Being nephew of Jesus Franco (the king of Spanish and international B cinema), cousin of the director Richard Franco (‘Pascual Duarte’, ‘The Good Star’), brother of Miguel Marias (prestigious film critic, former director of the Spanish Film Library and former general director of the ICAA) and son of Julian Marias (who was also a film critic as well as a philosopher), it was impossible for Javier Marias was not related in one way or another to the movies and that the movies did not influence his prose. In 1970 he already acted in a short film by Emilio Martínez Lázaro titled ‘I love my rich bed’ –of which the director would make a long format variation in 1992, ‘I love your rich bed’–, in which his cousin Ricardo, Emma Cohen and the critic Francesc Llinás also participated.
A year earlier he had collaborated on the script for Franco’s short ‘Gospel’ (1969), based on a text of his that would appear the following year in his literary debut, ‘The domains of the wolf’. But the most important collaboration between Marías and Franco would be ‘The Annual Disaster’ (1970), written between the two and directed and starring Ricardo. ‘The disaster of Annual’ summarizes a possible ideology of the Spanish ‘underground’ cinema of the time, at an extremely delicate moment in the last and violent death rattle of Francoism. Marias and Franco designed an overwhelming piece centered on a Spanish family locked in their own house. The film took its title from one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by the Spanish army in the Rif War, at the end of July 1921. Needless to say, censorship sent the film to the alley of lost souls and it could only be seen in screenings clandestine
Wayne Wang and Kitano
He did not return to the cinema until almost three decades later, when he participated in the script for ‘The Last Voyage of Robert Rylands’ (1996) by Gracia Querejeta, not very successful adaptation of his novel ‘All Souls’, based on his experiences at Oxford University. His latest film collaboration is quite exotic and unexpected. Wayne Wangthe Hong Kong director who made the films ‘Blue in the face’ and ‘Smoke’ with Paul Auster, was inspired by a story by Marías for his film ‘While they sleep’ (2016)in which another prestigious Asian filmmaker, Takeshi Kitano, plays a writer who becomes obsessed with a couple while staying at a Japanese resort.
Related news
Marías’ relationship with cinema does not end here. In 2018 she published with the title of ‘When fools rule’, a compilation of the 95 articles that between 2015 and 2017 he had written in ‘El País Semanal’, a Sunday supplement of said newspaper. The cover of the book is a photograph of one of James Stewart’s westerns directed by Anthony Mann, and precisely one of his texts on cinema written for another ‘El País’ supplement, ‘Babelia’, revolved around the Western genre: ‘The Frightful Future of the Hero’published on July 16, 2011, is a dissertation on the paths of western film and television pregnant with considerable melancholy for what the genre was.
Before, in 2007, he compiled the writings on cinema that he had published in magazines such as ‘Nosferatu’ and ‘Nickelodeon’ in the book ‘Where everything has happened. When leaving the cinema’. On the back cover you can read this phrase from his brother Miguel: “Javier is not exactly what is considered a film critic today, but on the other hand he knows very well that, in the cinema, as in literature, he is not so important. what is told but the way to tell it & rdquor ;.