting a sequence
and it would start in a place in the script
and we never knew where it was going to take us to.
Then, in the end, in the editing, you end up going back to the script,
but if you can take two or three things that give truth to the film,
then the final result is much richer.
That's why I've signed as a screenwriter.
During rehearsals, with the actors, we rehearsed and rewrote.
And then in the editing we kept rewriting
and in the end you are a scriptwriter,
because you are the person who has been there shaping the story
from the beginning to the end.
Yes, I wanted to and I also felt very comfortable
shooting in Spanish because, somehow,
being close to the actors and being able to speak quickly,
to tell them something... Many times I'm with an actor
in front of the camera and I'm next to him,
I'm whispering things to him,
I'm telling things.
That sense of immediacy that filming has it's sometimes
more complicated in English,
and for me, because the work of the actors is the part that I enjoy
the most when I make a film, it was very important to shoot again
in Spanish. I had been trying to make this film for a long time.
It wasn't planned for us to spend ten years developing this story,
but it was impossible to find the financing before.
It wasn't until Netflix came along that this film was possible.
There was no studio in the world that wanted to finance
a film with such a budget in Spanish
with unknown Uruguayan actors.
Netflix didn't care
and then they didn't have a single intervention
during the shooting or the editing.
It's just that I think that's the key, to be able to choose.
I was lucky that the first film I made was a success
and I could choose what I wanted to make next,
which was 'The Impossible'
and it was a success and that gave me the freedom
to choose the next one.
And then, I worked in Hollywood
and it was a way first, of trying that part of the job,
before 'Jurassic World' I had never worked in Hollywood
and being able to do it with Spielberg was very attractive.
and hopefully this film will go well enough
that the next film I make
will be the film I want to make, the way I want to make it.
The film world has that thing
that it's always had in the classic Hollywood studios
of the director making one film for you and one film for the studio.
I think that right now we live in a moment in which
the audiovisual industry is undergoing a lot of transformation,
the way in which it is consumed,
which attracts a lot of attention and we are at the center of the debate,
but throughout history this debate
has happened over and over again
when the television and then the video appeared,
and the public has always ended up returning to the theaters,
because there are no better ways to enjoy a film,
and this film is a very clear case, than in the theatres
and accompanied by unknown people...
there is no comparable experience
when it comes to watching a film
other than the cinematographic one.
It´s a very special film for those who worked on it.
71SSIFF | Kafea - Pedágio
08:45
71SSIFF | Kafea - Beyond the Fog
13:02
71SSIFF | Kafea - Grace
21:08
71SSIFF | Kafea - El juicio
02:46
71SSIFF | Kafea - Les rayons gamma
22:18
71SSIFF | Kafea - The New Boy
18:51
71SSIFF | Kafea - Los delincuentes
24:55
71SSIFF | Kafea - Los impactados
16:26
71SSIFF | Kafea - We Are the Hollow Men
13:25
71SSIFF | Kafea - Bauryna salu
18:28
71SSIFF | Kafea - Contadores
15:35
71SSIFF | Kafea - Single Light
17:24
71SSIFF | Kafea - Alemania
19:30
71SSIFF | Kafea - Camping du lac
15:16
71SSIFF | Kafea - Short Story
26:58
71SSIFF | Kafea - Aunque es de noche
21:22