The stern-faced receptionist. The waitress with impeccable manners. The chef specialized in hamburgers and Peruvian food. The security guard who neglects his vigilance, worried about the Real Madrid game that is throbbing thanks to a phone worthy of a secret agent.
Each character that appears in this residence, converted into a symbol of an emblematic representative of the thriving hotel sector, allows us to discern and clarify that the mission entrusted is in a position to be fulfilled.
In a library turned into a waiting room, various correspondents from various places such as Tucumán, Montevideo, Dublin and Stockholm appear. The staging is part of something worthy of the creator of “Los simuladores”, accustomed to challenging the impossible and setting no limits to his imagination.
Responsible for the buddy movie “Tiempo de valientes” and the endearing “Brothers and Detectives”, Damián Szifron reflected better than anyone the Argentina of rift, tension and inequalities in the episodic “Wild Tales”, one of the titles fundamental nationalities of this century.
The recent premiere of “Misanthrope” it serves as an excuse to talk with this artist who is passionate about movies. He doesn’t have the cockade on. He also has no fire. But luckily he wants to talk to NEWS.
News: From “Wild Tales” to this film almost a decade passed. Why so much time between one and the other?
Damián Szifron: These are things that happen to me involuntarily, I try to be more prolific and in fact I write many more things than I direct, then the situation means that some can materialize and others cannot. Before “Wild Tales”, between 2006 and 2014 I was also without filming, trying to make a science fiction film called “The Foreigner” to which I dedicated a lot of time and finally did not get the financing. I was also writing other things at the same time and as something on the side I wrote those stories that ended up becoming “Wild Tales”. Now besides “Misanthrope” I worked on several other things…
News: Was one of them the movie about “Nuclear Man” that couldn’t come to fruition?
Szifron: Yes, I developed it in Harvey Weinstein’s studio. It was a project that I liked very much, very anarchic, imaginative, free and belligerent in relation to the American system. But then, when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, the project went to another studio and we couldn’t understand each other anymore, they started distorting the script to the point that it was no longer a movie I was interested in shooting.
News: Is “Misanthrope” a commissioned film or does it assume its authorship?
Szifron: It’s mine, I wrote the script long before I had the producers. It was a weird movie because I started writing it in 2010, before “Wild Tales”. I did not see it as an Argentine film. At that time I had no international projection or real chances of going to the United States to propose a script, so I let it rest like a plant that one stops watering. And it turns out that it ended up being a cactus that continued to grow without water.
News: How did you sell a thriller to the kings of the genre?
Szifron: They felt that at the time there were so many superhero movies, mega-budget franchises, and while there were some genre movies, in general Evil was tied to supernatural elements. They saw a freshness and a space for a more adult film. Later, a series of mass murders similar to the ones that the film was reflecting began to take place in the United States and that was blowing up the possibility of producing it because it generated a lot of fear. The feeling of the producers was that it should not be done because the theme was too current and painful, they even thought that the public would fear going to the movies. They were afraid to invest money in publicity for the premiere, that a tragedy would happen near that date and lose everything they invested.
News: The context didn’t change, what happened to make it happen?
Szifron: The right partners appeared, the production company FilmNation that saw potential in the script, fell in love with the story and set out to get the financing. It was presented at the Cannes Festival Market and there, with only the script, it was sold to distributors around the world.
News: “Misanthrope” has a very good cast and a legend like Ben Mendelsohn. Here you worked with big names like Peretti, Sbaraglia and Oscar Martínez. Is dealing with actors very different here and there?
Szifron: In relation to the actors I would say no, each one is different, they all have different formations and styles, in that it is quite similar to work abroad or here. Ben Mendelsohn is a very electric actor, I used to say that he is like directing lightning, he tends to improvise. Shailene Woodley feels that the script is made of iron and that is the limit, while for Ben it is the springboard towards what may arise. Amalgamating those worlds took me a while and quite a few discussions, but I have to say I’m happy with the result.
News: Are you a film director to control what counts and how it counts?
Szifron: And, they are all tasks of a director. The word control in some way limits, rather I see my role as someone who enhances and tries to get the most out of a situation, sometimes with greater success than others. I feel very classic in directing. But when it comes to creating, I just improvise a lot when I write, there the process is insanely free. I write by hand, in notebooks, with music at full volume, at night, if there is a storm, I go out and get wet in the rain (laughs). Imagination is a moment of absolute excess and there I see the images, the dialogues, the cuts, the rhythm, but directing that is much more methodical. In order for everything you imagined to be in the film, you have to be disciplined, there is no time to try a thousand things on a shoot and that sometimes causes boredom because people want to go to different places.
News: Once in the Varela Varelita bar I heard someone close to you say that an old dream of his was to film a movie about Superman. It’s true?
Szifron: I don’t know if filming a movie about Superman is so much, but Richard Donner’s original Superman occupies a fundamental place in my memory and my imagination, the first memory I have of my life is seeing that movie in the cinema. When Superman visits Lois Lane on the terrace and then he takes her flying, it stayed with me forever. A man and a woman flying, she in that light blue nightgown and he taking her between the buildings to the Moon, added to the love theme of John Williams that is incredibly beautiful, lives inside me. There is another scene that I treasure in which Lex Luthor puts a kryptonite necklace on Superman and tries to drown him but a mine that is the assistant saves him, he goes flying and breaks the ceiling. I saw the film when I was 3 years old and those two images were always with me. The love I have for that film is infinite, I feel it is part of my family.
by Leonardo Martinelli
