It was the year 2012 and the Santander director Elías León Siminiani burst onto the Spanish film scene with an original documentary work. In Map, Siminiani combined reality and artifice on the basis of a plot in which a film director, recently fired from his job at a television network, He travels to India to find himself. Siminiani reproduced his own existential anguish (job loss, a sentimental breakup) in the face of the professional and vital void that was opening on the horizon. More than five years later, and after returning to television (has filmed the documentary miniseries The Asumpta case and is currently embarking on another work about the famous kidnapping of the Alcácer girls.) Siminiani returned to the big screen and the box office this week with another peculiar proposal.
Notes for a heist movie es, as the title says, a sketch, an approximation and, at the same time, a perfectly finished job. We are in the year 2013. The news reports the arrest of a young criminal, from a puddle, and his band, known for the assault on several bank branches using the butrón method. Connoisseurs of the network of sewers and tunnels that extends beneath the surface of Madrid, Flako and his gang drill holes in the basements of several bank offices to get inside and take the money. Fascinated by the history and Spanish black genre cinema of the 50, León Siminiani tries to contact the alleged thief, now in jail, to know its history and make a documentary film. When these things happen, the director's life is turned upside down: his partner has become pregnant and is going to be a father. While, Flako has been a father, in turn, of a son whom he has not seen born. Against all odds, Flako answers the letter that the director sends him, beginning, So, to a long and fruitful artistic collaboration. GERARDO LEON
Map, your previous documentary work and your first feature film, is of the year 2012. What distance do you find between that film and Notes for a heist movie?
Bueno, my first movie, Map, It took me six years to make it and it is a diary film, made in first person where the autobiographical function of the documentary fully entered, and what I intend with this film is to go from a central “I” of the first proposal to a “you” that, in this case, representative of Flako. In fact, starts as a kind of continuation, relay of Map. But it also happened that what I imagined as a film that goes from “I” to “you”, It ends up becoming more of a movie about an “us”, in a film about a relationship and the formation of a friendship.
I was going to ask you precisely about that.. Even if you are not the protagonist, you continue, like in Map, occupying a central plane in history. Where does that need to be present on the screen come from??
Actually, The entire part in which my character appears has a mirror-like relationship with his or with what I cannot film of him., to make up for certain deficiencies. Fatherhood is a central theme of the conversations we had during the three years he was in prison.. The day he was arrested, He was a father for the first time and when I met him I had just found out that I had become pregnant with Ainoa [the director's partner who also appears in the film]. Basically, we were talking about three topics: of robberies, of books, of the book he was writing, and paternity. I was very clear that fatherhood was something that had to be an integral part of the film.. Then, This became more complicated because, in the first instance, I couldn't film him because he was in prison., and then his wife opposed this project and could not film her or their son either.. So, by not having him, neither have his wife nor have his son, but have me, to my girl and my daughter, I introduced all this personal part, to act as a mirror of what I wanted to tell about him.
Where do you find that bond of union between you?, apart from the fact of paternity?
Bueno, basically the bond of paternity is very iron. During the first year that I went to see him we always talked about it. He asked me: have you done another ultrasound?, have you bought him clothes?, have you prepared the room? It was an ongoing thing, an intersection zone. For him it was also an area of great suspicion and guilt for not being able to exercise fatherhood in the first two years of his son's life.. This was something that brought us together a lot.. Then we were also united by the desire to explore the possibility of making a film together.. I found a boy with a wild need for expression, to count, and with enormous energy that, somehow, I was offering him a ride somewhere else., what was telling stories. And well, we made pineapple. It was a very complicit relationship in pursuit of that heist movie and, in the end, also in pursuit of his own novel [about his life] which will be published in January K.O Books. what is called That damn wall and?, somehow, It is an extension of the film.
There is a line in the film in which you state that “documentaries are more real than movies.”. To this, he answers you, “There is only one reality”. I wanted you to tell me what these lines suggest to you regarding the film and your work as a documentary filmmaker..
I think that, after that sentence, dice: actually there is only one, but it depends on who tells it. Essentially, Let's say that the vision of a story depends on who sees it.. On the one hand, there is the contrast between him and me, that we are two completely opposite people. Y, on the other hand, There is the difference between the police officer and him, who have a completely antithetical vision of the events narrated in the film.. I have navigated over five years between those two points of view., that of the policeman and that of the ex-butronero, the ex-robber, and my job as a filmmaker has been to try to find a center, an equidistant place between those two tendencies that basically have to do with exalting him or making him a hero, on the one hand, and on the other hand, judge him and cast a moralizing gaze on him.
It seems that in Spanish cinema there is a certain dazzle with the figure of the common criminal. In fact, There is a phrase that he tells you and that I like that you included because, somehow, With her you both expose yourselves and she says that “rich people are morbid about being close to a thug.”, and vice versa”. How do you resolve this dilemma after having made the film??
Bueno, When he says that phrase he doesn't particularly refer to me because I'm not a cheap guy. (laughter). He speaks in the context of his father, from some customers at his father's bar. What I have wanted is to try to make the deepest and most humanistic approach possible to his figure.. What I felt is that yes, It is true that there is a fascination with the common criminal (and not common), but the truth is that this fascination is based on news headlines. It is very difficult to have access to biographical reality, psychology of a criminal, in this case of a former robber. And what I wanted from the beginning is, somehow, dive under that headline, to know what had led him to do that, where did it come from, What was your context?, what was his biography. In that sense, It's not so much a question of me being morbid as of wanting to know that comes from a fascination with his specific person when I meet him., when I realize that he is a person who has a lot to offer, and that he has a very peculiar life that ends in a very peculiar character.
You send books to prison. From these books choose, among other, a phrase, It seems to me that from the novel The man from Alcatraz, what does it say: "nobody, until a caught, can comprise a prison”. What have you understood after this work??
Bueno, I have learned a lot of things from him. For a start, I have learned his hunger for life and his bestial enthusiasm for things. When we were together he said, “Holy Elias, but when this comes out you'll see, it's going to get messy, “This is going to make a lot of noise”. And I told him: ”not Flako, "This is a very small documentary.". And now, with the promotion, he lives it like this, as, "Do you see how he's getting involved?"?"He has his fantasy and lives it as is.". That fantasy is above reality. It also seems to me that there is something nice to learn there for a person like me., much more skeptical, when not, sometimes, cynical. And as for prison, I have learned things in the sense of having witnessed his confinement and what he has suffered for it. He is a very nervous person, very active, and when he was in isolation module, twenty hours a day locked in a two by three cell, It was very complicated. He has found an escape route in writing. If it hadn't occurred to you to start writing, he probably would have gone crazy.
The film tells the story of Flako, but it is also an exercise in the same process of making a film. Somehow, You tell how the story is put together as you are experiencing things.. Is this something that came to you on the fly or had you proposed it from the first moment??
Bueno, Let's say that I have been investigating the fusion between the result and the creative process for many years and, right now, I tell you about my most personal cinema, It's something I don't even consider anymore., is “part of”. In the initial plan I know that I am going to make a chronicle, Let's see where meeting this guy takes me, starting from the premise that I want to make a heist movie., and what happens while we make the film is part of that. It's not that I have any idea that I'm going to film this specifically.. Simply, is that the border between what is in front of and behind the camera is blurred. This would have taken him sooner towards a more thoughtful area, but now I consider that, in this type of films that I am making, that's what you have to film.
The film has a very nice moment which is when you and Ainoa, your partner, you reproduce the steps of one of the Flako robberies. Seeing it, I thought that the film has something like a children's game because, somehow, We have all imagined being a bit of a criminal at some point., That's the adventure of going through dark passageways in search of treasure., play pirates for once.
In that first part of the film there is a playful side, a vision as quite light and playful. That responds to an idea I had.. Notice that, more than script or previous plan, There are intentions that have to do with people's energies., and the relationship between Flako and I was very playful, as an accomplice, to take things with a certain humor within the difficult situation. And I wanted that first part to be soaked in that tone. But, on the other hand, Flako also has a very serious substrate, so much for what he did, as for his biographical ascendant. Hence that faster tone, lighter, He becomes more sober and takes on a more important shadow as his character enters, as the film settles. Part of the challenge was in combining two very different tones.. I didn't want a tremendous movie because neither he is nor our relationship has been.. But he also didn't want a kind of constant joke because his life isn't like that.. And well, I thought that this evolution was what the film could have in terms of its own tone..
The film proposes a confrontation between the intimate man that you know and whom you appreciate, and the criminal. I don't know if you prefer to leave the solution to that dilemma for the viewer or if, in that sense, you aspire to solve something specific.
Bueno, I believe that the dilemma that arises is posed to me and to anyone who sees the film.. He is a person you like. Bueno, At least I like him, he seems like a charismatic guy to me, nice and tender. But, at the same time, has a capacity (that he exercised in the past) to generate hyper-violent or very tense situations very clearly. I believe that it is in the ambivalence of trying to understand something like that that I move and what the film tries to approach without providing a solution.. This person is like this. We all have a shadow, We all have a capacity for evil and we all, to our extent, we exercise it in one way or another. There are people who, for his career, exercises it in a more extreme way, but, from the beginning, My approach has been to try not to judge..
I don't know if it's voluntary, but it seems to me that your portrait of the Madrid through which you move is still that Madrid of Robbery at three and all that cinema from the fifties that still seems alive in your film and in the city. Was it your intention to rescue that Madrid?
Yeah, Yeah. The two robberies that convicted him cover an arc that goes from the richest to, if not the poorest, Of course it was the most proletarian and there was a lot of desire to be on the street filming. This is something that many of the heist and film noir films of the 1950s in Spain feed off.. There's like a kind of film vein there., many of them wonderful. The film that opens the documentary is called A clean shot, by Paco Pérez Dolz. It's a masterpiece, an amazing movie. And all of them are very interesting because they ride between the fascination of Hollywood in the fifties and that moment before the New wave What is when you start filming in the street?, when all neorealism comes into play, also. That is very palpable in those movies and, somehow, I wanted to explore what that would be like today., that breath of the street.
El Flako has a conflict with his lawyer over the making of the film. Do you know what the reactions were once the work was finished??
Well, I don't know if the lawyer has seen her.. He saw the movie a long time ago, especially because the parts in which he appears were done together. I have been very careful with all this because, Of course, He is a person who is putting his life at your disposal. And what I wanted is that, If this had any impact on your future, if not positive, that at least it wasn't negative for him. In that sense, he has trusted, He saw that we were doing a job and felt calm. As for his lawyer, I think these days he is having an idea that the movie has come out. Oh well, The lawyer doesn't have much of a role in this.. He had him at the time boycotting any attempt to get closer to him, but right now it doesn't have a major role.
Your film speaks to us, it seems to me, of the possibility of cinema as a tool of redemption. I don't know if you share this idea.
Bueno, I think that more than a use, because there is no will for it, if anything it is a result. I also think that this should be tested in three or four years., Let's see where Flako is then. If Flako continues in the line he is today, What is being able to act as a father and be able to have a job? (He is very excited about being able to tell stories.), then the film or the process that the film and the novel have proposed will have helped that redemption. But I never set it as a goal.. If it has been, time will tell. And it will always be a result, more than an intention.
Will you ever make a real heist movie?
Well I hope so, I hope so. Man, after doing all this, I hope that at some point we can do it. And it would be the cherry on top if we made it based on his novel.
And to end, There is a moment when you tell the story of Alberto Spaggiari, an Italian thief who inspired others like Flako and his father to do this type of robbery. Haven't you thought about the possibility that your film may inspire others to do the same??
Yeah, In fact, At one point I was about to put this thing that sometimes appears don’t do this at home. Like in car ads, when a specialist appears and warns you “please don't try to replicate it”. In that sense, I have to say that the film is very thorough, but it is also designed like a maze. I mean that if you follow any of the instructions that the movie offers you, you are not going to go anywhere.. The caps [sewer] that appear are not the real covers. I know what the real tapas are., but they are not those. And I can also tell you that, although it seems to be explained in detail, Making a butron of that caliber is much more complex than we explain.. I mean, If anyone wants to be encouraged, they should try it and you'll see how it turns out..
