Without a doubt one of the biggest challenges that commercial theaters currently face is the challenge of attracting an audience that today disperses its attention among a wide variety of screens.. Two ideas inspire the implementation of this initiative that we want to present to you.. The first, that of highlighting the projection room, not only as the best environment to enjoy the cinema spectacle, but as a space for coexistence and meeting, a place to share the experience of watching stories with other viewers. Cinema in company is much better enjoyed. The other line of inspiration is to bring to the general public those proposals that, for your risk, They have fewer opportunities to reach the general public. This is how the Cine Club Lys was born last Monday, an initiative of the Lys cinemas in Valencia in which every week viewers will be able to enjoy one of these premieres, accompanied in the presentation and a subsequent discussion with the public by renowned critics and journalists. In addition to the presentations, Cine Club Lys will feature directors and professionals from the world of cinema at the screenings who will accompany their work. How to participate? You just have to visit the page cineclublys.com and sign up. You are already a member of the club!
In the first session this Monday Cine Club Lys had a special guest. Born in Mallorca, but Valencian by adoption, how he presents himself, director Daniel Monzón has a long career full of successes. Tapes like Cell 211 o The boy They show a mature director who knows how to tell stories and has a firm and solid narrative.. Monzón arrived at the Cine Club Lys to present and chat with the public on the occasion of the premiere of his latest work, Yucatan, a crazy comedy in which two scammers, Lucas and Clayderman (played by Luis Tosar and the Argentine Rodrigo de la Serna) They try to make a big hit while traveling on a big cruise ship, while they fight for Verónica's love (Stephanie Cayo). The three will star in a series of crazy situations in a space where a sample of our society meets.. Mix of comedy and musical, Yucatan achieved very good acceptance among viewers. We had been warned: Daniel likes to talk about his cinema. A lot. They were right.
With your last job, Yucatan, You inaugurate the new screening program in this new cinema club that the Lys cinemas in Valencia have set up. How do you feel about this initiative??
Well look, I am a film director thanks to a film club. When I was seven years old, my grandmother took me to a movie club that was in the Finca Roja, which was a neighborhood association., in a bass, with wooden scissor chairs and a sheet on the wall. They projected a copy, possibly in 16mm., of King Kong, to from 1976 and for me that was an epiphany. I saw King Kong and I fell deeply in love with cinema, I got into that universe, on that island and I tell you I haven't left yet. It is thanks to that cinema club and thanks to that film that I am a film director. Besides, Cinema clubs are usually made by people who love cinema and what they aim to do is show people who love cinema films that are usually difficult to see.. So I love that a cinema like the Lys, a downtown cinema, that has commercial films, Make a bet in this way and want to generate regular membership in a group of a club where every week you have the opportunity to watch a more difficult-to-market film or have the opportunity to chat with the person who made them., I think it's something wonderful.
With respect to Yucatan, your latest feature film, I have read in the production notes that its origin is in an idea that Telecinco Cinema had, one of the producers of the project, I don't know if it's exactly like that.
No, it's not like that. I was longing to do a comedy with Luis Tosar because I know Luis very well and I have a lot of fun with him.. It's someone who even rolling Cell 211, It was such a claustrophobic movie., so distressing, Between takes we laughed a lot because it was almost a necessity to survive in such a hard story.. And Luis is very witty, it's very fun, it's very thuggish. And of course, I like to challenge myself, change gender, change what I've already done and, if I think of Luis, I enjoy putting him in situations that may be new or fresh for him.. So the comedy thing is something that when I premiered in Venice Cell 211, I remember a trip we took from Lido (where the festival happens) to Venice on the vaporetto in which Luis clowned everything he knew and more and that's when the first inkling came to me of “I want to do a comedy.”. a kind of buddy movie international with Luis. So we talked to Jorge [Guerricaechevarria, director's regular screenwriter] about making a con artist comedy. It is true that Javier Ugarte had told me about the element of the cruise ship., who is one of the producers of the film, At that time I worked at Telecinco. He told me a lot that the scenario of a cruise ship could interest me.. I was reluctant about it., but, one day, being in a boat, I saw the magnificence of one of those ships from the sea and said: well, indeed, this is a world. A small or a large mobile universe. Then everything started like a marriage.
I was going to ask you precisely about Tosar. You have already made three films with him and yours must already be like a very intimate thing., very intuitive. how do you work together?
Yeah, Yeah. With Luis, indeed, In all three cases we have started the process very early. In the case of Cell 211 He was the first person I gave the script to., praying that she's interested in the role of Mala Madre because, when I wrote it with Jorge, we only thought about Luis Tosar. And that's why we went so far with the character., because we had Luis in our heads and that gave us wings to do it as it is, so rich, so complex, so special. So when I first sent him the script it was one of the most nerve-wracking moments of my career because I thought: what if he doesn't like it?; What if he says no?? But fortune made it so that within a few hours (It is one of the quickest responses I have received from an actor) He read the script and called me. The first thing I did with Cell was sitting with Luis Tosar at the Comercial café in Madrid around three in the afternoon and until they closed, at one and a half or two, to speak, talk about everything that the character was, of what it could mean, how to characterize it, etc. I was sending him diary books of prisoners that I had and he was offering me different characterizations.. He suggested things like voice registers to me and I thought it was wonderful.. It was a constant feeding. I went to interview prisoners, one of them a homicidal prisoner who gave a lot of meat to the character of Bad Madre because Luis is like a sponge and absorbed everything. Then, con The boy, the same. If the character of Mala Madre is for outsiders, the one of The boy it was inside, obsessive, but with a fine brush, everything as quiet. To write the script I was living with police officers, judicial police, civil guard, all. And specifically there is a type of police in the Strait that is customs surveillance., that actually flies over in a helicopter, who goes on boats and who is like an adventurer. I became friends with several of that body and with Luis we flew over the Strait in a helicopter, we went by speed boat, we lived with these people. In the case of Yucatan He is such a fantastic character., but it's also based on what we discovered. When we board a cruise ship and start talking to the people who work there, We saw that there were two types of people. Some are those who work on cruise ships on a temporary basis., that is to say, They have a project on land, and then there are those who want to live on the boat, That is the cruise meat. Talking to them is where we get what Lucas and Clayderman are., that they are like people who do not want to live in the outside world, what scares them, that overwhelms them, that suffocates them and that they are in a small world where their rules dominate. But this comes from reality. That is to say, Even within a comedy like this we also did field work to extract something human that was behind this character who goes after money like crazy., but what he is most hooked on is the game, of the trap, of adrenaline. With Luis, From the moment I conceive the idea I begin to tell it to them in such a way that, although he is filming other films, You already know what I'm up to and we feed each other.
The most difficult thing in a film of this type is its ensemble quality.. The fact of coordinating all the elements and, in this case, the number of characters so that the set of forces that are at play on the screen is balanced and does not fall on one side or the other. In this sense, What has been your greatest difficulty??
Indeed, I think the most complex thing about the film was that somehow that universe so full of disparate things had a coherence., a homogeneity. And here I was very attached to the cruise scene itself because a cruise ship has this impossible mix of nationalities., of beings, of interpretive schools. The same way you see a man in a thong dancing the conga, Next door you have a millionaire who is on his high terrace standing had a glass of champagne. So the same scenario helped to amalgamate this circus, this kind of bustling characters. It is true that this was the most complex part of the film and if in the end a universe of coherence or homogeneity is obtained, it is what I can be most proud of.. Yo, being of Valencian adoption, I adore, I deeply admire Berlanga. Berlanga is someone who starts circuses with huge casts and wonderful grotesqueries.. In a comedy the protagonists are very important, but what gives it richness are the secondary ones. There are Robert Altman movies, He's a guy that I also really like., that also plays with that corality. Crossed lives It is one of his best known films, and its title already defines it from Carver's stories. But it has Nashville, A wedding day, movies in which there is a bustle of characters. I mean that, in part, the charm of Yucatan this, of course, in the plot, but, above all, in the characters. The structure is very risky. In the first part of the film we get to know the characters little by little., and there is even a couple who are going to be cheated on in Casablanca who, if we went to a traditional narrative, A spectator would think that they were going to be very protagonists, and are abandoned after twenty minutes by other characters. It's like a relay race of characters, but, in the end, you end up knowing practically everyone and, besides, inside the nonsense, everyone has a certain truth.
Tell us about the rest of the cast..
I love that a cast is as fresh as possible. At least I love it as a spectator when I see good actors, but I didn't know them before. In the case of Luis Tosar it is very well known, but this film also refreshes his image a lot. Rodrigo de la Serna is an extraordinary actor, He is one of the best Argentine actors, but it is not very well known in Spain either.. I wanted the character played by Stephanie Cayo to have that glamour from a classic hollywood movie. Stephanie is of Peruvian birth, but his greatest triumph is a Netflix series in Mexico called Crow Club, very well known there. She had worked in Colombia, lives in Los Angeles, He has an Italian father, It is very complete: has been singing since she was little, dance everything, and she is a very good actress. He studied at the Actors Studio in New York and does comedy as well as drama.. I saw her in this series and spoke with her, I sent him the script and he came to Spain. We were playing around with some sequences and I realized it was a diamond in the rough.. In fact, after finishing Yucatan(which is his first movie), He has already filmed an American independent production with Paul Sorvino and has offers for more films. There is another actress who is very bright, Alicia Fernandez. I had seen it in a café-theater and had not done anything in cinema. The two brothers-in-law, one is better known because he is a monologist, Agustin Jimenez, and the fattest, Jorge Asín, I saw him on an Aragonese regional television program doing a sketch called 'El maño mayor' and I found it enormously funny.. But above all I saw that it gave the character a lot of humanity., gives a lot of truth to the role.
Tell us about Joan Pera, the actor who plays Antonio, the old baker.
The film has many surprises and one of them is the structure. At first the character of Joan Pera appears as a secondary character.. It is not seen that it will have the prominence that it ends up having. And little by little it takes over the role of the film. I think this structure is risky because you are not making it clear from the beginning who the protagonist is., but you earn it as you go. What I wanted was, evidently, a magnificent actor who could talk face to face with Tosar and Rodrigo. I reviewed several possibilities to play Antonio, but I wanted someone who was as unknown as possible. Someone who was like your neighbor or someone you passed on the street. Someone who gave a lot of tenderness, with great closeness and that you suffered for him. Joan Pera is an actor who is well known in Catalonia and who has been doing theater his entire life.. He was interpreting The strange couple like ten uninterrupted years with brutal success. But outside of Catalonia nothing is known about him.. Many reviews are saying: He deserves the Goya for revelation actor. And it makes me a little embarrassed, because a man of 71 years with the career he has and so on, but it is true that he is a revelation actor because he is not known. I was afraid that being a theater actor I wouldn't know how to measure acting., but not at all. There is one thing that will ring a bell: He is Woody Allen's voice actor. So, He is a man who has a familiarity with cinema. I am very proud of his work because I think it is the soul of the film. It's us.
There are films that seek to reflect reality, but I think your film tries, and I think it's intentional (you will tell me if it is like that or not) make a kind of tribute to popular culture. The fact of the boat is a very popular event today, how we spent the holidays. I think there is an intentional look towards that..
Yeah, indeed. Jorge and I didn't start writing this story until we got on a cruise.. And it was precisely that trip on the seven-day Mediterranean cruise that set the tone for us., the keys, many of the characters. Somehow, What a cruise offers to a passenger is what an entertainment movie offers to a viewer., which is a bubble made for your evasion. In that sense, It is true that we wanted this film to only exist on a screen, Just as a cruise ship is an artificial entertainment space that can only exist there.. The first moment is shock. But, what is this? What Fellinian world comes to me? But then there is something like Stockholm syndrome and as the days go by you end up imbibing it., you are part of that space. This was the intention we had with Yucatan, what, as it progresses, you are immersed in that universe so full of such antithetical proposals, because it is true that there are times when there is a lot of fun and, suddenly, begins to take a dramatic turn, and suddenly you go to another scene that is film noir, almost hard, but then it turns out that everything is a game of appearances. When I was young the movies I liked the most were the ones I couldn't foresee, those that offered me constant surprise. And I think that's what a movie should always propose.: that entertained me, to tell me things, but that would mean something original. I think that, in that sense, Yucatanhe gets it.
There is a Godard film that also takes place on one of these ocean liners. (Socialism film), but in that case it is approached in a documentary tone and what you see seems horrible to you because that is something of people who do not know what they are doing and who have lost their reason.. What I wanted to tell you is that, just as there the look is caustic, what we see seems decadent to us, In your film you pay tribute to that world and to those characters who have something decadent about them, It's true, but you also treat them with affection.
Yeah, Yeah, It's not a caustic look. It's a look, if you like, ironic in some cases, but loving. It's just that condescension is something I don't like.. Enter a universe, if it seems despicable to you, to tell a story from condescension, “I am smarter than everything I am portraying”, so, bueno, Why do you start portraying this?? What I like the most is to immerse myself. In the same way that when I went into prison I tried to reflect all the experiences and feelings that I had on those walks through the prisons and so on.. Or when I was in the Straits. I was on the boats, in the helicopters, in the marijuana fields, etc. It's a different way. There is an irony, there is a playful spirit, there is no celebration, but, For example, musical shows are done with dignity. The portrait of the ship and that universe is not vitriolic, this is true. But what does have a certain vitriol is the impossible conjunction of beings that are there. There are people in the audience who told me that they have traveled on cruise ships and that they are portraying what they have experienced.. That makes me more amused, not people who don't recognize that space.
The Lys cinema club was born with the idea of bringing less popular or less conventional cinema to the public., so to speak. You cinema, however, It's more classic, we could say. I would ask you to defend yourself in that sense..
Yeah, Of course. I will tell you. Look, there is nothing more modern than the classics. You think what could be more modern than Ciudadano Kane. The other day I saw a trailer for the movie, at last, Netflix premiered Orson Wells's Venice in 1974, The other side of the wind. It is a film that, how do you know, I was lost, that was shot (con [Peter] Bogdanovich, with John Huston and such), that for an economic reason the Shah of Persia kept it and that the negative was finally released and now they have traced it back. What I received was: this man, in it 74, It's modern! Or look Fraud, the last film Wells made. I tell you Wells, but I can tell you Luis Buñuel, I can tell you Alfred Hitchcock. Watch any of the films of these three that I mentioned at random and there is nothing more avant-garde, more irreverent, deeper than any filmmaker today, the best, how can they be Tarantino, Fincher, Del Toro, Cuaron, do not give up or pay homage to these classics. For me, classic is not a pejorative adjective., but quite the opposite. If someone tells me what it means is that the cinema you make is classic, I feel honored. ¡Bueno!, is that you have cited Godard. Godard is a classic. In his way of dynamiting everything, it's a classic. Because classic is something that never goes out of style.. I remember Tony Scott, when he took that one out The craving, o Alan Parker, It was a very colorful type of cinema and so on., but you watch a type of movies, the wall, that in their day were very modern, and they are out of fashion. Ken Rusell, which was also like the most modern thing and now you see it and it's laughable. Like the stick selfie, that from now on we will say, do you remember this? Like using exaggerated zoom, there are things that quickly go out of fashion.
In your cinema you have touched fantastic cinema, prison cinema, the policeman, now the comedy mixed with the musical. What do you have left to play and what would you like to address??
The truth is that I don't think about it: and now I'm going to do...!
Maybe it's not your idea, but in the end it is built...
It is being built, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. It is possible, It's true. It is in an unconscious way. I don't consider: I have not touched this genre, I'm going to touch it. The thing is, I like all kinds of movies., of all genres. So I can greatly enjoy a Tarkovsky film and a Peter Jackson gore from his early days.. I say this to mention two things that seem very antithetical to me.. What does have to happen to me is that I have to be passionate about the story I am going to tell.. There is a time when I am like fallow, with several stories in my head, and I think about them, I aftertaste them, until I just decided on one because it's going to take three years of my life to make a film., from the moment I conceive it until I get it brand new. So I must be very sure that during those three years I will be passionate because there is a lot of fight you have to do for her.. And you also have to know that you are going to have to inspire many people on that path to accompany you.: to the technical team, to the actors and, hopefully finally, to the spectators. In any case, if that doesn't happen, por lo menos tú tienes que tener claro por qué la has hecho y por qué te apasiona. For example, a movie like Yucatan, yo sabía que frente a Cell 211o The boy,a mucha gente le iba a chocar. Alguien me dijo al principio: tú sabes que esto es un salto mortal sin red, ¿no? Y yo pensé, but, because? Es una película de la que estoy perfectamente orgulloso, que sé por qué la he hecho, que me divierte, y es una más en una trayectoria que creo que es bastante coherente, que es hacer aquello que disfruto tratando de hacer disfrutar a los demás.
Algo importante en la película es el espacio donde suceden las cosas. Ese crucero que es un protagonista más. ¿Cuál es la mayor dificultad a la hora de rodar en un barco real como este?
Yeah, yo quería sacarle glamour a ese barco, entonces cuando tienes un decorado que no puedes mover paredes, que no puedes trabajar con la libertad de un decorado, que tienes el pie forzado de que hay muchos pasajeros y solo tienes un tiempo muy limitado para rodar en cada uno de los sitios, que los pasillos son estrechos y, besides, quieres hacer una película en scope, en pantalla grande, y que de una sensación como de película de lujo, realmente es de una complejidad muy grande. Y además estás al albur de la climatología, estás navegando y si tienes tormenta el barco se mueve, si el sol no sale el mar está matado, tienes los cielos grises, o las tomas aéreas porque el barco está en movimiento y tienes que hacer movimientos muy suaves con unos armatostes enormes. O sea que esa fluidez, esa ligereza que te pide una comedia, digamos que estás chocando constantemente contra los elementos. So, sí que es cierto que, dentro del diseño que hicimos mi director artístico y mi director de fotografía, hay algunos elementos que los decidimos sacar del barco (no te diré cuáles –risas-) para que la experiencia resultara más golosa porque había algunos espacios que iban en contra de esta búsqueda del glamour.
Quería preguntarte, to finish, sobre el reto de abordar la dificultad del ritmo en una comedia como esta.
Above all, si uno se lo plantea, uno cuando ha contado un chiste y lo va contando a distintas personas va aprendiendo cuál es el tempo idóneo para que el chiste tenga gracia. Pero claro, cuando tú haces cine, no tienes a ese espectador todavía y tienes que confiar mucho en tu intuición y en cómo te hizo gracia la primera vez, porque es un chiste que se repite varias veces a lo largo del proceso y que te puede dejar de hacer gracia. Entonces encontrar el ritmo en comedia es una cosa como de una alquimia muy complicada. Y más en una película como esta que está jugando con muchos sentimientos, porque es una película que juega con el humor, pero también juega con el drama. Por cierto, como en las películas clásicas porque hay una película que está considerada una comedia que es una obra maestra de la historia del cine que se llama The apartment de Billy Wilder. Tú ves esa película, que es unan comedia, y es un drama existencial profundo. Digamos que, si no es suficientemente difícil el que una película sea cómica, aquí en Yucatanhay algo más, and it is that, encima, muchas veces estoy rompiendo la sensación lúdica del espectador con secuencias de drama. Pero me parecía que eran interesantes para la definición de los personajes y para contar lo que al final es la película, que es como una fábula moral de estas que a mí me encantaban cuando era niño de Frank Capra. Vive como quieras, o How beautiful it is to liveo Caballero sin espada, que además te habían contado algo, ¿no?
Una especie de inocencia mágica.
Exactamente, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Con todo lo que quieras, pero eran efectivas. Que te tocaban el corazón, caray. Ya sabes (laughter)
Próxima entrega del Cine Club Lys: Todos lo saben, de Asghar Farhadi.
