Storm closes all New York City flights. This situation forces Marcos to stay one night at Alan's house., the friend of a friend of hers to whom she turns. Marcos is Spanish. Alan is American. Alone in the apartment, collected from the strong storm that hits the streets and even though they do not know each other, This context invites Marcos and Alan to share their intimacy. Alan is a man of rather conservative ideas. Has a stable partner, the affable Tristan, and an apparently rigid vision of relationships and the commitment they require.. Marcos is at the opposite end. With a more casual character, For Marcos, monogamy is a self-imposed impossibility whose benefits he cannot get anyone to explain to him.. Forced lockdown due to the storm that has broken out, A slip between the two will trigger the possibility of a relationship and with it, the ideal environment to share intimate confessions about love, couple relationships, Sex, cultural differences or, even, your future aspirations. Definitely, two apparently opposing visions of life that will soon show their cracks.
This is the argument of A stormy night, premiere in the feature film by Catalan director David Moragas that will have the honor of closing this particular edition of the DA' festival in Barcelona. As we mentioned in this other article, compared to other festivals that have been forced to close their programming due to the situation that most cultural events have been faced with due to the current Covid-19 pandemic., The DA' took a path that can serve as a reference for the future, screening your program through the Filmin platform. With David we talked about this experience, of the film industry, from his movie, of course, and of many, many more things. In my humble opinion, an interesting interview in which he speaks to us with a very unusual honesty and for which we thank him. It's worth reading from cover to cover..
A stormy night will premiere on the Filmin platform next Saturday 9/5. GERARDO LEON
The first thing I wanted to ask you, although I suppose it makes you very excited, is that you are going to close this year's DA', also with a first work. How do you feel about it??
Well look, I am very happy, especially because the DA' Barcelona festival has been a very important reference festival for me. I trained in Barcelona, I studied Audiovisual Communication, and attending the DA' was like part of my training while I was learning about cinema. In the DA' I discovered film references that later formed the film I made, and being able to close this festival has an emotional and symbolic value that is above what I would have ever imagined.. I am very happy.
The DA' goes online this year due to this coronavirus issue and, leaving aside other experiences such as the Atlántida Film (which is also worn by those from Filmin), How do you rate this experience?? What do you find good or what do you find less good about this??
I value it as I have been evaluating the entire process of making a film that, already, It is a bit outside of traditional industrial protocols. I do it openly, with great enthusiasm and nerves, with great anticipation to see what the result will be. For now (The festival has been going on for a few days now.), The first impression I have is that many more people are watching the films and in a much more decentralized way. In this country we have a problem, and these festivals, sadly and without intending to generalize, They are usually very centralized in large cities, and one of the first conclusions I come to is that, taking the festival to the cloud, This universe of film festivals is democratized a little. Many more people have access and, as a result (I'm seeing it every day, I'm feeling it on the networks), a lot more people are watching the movies and that's good.
Don't you stay, despite that, some hurt for not having seen the movie on a big screen with an audience?
Yeah, It saddens me to a certain extent.. On the one hand, I'm looking forward to seeing what the audience's reaction will be in a movie theater full of people.. On the other, how is one first work y, as i said, It was conceived a little outside of traditional industrial protocols, I don't dislike this condition too much..
The movie, according to accounts in the presentation that can be seen on Filmin, you did it in ten days of filming. How to make a movie in ten days? (laughter) What was the production process like??
(laughter) Well look, The production process is conditioned by the fact that, as first work and as a new filmmaker, you don't have all the resources you would like to have. The film starts from a summer in which I decide to write the script. Later, I share the script with a group of classmates and ask them, would you like to shoot this movie? We don't have the means to do it., But I promise you that it will be a shoot that will not exhaust us physically nor will it exhaust us emotionally., and where we are going to eat very well. (laughter) So, here we also had to find a way to combine a shoot with the fact that we all had, then, jobs or ways to earn money because, Of course, then, no one was getting paid to work [in the movie]. For that reason, we decided to shoot in just ten days, between which we left a weekend of vacation so that everyone could come home and rest. We shot eight hours every day. a little in the morning, we all ate together in a very beautiful garden, and in the afternoon we continued riding a little more. The way to do it is to start from a very strategic economy of resources. What we did was a very exhaustive preparation for the shoot together with the production director., Marta Cruañas, and the director of photography, Alfonso Herrera, in which we considered everything we had to shoot, when we had to shoot it, and how we wanted to do it to save the maximum amount of time. The filming was very comfortable in that sense., That is to say, we never had the feeling that we were running out of time or that we were shooting longer than normal.. Simply, We conspired from the beginning so that we could do it in this number of days. This was a limitation and, like any limitation, goes through commitments. Probably, If I had more time and money I would have shot the film in a different way.. Limitations in no case are an advantage. It's not a better movie because it has limitations.. But, at the moment, We knew how to adapt to the needs and resources we had.
I understand, From what you say and from watching the movie that, somehow, You already projected these conditions from the script itself, when considering the story. And I also wanted to ask you if there is anything that fell by the wayside because of it..
Yeah, of course. All these limitations are already foreseen in the conception of the script.. Regarding what was left by the way, not really. Actually, nothing stayed by the way because, as we proposed it that way from the beginning... It's not that I wrote a script, I couldn't find a way to finance it and, then, said, “Okay, well, we are going to sacrifice all this to be able to film it.”. No, From the beginning we start from these limitations and, as i said, we conspire in favor of being able to make the film with a certain comfort.
These things interest me because I think that people who are starting to make films, how is your case, may find your experiences very illustrative, and that also reveal to the viewer things they don't know about how a film is made..
I think it is important that we talk about these notions in the industry., why, but, What happens is that you find filmmakers with wonderful careers, who make movies, but no one talks about this issue, which is a little bittersweet. Talking about money is a taboo topic that people don't like very much., and it is actually vitally important, especially for new filmmakers. What also happens is that filmmaking sometimes comes from privileges that no one talks about either.. And I think it's also important precisely for this reason., what happens when you are a film student? In my case I studied Audiovisual Communication. Then, I applied for a scholarship to study a master's degree. I studied three years in the United States and, when finished, He had two diplomas that said he was a film director., but no one was giving me jobs to direct films. I think this is a very important notion and one that, as you say, we should talk more.
How do you get in an independent production like yours, that someone like Antonio Chavarrías (The daughter of a thief, Petra, The scared tit), enter the project?
Well, in this sense, I am going to defend something that is done a lot in film schools, which is exploring the universe of short films.. When you are a student, making short films seems like an impasse between what you want to do and what you have to do at the moment. and you think, "But I don't want to make short films.", “What I want to do is my hour and a half film to tell my plots.” In this sense, I have to emphasize that, The fact of having made a couple of shorts before making the feature was of vital importance to establish subsequent contact with the production company., with Oberon Media. I think that film students become a little obsessed with this idea that short films have to go to festivals and that, through them, This is how they are going to get financing for their long films.. In my case, The short films were a very important letter of introduction to establish a professional bond with Oberon. Later, when I consider the possibility of making this feature film, Oberon Media already knew my short films and my skills as a filmmaker. They followed the filmmaking process from the beginning, they read the script, They really liked the proposal, and at all times they looked for ways to help me. The time came to make the film and I told them, “I'm going to shoot this, this movie is going to happen, I'm going to do it". And this is another learning that I have done along the way and that is that, sometimes, We wait as directors for someone to put us on the train of a production, when in reality what the world is waiting for is for you to start moving the train and hit the first car. Once you have started the train, more people join. I want to add that I start from privileges that have to do with a sociocultural context that allows me to do this. This is the base, a sociocultural condition sufficiently privileged to be able to invest fifteen days in writing a script, for a start. And then, the initial investment is mine.
I'm glad you talked about that because it's something that isn't talked about much when it comes to film.. It seems that it is more about protecting or hiding that issue.
It's true.
Y, curiously, That creates a confrontation with the viewer because that state of privilege is hidden and the public rebels against it in some way., because he realizes that it is like that, and in the end it turns out to be counterproductive. I don't know what you think.
You are absolutely right. and I think that, as I told you, It is a topic that we must talk about calmly without it becoming a taboo or an uncomfortable question.. This happened to me studying film. Many times, followed the trajectory of new filmmakers and, when I finally learned the lesson that what many of these filmmakers had done was not wait for anyone to give them permission and start the train machinery and make their own films, the next question was, "OK, but, What was the sociocultural and socioeconomic context that allowed them to turn on the train??"And these questions always ended up frustrating and irritating me.", somehow. In my case, I grew up in a small rural town (laughter), of rural Catalonia, very small. It was a town of one thousand three hundred inhabitants.. There was a very important lack of references, in this sense. There were no film directors. You grow up a little with the illusion that filmmaking is possible and that the medium is completely democratized.. Although new technologies and new forms of distribution, like this notion that we were talking about now about festivals online, They are a huge step in this matter of democratizing cinema, art is not yet completely democratized, and I think it is very important to be aware of this notion, talk about it.
Entering your movie now, I have seen in the production notes and in the introduction you do for the festival, that you present it as a romantic comedy. You refer to tapes like Noting Hill o Runaway Bride, but to me, when I saw her, It reminded me more of the films of Ira Sachs or Noah Baumbach. How do you value it??
I value it very positively. My origin references are these romantic comedies that I grew up with and that I am so passionate about., how are they Noting Hill o Runaway Bride o You have an email. What happens is that these first references go through a very extensive training cycle that has to do with studying film., For example. After these cycles, Billy Wilder appears, appears Hong Sang-Soo, Lubitsch appears and, later, Noah Baumbach and the movement appear of course mumblecore In the United States. Perhaps Ira Sachs cannot be included in this genre., but I do believe that his cinema has inherited aspects of this philosophy of making low-budget films., but infinitely personal. This is how I finished making a movie that, for me, still starting from the romantic comedy, but that has inevitably mutated my personal perspective and my way of seeing the world.
Although, from what you have told me and what I assumed from your film, I already know that you are going in another direction, talking about romantic comedy, is highly questioned by the social clichés that it sometimes proposes. But, on the other hand, a genre cinema is what it is, clichés. That is to say, two who love each other or don't love each other. How do you see this controversy??
I think that questioning the romantic comedy sometimes stems from a certain elitism that is associated with seeing the genre as a reduction of clichés., of elements. In this sense, My way of seeing it starts from doing the complete opposite., to appropriate this genre and praise it as a popular genre that has a very large reach. For me it is an essential tool to propose narratives that escape the normative., What is a love story between two men like?, but leaving, as i said, of a genre that is so popular and that is so transcendent. It is a universal genre, there have been romantic comedies forever, from Shakespeare, from the theater.
You have decided to star in the movie, embodying one of the characters. What led you to this decision?? Was it a budgetary issue?? Was it a conscious decision? And how has the experience been?? I don't know your shorts and I don't know if you've addressed yourself before.
It starts a little from a confluence of all these reasons that you mentioned.. On the one hand, It is a practical matter. In my case, I made the shorts and the film when I was in New York. For me, no one does a better job of interpretation than an interpreter., someone who has been trained as such. At the time, We raised the question of inviting some of my Catalan actor friends, spanish, to the United States to carry out the project, but we didn't have the budget to do it. On the other hand, the experience of making castings In the United States with Spanish actors it had always been very frustrating because it did not satisfy my ability to find someone who could play the role. Because the way I have done castings It's just that I have always worked with friends of mine or with people who I thought were special to play the role.. Starting from all these questions, In the end I decided to act in my shorts and also in the long one. The professional team that worked on the feature are the same friends with whom I had made the shorts.. So, It came about as a bit of a very casual decision in which the cinematographer, Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, told me, bueno, you are going to do this, ¿no? We made the decision like this, in a choral way, and I decided to do it because, besides, I like.
I would like you to tell us a little about the rest of the casting.
Of course! My partner in the film is Jacob Perkins, who is a friend of mine that I met in the United States. I had seen him performing theater, but I had never done any feature film project. Even so, I thought that, precisely because of this theatrical tradition, could play the role. At the time of filming it was wonderful because it provided a way of understanding the staging and the plot., the role and protocol, very different from what I was used to.
Does that coexistence bring something to you as an actor??
Yeah, of course. It taught me a lot. I think acting work is very symbiotic and you learn from everyone around you.. Even the director of photography. How it is shooting you or how it is telling you that you should be on the plane, is conditioning your notion of an actor.
Apart from the argument, your film is a kind of map of a series of demands. Is it something that was in your initial intention? Or is it something that came up for you??
I really wanted to put on the table a collection of questions that I had asked myself throughout my twenty-seven years.. I understand that the next film I make will be done in less than twenty-seven years. (laughter) So I won't have the ambition to explore as many themes as I have done in this first feature film.. I think that, precisely because I have had so many things I want to tell for so long., In the end, the film emerges as a speech that unfolds over the course of a night.. In this sense, There were other films that had inspired me a lot like Richard Linklater's love trilogy, in which he uses his films to explore such beautiful themes as commitment, marriage, fidelity, through an hour and a half of footage.
Your film is included, you say it yourself, within a type of identity cinema. I see that this cinema is making its way into festivals, but I don't know if it hits the theaters that much. How do you assess the situation?
It is a cinema that is easily associated with a niche, and it is a minority niche. For this issue, There is apparently less public that wants to consume it. This is a problem for two reasons.. On the one hand, because it is a misconception. It's not true. At first, It seems that niche films are only going to be consumed by that niche., but in reality these films can be consumed by the entire public, the mass public. That is a question that must be questioned.. On the other hand, and here there is a contradiction, when you present a film associated with a niche, It's true, the niche is going to consume this movie more. It is a very complex equation and one in which I live in constant dialogue with myself.. In the end, For me, the most comfortable thing is to let the professional economists in the sector decide how the film is classified.. When I write a movie, I write the movie that I would like to see and that I think my classmates would like to see. And then, in retrospect, I let the world decide what is the natural way to watch this movie. Probably, in the future, the platforms of streaming, as we said, with this democratizing issue, What they will allow is for the niche to reach more directly the target audience that is being appealed to.. But I prefer to stay away from this concern and make films the way I like to make them..
The film tells us a little about how two strangers can establish a certain intimacy in a short period of time.. Was that what you were looking for? The expression of that intimacy?
Yeah, I wanted to explore this intimacy. I wasn't so interested in whether it was a productive intimacy with a constructive resolution, I was precisely interested in the fissure between these two ways of seeing the world.. For me it's not a movie about two people coming to a mutual agreement on how they see the world.. For me it is a reflection on how to appreciate the small differences. Small cracks in discourse make us richer and, in the background, happier. Richer with happiness, not of economic value.
Well, you almost screwed up the next question I had prepared because I was going to ask you about that.. The two characters discuss between monogamy-fidelity or the impossibility of it, which is a very recurring theme, It's true, in romantic comedy, the question of commitment or not. It seems to me that the characters end up questioning each other. Was that an initial intention or was it something you discovered while writing the story??
It was the initial intention, but it started from a way of understanding the relationships that, inevitably, It changes as I learn and as I grow.. The initial intention was for them to reach a mutual disagreement, but I really want to continue making films to add more layers of questioning to this notion.
Was it more the question than the answer, so?
Correct.
In your film you talk very explicitly about sex between your characters.. I was speaking not long ago with the producer and director Luis Miñarro about his latest film, and we commented that there seemed to be a need to talk explicitly about sex again., no holds barred, as had happened at the end of the seventies. Do you see it like that? Was that something you wanted to talk about?? Was it a demand? Was it a provocation towards the viewer?
I started from the fact that throughout my life I have been watching films with heteronormative sexual-affective relationships in which sex had always been a completely normalized issue.. They talked about sex, sex was seen explicitly, era, as i say, a normalized question. So much so that, in conversations in which this type of content is based on heteronormativity, of conversations, Those jokes are perfectly natural and normal.. So, As I live I end up establishing my own order of things in which hetero is no longer a norm. For example, when I'm with a group of gay friends and we talk about sex. For me, the issues of sex that are questioned in the film and how they are questioned are not at all explicit or out of the ordinary.. For me they are part of how I understand sex and how I talk about sex.. When I start writing films and I start making shorts and I put these questions on the table and I realize that they still represent a deviation from the norm for many people, I decided to praise this issue and I did so in the feature film. There is a subtle exaltation of these reflections and these themes. For me it's a matter of pushing the viewer's comfort zone to gently invite questioning about what is normal and what is not normal.. In a movie like Noting Hill, For example (which I review many times, because I like it a lot) there are highly sexually charged scenes, high erotic content, but they never question. Somehow, It is understood that they fall within the canon of romantic love. I want to do the same with my gay characters..
Another element is cultural differences.. The film presents a clash of two completely different visions of life and, even, in the most formal treatment. There's that first scene in which the characters get together and Marcos is going to give Alan a kiss as a greeting., and he doesn't understand what he wants. I understand that it is very deliberate because it is in the movie. I wanted you to tell us about those differences..
Bueno, I have experienced those differences first-hand because I was living in the United States for three years., and I wanted to put them in the film because for me they fell within the same question of questioning the normative. When I was in the United States, I always had the feeling that their culture imposed itself a little strongly on all the others, and it seemed interesting to me to ridicule this notion a little. For me it was also a way to champion my own cultural identity., which is a question that I had never considered until I traveled to the United States. I had never felt particularly proud of my cultural identity., but traveling I realized the importance of claiming this diversity. I think there was room for this speech in the film and that's why I included it..
Some time ago I read a chronicle by Elvira Lindo in which she talked about her experience in New York for a time, and she also wondered about this cultural shock that it can cause for us. She described a very isolated or, even, impenetrable to the other. How do you see it from your experience?? Because there is something about this in your movie, I enter the affective nature of your character and the rigidity of the other party..
On the one hand, I will say that, due to the media globalization that we are experiencing, We have a false illusion that American culture is closer to ours than it really is.. So, I am surprised when I have the opportunity to live there for a while and discover that, In fact, The differences are much more plausible and are much more explicit than what, in appearance, we understand. The second part of the answer has to do with this notion, which I think is present in the film, of an affective intelligence that we have in European countries (above all, in European countries bordering the Mediterranean) that I did not find in the United States and that always represented a barrier that caused me a lot of discomfort. I call it that, affective intelligence, which is a variation of what one might call emotional intelligence, but it is that, sometimes, emotional intelligence tends to be intellectualized in a way that does not play in favor of my speech. I speak of an affective intelligence that has more to do with knowing how to be physically and in the presence of another body., and how we interact and relate to that body.
While you were talking I was thinking about that, that the difference is in the treatment with the presence of the other, between putting up a barrier or trying to get closer.
Correct.
Your film is also a tribute to cinema. There is an explicit reference to Agnès Varda and her film Cleo 5 a 7. I wanted you to tell us where your interest lay., both in it and in that tribute to cinema in general.
For me, film was my way of escaping my own notion of what was normative.. The moment I start watching movies, I am beginning to become aware of the diversity in which we live. It is a type of diversity that one does not recognize by reading a newspaper or watching the news on television.. Cinema provides a type of diversity that has a connection linked almost more to emotions, to spirituality, but also to the representation of bodies, of cultures, etc. In this first movie, I wanted to pay a little homage to this notion of how films can open up the world to us and can establish an invitation to question our own notions about life.. One way to do this was to fill the film with small film references that have inspired the film., but it has also inspired my way of seeing the world. I invite the viewer to look at the paintings that adorn Alan's apartment.. There are small film references in those paintings. Also the question of film references allowed me to introduce another line of discourse that I thought was interesting to question., which is the historical perspective with cinema. At the beginning of the film a reference is made to Annie Hall the Woody Allen, and at the end a reference is made to Cleo de 5 a 7 by Agnes Varda. They are not arbitrary references, nor are they raised at the moment in which they are raised arbitrarily. For me, this final reference seemed like a very interesting way to finish giving meaning to Alan's character.. Besides, as a curious fact, Agnès Varda passed away just before filming began and again it seemed like a nice way to pay tribute to her.
Now to finish and talking about cinema, I wanted to ask you a personal curiosity. And it is that, talking to young directors like you, that you are from the generation of the nineties and surroundings, I find it curious that there is a great interest in making films, however, there is talk all the time (although I don't know to what extent it is true) of a loss of spectators as the ages decrease. How do you explain this? How is there so much interest in making films and, however, the spectator seems to leave the room or the cinema as a form of expression?
The consumption of images, according to my notion of the world, is ascending. The only thing that is changing is the way we consume these images. For me it is vitally important that, as filmmakers, let's question this conception and find a way to adapt to this change. For me, nothing replaces the experience of watching a movie on a cinema screen., but, on the other hand, just like what is happening in this context of crisis, I think it would be indulgent on my part not to be aware or aware of this radical change in the way images are consumed..
