Film genres often contribute to presenting and delimiting recent events in Argentine history. The judicial thriller served Santiago Miter to direct the adventures of the prosecutors in “Argentina, 1985” and in “El abduction”, Daniela Goggi uses the procedures of the political thriller to tell a tragedy about family disintegration, democratic transition and savage capitalism, in a country immersed in mistrust, with a period climate that is reminiscent of the paranoia of classics like “All the President’s Men.” “or “The Three Days of the Condor.”
In a Palermo hotel that evokes the spirit of home, located on Honduras Street, Goggi is preparing to chat with NOTICIAS. A good opportunity to meet a woman who found in her love for movies an extraordinary way of life.
News: In Scorsese’s film “Goodfellas,” Ray Liotta’s character says he wanted to be a gangster all his life. Have you wanted to be a filmmaker all your life?
Daniela Goggi: I think so, but you saw that one is not aware of how the processes begin, but I always studied and watched many movies as a child, between the ages of 10 and 18, I have that memory always present and I also watched a lot of TV. Do you know what I liked? The musical comedies, the first one I saw I didn’t understand at all because I was very young, but it impacted me. It was “Cabaret”, by Bob Fosse, in my house they had just installed the cable and I started watching a lot of movies on the TNT Clásicos channel, although I didn’t fully understand them, there was a kind of intuition of what cinema was.
News: “The Abduction” was shown for the first time before the public at the Venice Film Festival. How was that experience?
Goggi: Exciting, when you start working in film, the Venice Festival is a place that you respect and that you want to get to because the filmmakers you admire are there, the films that you are going to see during the year pass through Venice, it is like a film curatorship. Being there was a luxury, a privilege. We had never shown the film to the public and we did not know how non-Argentine viewers would react, because it is such a national story. It talks about our idiosyncrasy, about how institutions work, about what happens with ideological transitions in our country. We were very moved by how the film was received, we had five minutes of applause at the screening.
News: How did you come to “The Rapture”? Did the producers summon you?
Goggi: No, I read Martín Sivak’s memoirs — “Daddy’s Leap” —. We were writing another script with Andrea Garrote, who is the co-writer in addition to acting in the film, and when I read the novel I immediately realized that there was a synthesis of two things that we had been working on, talking about personal duels and historical duels. . That’s where the idea of making a free adaptation begins, because we wanted to work on the film as a historical tragedy, not as a family drama. I started writing the film with that trigger and I called Axel Kuschevatzky. There I told him and showed him the treatment, with the rights transferred by Martín Sivak to make an adaptation and only after a year working on the script we presented the film to Paramount who immediately accepted it, but it was a long journey.
News: What is it like to write a script in pairs?
Goggi: I always try to write between two or three, it is much more stimulating. A dialectic is created because you don’t think the same about the sequences or the characters, so the conflicts and information are discussed. For me, writing with collaborators is the best way to make the dramaturgy process grow. Since in this case we were starting from a very free adaptation, the main thing was to understand what we wanted to leave out, what to do with the historical information, how to fictionalize it and create new family ties. It was a very interesting job to see how to get out of the documentary story and enter other areas.
News: Was writing the script almost a journalistic investigation?
Goggi: Yes, because we resorted a lot to the newspapers of the time, to all the sessions of Congress and to “Good Boys”, the book by Carlos Juvenal that investigates the extortionate kidnappings of the 80s. Thus we were outlining what to discard and how to build a new credible with the fictional synthesis of all the materials that reality provided us. It was three years of writing.
News: Did having done the María Marta series that was based on a real event help you with that?
Goggi: Yes, it helped me because of the differences. There we had to stage something that everyone was talking about, but no one had seen because in that case the documentary is in the past and the fiction is in the present. Everyone knew how María Marta’s body had been found, we directly worked with the forensic reports of a documented case. It was very interesting because the writing processes were very different. When you have the freedom of fiction you find the best resources of dramaturgy. On the other hand, when there is a judicial file you cannot escape, you remain stuck to reality, in that case the challenge is how to make interesting a fact that everyone knows. “The Abduction” was a material created from fiction and placed within the narrative logic of the thriller.
News: The treatment of the image reminded me of those thrillers from the 70s, but I read that a reference for “The Abduction” was “The Lion’s Share” by Adolfo Aristarain, is that correct?
Goggi: Yes, “The Lion’s Share” was a great reference, it is one of the films that I like the most in Argentine cinema along with “Barely a Criminal”, by Hugo Fregonese. We wanted to build a film with an Argentine identity, so it’s very strange when you propose that, but your reference is always North American cinema. We have an impressive cinematographic tradition.
News: Have you already started writing the script with Rodrigo de la Serna in mind?
Goggi: It was very shocking the first time we met and we brought him the script because without him there would have been no film. When we started writing the first treatment with Andrea, we always knew that Julio Levy’s character was Rodrigo. We could never imagine another actor because the nerve that character has, the way he changes, swallows, how everything happens to him but he can’t say anything and that tension could only be reflected by Rodrigo. We sent him the script and he called a week later to say that he wanted to meet me and make the film. He flowed, that’s something that sometimes happens and sometimes it doesn’t…
News: In “Abzurdah” the character of China Suárez has an eating disorder, Carlos Carrascosa was an overweight character who smoked a lot and in “El rapto”, Julio Levy too. Is it a way for the body to tell what happens to the character?
Goggi: The body speaks. In all cases they are people who are destroying themselves, I am interested in the characters who are exposed because society naturalizes pain and those three characters move me a lot because we have to discover them, they are an accumulation of problems, but they do not give you any information .
News: He directed China Suárez in “Abzurdah” and “The Red Thread.” People think she knows the public figure, but in her experience, what is she like as an actress?
Goggi: “Abzurdah” is a film that I feel close to me and working with China was a privilege, she is an actress very trained in television, very intelligent, she understands very quickly the references that one puts when building the character and is very disciplined.
News: When we talk about Argentine directors, María Luis Bemberg, Lucrecia Martel, and Albertina Carri are always present. Is this a more favorable time for there to be female directors, whether in films or series?
Goggi: I think it is an auspicious moment built by great pioneers, but it seems to me that there is something super scary because we have more space, but there is also that: “This series has to be made by a woman because otherwise ideologically we will be stuck.” The truth is that the world is still essentially sexist, in the awards shortlists there are generally a majority of men even though there are many of us who produce and direct, the truth is that not everything has changed that much. Although there are more awards at festivals because minorities benefit from guilt, let’s hope that is a genuine feeling.
News: If you were to win some important distinction, who should not be absent from the acknowledgments?
Goggi: My son.
by Leonardo Martinelli
