"One of the things that people appreciate most about my film, and that has been discussed in some reviews, is the fact that it takes a different approach to the epic genre, without destroying it." "You could say it's the paradox of filming dead time in a way that hadn't been done before, with small digital cameras, filming an epic tale, that great story known to all, which is epic because it's a classic and also for its subject matter:" "a man who wants to change the world through his own self and his loneliness, and takes on everything and everybody." "I think that was the whole point:" "to avoid destroying the epic sense." "And, paradoxically, to do it through small details." "By filming the dead time, above all, with small, low definition digital cameras." "In the past, the epic genre, guaranteeing that it'd all be up there on the screen, had been a huge industry... 35mm cinema, with big open spaces, big extras, big stories." "With all the traditional Hollywood people behind them, movies were guaranteed to have that spirit, that epic feel." "What I find most exciting about my film is the fact that this would apparently have to be destroyed, but it isn't, it remains intact." "And that slightly paradoxical sense as you watch it even gives the film a little more richness and a freerspirit." "Earlier I mentioned things I was reading as I looked for locations for the films," "I sometimes read novels and stories, but I'm not particularly close to literature." "But I did think it would be good to talk about dead time, and we should define what this dead time is, because... perhaps in some films that interest me the whole film is dead time." "Do you know what I mean?" "If there's a fixed camera and characters who don't talk," "I don't consider that to be dead time." "Or perhaps you could call it dead time, but I think that as a viewer you become much more alive when you start feeling what that dead time triggers in you." "So "dead time" is a strange category to start talking in formal terms and in terms of what we are attempting to do with images and sounds." "OK, well in this regard" "I have a better definition for dead time:" "the moments in which the contemplative aspect predominates in the image." "The moments when viewers don't have narrative stimulus, or any of the more superficial graphic stimuli, but they do have a contemplative stimulus, a strong contemplative aspect on the screen, which forces them to simply" "be attentive and contemplate with a strange mixture of passivity, of passivity and activity perhaps." "It's a much more sensitive approach to the film, the moments when no narrative, or graphic element are very important or predominant, so all you can do is have yoursenses, not just yoursight, very alert" "and that's why you call it dead time." "Perhaps it isn't the most appropriate term but that's how I see it." "In terms of Albert's film," "I've told him 1000s of times, apart from the fact that I personally love it," "Serra's film contains many of the elements that interest me in cinema, in a personal sense." "It's a spontaneous film that takes aesthetic and cinematic risks, and is committed to... adventure." "To cinematic adventure among friends, professionals, trying things out." "And I think that's essential in any endeavour, to be able to enjoy yourself, with painting, music, or in my case film," "I don't think you can get good results otherwise." "Or at least I can't get to the point I want to which is to try things, ask myself 1000s of questions, and perhaps not answer them all, and maybe not even answer the questions that I pose myself at all." "I think that the actual experience of making something that you might not have totally mastered, is a much more tantalising option for a director, or whatever you call it," "than filming something, script in hand, and simply taking it to the screen." "If you are so sure of what you're going to film, why film it?" "That's of no interest to me." "Maybe I'm digressing..." "I think he's right when he talks about adventure, because we can only talk about contemplation, if there is something to contemplate." "We've seen many otherfilms based on this very same field, but they're substitutes for Lisandro's films, which he takes as far as they can go:" "his films are a highly concentrated form of this." "These others are artificial, or boring, simply because in order to have something to contemplate... the emotion that stems from contemplation is based on... you obviously need some type of construction, and the whole artifice of making a film," "but each shot must contain this emotion, which is linked to the sense of adventure, and it's so subtle, that if you try to fabricate or prefabricate it, it seems to be very easy, particularly using... we'll talk about non-professional actors later..." "It seems easy, but I've seen many people try it at one point or another and they can't do it well." "And it's all based on the idea that contemplation requires something to contemplate." "In my last film," "I started looking forsomething to contemplate and then I realised there was nothing to contemplate." "The film was created or took shape as we travelled around looking for places to film and meeting people and sharing this "dead time" with them for a few days," "and out of all the things going around in my head," "I put some down on 10 or 15 pages which became the script we used." "I started reading late, when I was 20 I hadn't read anything." "I'm trying to make up for lost time but I don't think I can." "Nonetheless, he has assimilated the way literature is introduced into cinema." "He takes a weighty, metaphysical book such as a Dostoevsky novel, he - and I think this also goes for me, which is the magic of these two films - he adds that lightness that comes from one's personal experience," "which is gradually shaped through simple banalities." "For example, I really like one moment in his film," "Los muertos, when..." "what's the actor's name?" "Argentino Vargas." " Vargas." "Goes to get the canoe he'd stowed away, and the man says: "I hear you killed your brothers..."" "and he replies: "Sure, but I'm over it now."" "He says: "I'm over it now." Those are his words!" "I love the way in which that great psychological conflict, that could easily be in a Dostoevsky novel and give way to metaphysical, dense, ponderous images, and which is the core of the whole film" " just as the core of my film might be the madness of Don Quixote - this conflict is transformed by the essence of film, which can transform themes that are expressed in a particular way in literature, into images with a lovely lightness and poetry." "And it doesn't matter whether the literary source might not be widely read, like Dostoevsky." "I don't mean that he transformed it, or that the film is faithful to the spirit of Dostoevsky, he doesn't care about that, just like I don't care if people say I've been faithful" "to the spirit of Cervantes' novel." "But he did manage to use it as a springboard to turn it into images in a really magical way." "Both of you have used other springboards too." "You sometimes mention Joanot Martorell," "Tirant lo Blanc, Martí de Riquer, among others, and Lisandro Alonso has also spoken about the influence of Horacio Quiroga in his films." "Yes, but that was basically in Los muertos." " In Los muertos." " Yes." "Horacio Quiroga always wrote" " apart from committing suicide in the jungle - he wrote about what went on in the Misiones jungle." "He had a lot of stories, such as explaining how to take bees out of a natural honeycomb in a tree." "I read that in the book and thought:" "let's see if we can film it." "I asked Argentino:" ""Is this true, or is it just fantasies in a book?"" ""No, it's true." "I have one 15 metres away."" " "Can we go and see it?" - "Sure, let's go."" " "Can we film it?" - '"Yes."" "That's it." "It's true, it's not a profound or spiritual influence." "All the books that I..." "When me and my friends read books or see films thinking about making a film we might notice the silliest details, small things that can give rise to a small sequence, a small scene, but we never think about the meaning of the book," "in the sense that the book has influenced me spiritually." "They're simply springboards, of no importance." "This is another reason why I like his films, because he has shed these pretensions." "In this film, there were scenes that involved some difficulties with nature, or posed problems, as one actor was elderly, and another had mobility problems, those scenes ended up... a bit grotesque, difficult to film." "In fact, in some scenes Don Quixote had to get on the horse and it barely comes out, because when we filmed other takes, he fell off the horse." "And they had to go through some difficult places, so we ended up avoiding them." "It was a nuisance, it wasn't reasonable or practical, so we gradually got rid of them, and we ended up with that "pleasant" nature which I really like because it's a bit contrived." "It's like I said earlier about American musicals, where nature is very realistic, and I really enjoyed using the audio to emphasise that realistic aspect, we went to great pains, it's all location sound and so on," "But there's still that aspect that you mention - it's easy, the kind of nature that interacts with the actors in a very gentle way, turning it into a kind of fantasy landscape." "And I liked this aspect." "Like Brigadoon, a musical in which the entire landscape is recreated, and in El cant dels ocells this aspect is even more exaggerated." "But it was a practical matter that came up along the way, by getting rid of the more complicated relationship between the characters and nature, because it was difficult to film and develop it properly." "I was working in the city, it was 2001," "I decided to leave the city centre, and go and work in the country with my family." "I'd been working for two years, and on one of my trips I found Misael, like in the film, cutting trees." "I went up to him:" ""Hi, how are you?"" "And I kind of fell in love with his way of living, being in the world, acting, communicating, working, eating, breathing, whatever you want to call it." "And I was already in love with the idea of making a film." "So it seemed to me that Misael was a young man who lived outside of a city, and for some reason I felt that he experienced the same things as I did in the city," "I was a young man from the city, lacking a decent job, lacking communication, lacking money in some sense, and at the same time we were very different." "The fact is that one day, forsome reason, perhaps I had seen that Kiarostami film where the guy is alone, and wants to commit suicide," "I can't remember the title..." "Taste of Cherry." "And I was so clueless, I was 25, and I said:" ""If he can make a film like this, so can I."" "I didn't know his name was Kiarostami or that he had made 40 films before that one." "So I decided to do it, and I thought, if I'm going to make my first film, something simple will be much easier for the ten people I would work with." "The example of Misael, who fate led me to when I decided to leave Buenos Aires, was fantastic for making this film." "But I didn't start with an idea about the harshness of nature and physical work." "All I knew clearly was that he would be the only character in the film because that made it easier and I didn't want a lot of talking." "He obviously doesn't talk because he is alone, but the fact that he works the land revealed more about his personality, his way of eating, breathing, the surroundings in which he lived, because it couldn't be described in words." "I don't know if explaining myself." "It was a good excuse to show how somebody survives physically, without having to use words." "And I also thought that his work allowed me to show how young people live in Argentina, how certain people live in Latin America or the world, it was much more..." "I'm not really interested in these subjects now, but back then I was." "I think the process is more or less the same." "Regardless of how long you've known somebody, you approach him as the subject of your film because you like him or you think he can have a certain spontaneity, a certain flair, orsimply because you want to make a film with him" "rather than somebody else who you don't like, no matter how good he is." "I agree with what you say about the imaginary, in the sense that I found this naturalism of observation interesting, but placed in the context of an adaptation of Don Quixote," "and adding a bit of fantasy, estrangement or artificiality, which I really like, and trying to make it fit." "Don Quixote has many different themes, chapters and adventures, and I chose the aspect of his mental delirium, precisely because it is contrived or difficult to show in images, and not the typical naturalism which is also quite present in the film:" "you see them eating, walking or whatever." "Perhaps in this sense, he has taken pure contemplation to the limit." "But that's part of each person's idiosyncrasy." "For me, there's another rule" " so as to remain faithful to the idea of curiosity and love -, which consists of never rehearsing." "The first image in the film" " perhaps not the first, because we filmed a lot -," "I hadn't told them anything about the film or what it's about before shooting, and we never rehearsed." "And this is part of this idea of curiosity." "I don't know how he does it, it's actually each director's secret, and it's the hardest thing to work out and explain, and it's what makes his film, which is very good," "different from many others I've seen which are bad copies, and the difference lies in that secret which he won't explain." " I don't know if it's secret..." " It's easy, I say:" ""Don't look at the camera and don't express anything."" "But a lot of directors say this to actors, with terrible results." "So it can't be so infallible." "I think that this is the real difference between filming in 35mm and digital." "Digital allows you the luxury of more anarchy and much more chaos and you don't have to..." "The psychological pressure is just as strong, people think that if you shoot many hours when you edit the fact that you've filmed 100 hours makes it simple, but by the same token, many fools have filmed many hours" "without good results." "The psychological insecurity is the same, the only difference is that you use different tools which each person adapts as best they can," "and perhaps it's a more collective experience, although that's not really the right way to put it... it's a bit more anarchic,I think." "I've neverfilmed in 35mm, and I don't know if he has ever filmed in digital..." " No." " Well, Lisandro..." "It's interesting because we reach the same conclusions through totally different methods, while maintaining a certain rigour in different things." "I'd like Lisandro to describe his process." "Because, for example," "Argentino Vargas, the protagonist of Los muertos, had neverseen a film in his life." "What's it like to work with somebody who doesn't know what cinema is?" "For me it's an advantage because he isn't afraid of the camera or the microphone, or where the film is going to be screened." "Argentino lives in a mud hut on a river bank, with a large family, and he had no interest in what we were doing, or he did care about the process, and he enjoyed it, but he enjoyed the process more than seeing the film," "that's what he told me." "I think that this... eases his mind, the idea of doing something that he may never see," "and not knowing how we will use the images that we recorded of him." "And we weren't asking him to perform Shakespeare," "I just said:" ""OKArgentino, walk from here to there, or do so and so, or kill the animal..."" "Everyday things that he has learnt physically over the past 54 years, and I think he simply saw it as just another job, working with people who trust him, and I trust him, and we're working together," "so if you ask me to be more specific," "I think that the most valuable experience for me" " and I think that Albert might agree - is when film allows you to have an experience that you couldn't have had in any other way, if you hadn't made a film." "No matter how different we are - me in Buenos Aires, him, somewhere outside of Buenos Aires - we come together in a joint project and we work seriously towards something and perhaps I enjoy it more, or I get things out of it that maybe he doesn't," "he's probably not interested in the same benefits," "I think that the benefits of spending a month with ten or twelve people who treat him with a lot of respect and admire him, look after him and take him out of his everyday life," "I think this is what he enjoyed, and if he enjoys himself, I do too, so we both enjoy ourselves." "If you have twelve or fourteen people enjoying themselves as they work, you will see and hear the results on the screen." "But it's more complex, because this actor never killed his brothers in real life, did he?" "No." "But this is the magic of the film, and what sets it apart." "He never killed his brothers but when he says:" ""I'm over it now..."" "Or some moments when he's in jail playing a prisoner, when you gradually deduce he has killed two people, is totally unsurpassable." "This is exactly what makes it a great film, and sets it apart from bad ones." "The difference is being able to do this." "Lisandro says:" ""I only ask him to do this or that, to kill the animal..."" "simple things." "But here we have a subject... that is more complicated to translate into images, his psychology comes into it, and what he was saying about complexity, between lightness and something more profound, but he manages to translate it wonderfully." "It's not as easy as saying:" ""Do this, kill the animal..."" "but when he says:" ""I'm over it now..."" "and the way he says it..." "It's like the images in Honor de cavalleria where they talk about the Golden Age, a dialogue from the book," "and it almost verges on the grotesque, the way they say it, but it never exceeds that limit, and it's very difficult to reach that limit with actors." "Very few people know how to do it." "Some do, but... the point of departure is simple but there's an indefinable mix of the director's talent." "I don't want to play down the work my team does by saying everything's easy, but I agree with" "Albert when he talks about estrangement, which does actually come about, because otherwise we wouldn't be here talking, or we'd be talking about other things." "I think that this has to do with a team and a director behind it." "This estrangement that certain scenes produce, stems from previous scenes and scenes that are yet to come, and although it seems easy and perhaps the scene in question was easy to film, or maybe a bit more complex" "because it required some dialogue, but it didn't need 1 7 takes or 124,000 takes." "It wasn't so difficult in itself." "The difficult thing is putting one shot after another and adding sound and creating an atmosphere around it." "That's the task of the director and the editor, and that's what makes a film like the one we're discussing, in which everything came easily, into a sincere, honest, valuable and decent film." "And particularly a fiction film, which is particularly fascinating because when you enter into contemplation it's very easy to fall into being informative, or the fiction can end up becoming simply documentary," "but the intensity of the director's aesthetic work is always above" "the purely informative, and when you work with non-professional actors it becomes even clearer, and this fascinates me." "This estrangement is something I wanted to make more radical or exaggerated by using a classic story like Don Quixote." "Vargas is a murderer who killed his brothers, that's where the estrangement starts." "But if you make him play Don Quixote you go even further." "And it has nothing to do with real life, people think that these actors are so good, that they do it on theirown, but this is not altogether true." "For example," "I've seen my actors do things in real life that are infinitely more memorable then the ones in my film, and you think:" ""I wish we'd filmed it."" "I don't know if it's happened to you." "However, the images that end up in the film always have an aesthetic quality and he may have done more memorable things in real life, but none of them have the same intensity or poetry..." "Perhaps it's because you perceive real-life things within a context and vulgarity while in the film there's a selection," "I don't know..." "I mean, it's not just about putting the actors there." "Why do you use the same actors more than once?" "Sorry?" "Why do you go back to your non-professional actors?" "Actually, I only made one film which brought them together, but it was a special film that I wanted to make," "Fantasma." "I wanted it to be a short film and I didn't quite go crazy, but I started to like what we where filming and it turned into a 62-63 minute film." "I wanted to work with them again and thank them in a way for having worked in the other two films." "And I wanted to give myself the luxury, which I could do, because I'd made a few pesos with Los muertos, and given that I'd earned them through film" "I'd put them back into film and talk about film, or to put it in more serious terms, seeing as I gave myself the luxury and paid for it myself" "I could let myself talk about the status of a certain type of cinema in the world and in culture." "Some people took it to mean that I saw myself at the centre of the world as an influential filmmaker, and it's fine if they interpret it like this." "But in fact, I wanted to make a comedy, or the closest thing to a comedy I could manage," "I worked with them again to say thanks and bye, and I think the best way to thank them was to work with them again, this time in my space, in my city, in the place where" "I learnt or grew up in terms of film, which is a cinema in a cultural centre, and to see what it was like for them to go through that alien experience of seeing themselves and to go through things they rarely go through." "Your questions are based on these preconceived ideas around the myth of the creator who knows exactly what he's going to do and why, but I see that our answers usually refute this, and in this case too," "because I didn't work with the same actors due to some preconceived idea but because as I made the films" "I did experiments with other actors who aren't in the final edit and they're very bad." "All the experiments with other people" " in the last one I included a few that are worthier, almost at the level of these -, but in general all the experiments and the life experiences that I had with other actors ended up being awful," "and these were so good, that the only practical option was to use them again." "Albert, what's going on with the sky in yourfilms?" "The sky that protects your characters seems very..." "That seems like a very abstract idea," "I've never thought about it." "It is the typical concept that a critic should talk about, rather than asking me, because I've obviously never on purpose, consciously or even unconsciously put this in my films, so this is the typical example of a critic," "which is very commendable." "There are two types of film critics." "One type watches a film and says: "I like it", and tries to work out why he likes it." "Then there's another type who would watch this film" " this is just as respectable, I don't say that one is better than the other - and say: "I don't know if I like this film or not."" "He asks a friend:" ""Is it good or not?"" "The friend says: '"Yes."" "And then he starts working out why it's good." "I tend to prefer the second type, who seems more creative and very 20th century," "and this would be a question for the second critic." "If you've seen something, in my fascination for the sky, you should now brilliantly reflect on all of this, because I can't come up with anything, not the slightest thing that could be of the slightest interest on this subject." "Good." "Lisandro." "What about yoursky?" "Over to him." "It's true that if you escape from the city, if you go to rural areas..." "Yes, the sky is there." "The sky and the earth are all you can frame." "I think this is behind it." "You can't frame, I don't know, a gas station or a car or a helicopter or..." "I'll be a little bit less bad:" "for example, the shot we saw, which starts with the ground, is an idea that probably nobody understood, which is that Misael was looking for deer tracks to see if there were any around and you also hear some deersounds... roars or whatever you call them," "but nobody realised that they were deer and nobody saw the tracks so the whole excuse was kind of futile." "It had nothing to do with the sky." "Nevertheless I think..." "Sure, you explain it if you see it!" "But I won't." "I'd like to insist on this," "Lisandro's talent for observation leads him to that, to filming those characters bound to the land, while the imaginary that prevails in your films or your images, or the imagination that you bring to it, or the images that you film in nature" "tend more towards the aerial or the ethereal, right?" "They're two different things, there's the aerial, the physical, and then there's the conceptual ethereal." "I don't know, in this film there's a bit of this delirium of looking at the sky, that mystical thing," "about looking at God the whole time, and it's one of the few things that have a clear narrative justification in the film, there's no other mystery behind it." "From here, I wanted to talk about your influences." "You'll go to heaven..." "Lisandro Alonso mentions Italian neorealism, the Lumières, Tsai Ming-liang..." "This is also dangerous ground, because Lisandro is not a great fan of influences," "I warn you, and you'll have to work out a theory on your own." "You've mentioned some influences too." "I'm not going to do it either," "I was speaking for him, a bit inappropriately..." "First we'll talk to Lisandro about his influences." "Well, influences..." "In relation to that idea of observation." "If you ask me:" ""What is cinema?"" "A question people sometimes ask me," "I say, cinema is the Lumière brothers and that's it." "What more can you say?" "Atrain arriving, a guy watering plants, or whatever, recording something." "Only that they didn't have sound." "But... where I imbued my influences..." "Well, at university, from Herzog's madness and from that process the neorrealists used, simply going out on the street and filming without actors in real surroundings, and dealing with tangible, everyday matters," "I guess that's why I work with or without actors and in orout of nature, and as far as authors who are closer to home, as I told you by email, they go from Tsai Ming-liang and his estrangements of everyday life," "filming somebody having dinner or drinking water or having a bath or walking or on a motorbike, which I think say a lot more about how a character feels or how a city feels or how an environment feels or how I feel," "and I've only mentioned four more or less at random." "But I think you always feel that you've picked up things and the mix of these four, these 100 or 200 films I've watched, they all end up in my head and something comes out... new, or not new, original or whatever you want to call it." "I think that's were influences come into it..." "It's odd, because you can't identify these influences in his images." "When I watch them, I don't notice them very strongly." "It's his own personality, from what I know of him at the more personal level, and a bit like myself, our personal lives have influenced us, because the images don't show these influences in a strong orobvious way." "People can say this or that, but in the end nobody can tell me:" "'"We identified this very strongly."" "In fact, when I tried to copy," "I tried things with some actors, but in the end, to my surprise, the first time we saw the edit of Honor de cavalleria it was totally different." "It had no obvious specific influence even though I had not so much been influenced, but actually tried to deliberately copy." "And this is also a sign of authorship, I like it." " He is an author, like me." " You've mentioned that..." "It's true, his own personality comes out in the images, even unintentionally." "But it's true that you started your latest project," "El cant dels ocells, about the biblicalMagi looking for the Saviour because Pasolini's unfinished project..." "This was written..." "Sure, but it's totally unrelated, no, no..." "If you see it, you'll see that even if it were the case, even if it were true, the result is totally unrelated." "Of course, obviously." "People say these things... but they're not true." "So Pasolini isn't an influence." "I'll explain, even if it's not really relevant." "One day, listening to Ninetto Davoli, what caught my interest, and it's related to this, wasn't when he said that in his final years Pasolini wanted to film the story of the Magi, and one of them getting lost" "and then being found walking around New York and realising that Jesus was already dead." "He explained that it was one of Pasolini's projects but that didn't make me want to do it." "I had the idea long before I heard that story and in fact I'd already seen two or three films on the same subject." "But what Ninetto Davoli said, which is related to the films Lisandro and I make and which I'll tell you now and which is related to the singularity of our films, was about working with non-professional actors," "people may not know, Ninetto Davoli was one of Pasolini's actors, and he explained how Pasolini chose his non-professional actors, which is a subject close to Lisandro and me, quite close to me and I think to him too:" "they'd walk down the street, in the suburbs of Rome or somewhere, and when Pasolini saw somebody who interested him" "he'd say to Ninetto:" ""Go and ask him where this place is."" "And he'd give him a complicated address." "And Ninetto would go, and he'd stand aside and watch." "So "Where's this place?"" "a place that was complicated to explain." "And the person would say:" ""Something or other, here or there..."" "the way Italians gesture, the person moved while explaining how to get to this place that was strange, orfar away, and difficult to explain." "Pasolini would watch the person's gestures, whether he was quick-minded or a bit slow and clumsy, how his mind connected to his body and gestures, and based on the image he saw on the street, he'd decide whether to hire him." "In Pasolini you can see traces of this way of choosing people in all his films." "Well, that's a digression on what we were talking about." "Yes, it does have to do with the films, and it's Pasolini, but you can't see it in the images." "The Iceland thing is a little..." "I was a bit tired." "The film premièred in France and French discussions are a bit... normal audiences are kind of very intellectual, and a bit of a pain." "And at every debate, every screening the first question would start:" "'"What a beautiful landscape" and especially:" ""What a strong link between the characters and this landscape, and you capture it so well, you must love this landscape and feel very close to it, what a magical integration between you, the actors, the landscape..."" "The first time you hear this it's a compliment, you think it transmits emotion in the film, it's beautiful and so forth." "But when you hear it 40 times you get so sick of this third-rate humanism that you say:" "Oh Really?" "Well now we're going to film in a totally different place, one we don't know." "Just so people don't have that impression, that idea... about an emotion in the film, which might be true, but ultimately, in many viewers' minds it becomes the essential thing about the film," "and as in Lisandro's case, it was a practical matter." "We filmed close to here because we didn't have money, it was near my house and it was a place we knew." "There wasn't all this empathy, we simply chose the next one because we were tired... and unlike Lisandro we did have money for travel so we travelled." "In fact, I was so unconcerned about locations" " this is completely true - that we chose them with google earth" "15 or 20 days before we started shooting." "The locations." "I went to the place eight days earlier, even with Fuerteventura I went 3 days earlier," "I didn't even go to France, somebody else did, so if somebody says there's a close connection with the landscape in this film they should get their head checked." "That goes with your personality, the fact you don't like to prepare things." "Now I can't really remember why we had to go so far away." "At first we wanted snow, like him, we looked on google earth for a place with snow." "But there aren't many places with snow in summer, in October." "In May many places in Europe have snow but apparently not in October." "And on google earth it said:" "Iceland." "But then we weren't sure whether it was a snapshot that was there all year or if it was updated every day, or month or week, or whatever... but in the end we went to the consulate and they said:" ""there's snow."" "And I went to the location seven days before the shoot and it was full of snow and people said:" "'"When you come back there may not be snow because it snows one day and the next day it's gone."" "And indeed, when we went back there was no snow, there was just a kind of ice, kind of dry." "It wasn't..." "And really, there's no justification at all, the locations are totally gratuitous... in Fuerteventura we found a great place that looks like Palestine and then I looked at the map and I saw:" "Fuerteventura, if you put the latitude like this you see that Israel and Palestine are almost on the same level and there's a very similar kind of landscape and now I can't remember, but I saw it on a map later," "that wasn't even what took us to Fuerteventura." "I mean, we'd seen photos of Fuerteventura that looked a lot like Palestine and it seemed like an appropriate place to talk about Jesus Christ, the Magi and all that, but there's really no explanation." "We could have made it here and it'd be the same film." "We were living on an island near where we were filming and there were a lot of those little goats, and I thought, OK, in order to show that he still has instincts, that he can use a knife." "Even if he was in jail there are natural things that he didn't forget and it seemed logical, if a man spends 20 years in jail, once he gets out, he knows the place he is going," "with his daughter, and he's aware of the situation so he knows she won't be alone, she has children around her, so I thought that if he found a gift from the gods on the river bank," "this gift could become food for the family and what could be better than arriving with a piece of meat to hold a welcome feast?" "So I thought it seemed natural that he should find it and kill it to give it to... maybe we didn't know how it would turn out..." "We did know in the scene we just saw, because it was framed." "But in the previous one, when he slaughters the animal, we had no idea how it was going to work." "But it seems very natural, maybe because I went to the country when I was young and saw how they killed everything from pigs to hens, whatever was edible went under the knife." "And it isn't such a big deal for me." "In fact, these places have no supermarket nearby, nowhere..." "to buy meat." "So I don't know what's so strange about it." "He couldn't go to the canoe and pull out a kilo of packaged meat." "Do you know my favourite thing about this scene?" "When he grabs it." "How he grabs it." " In the previous scene?" " Yes." "No, the white one..." "When he takes the goat." "Yes, he's standing there and goes "clack" and just grabs it." " In a very natural way..." " He is standing." "The point is that it's a mix of..." " Of course, you put it there, right?" " Of course." "And it's this mix of contrivance and at the same time naturalness." "It's fascinating." "For me, really..." "I saw it on DVD." "I watched it and rewound it two or three times because..." "It's very poetic." "Precisely because it's indefinable, the way..." "He's ready, he gets there, to this small space, and it's there in the middle, it can't escape or do anything." "That's true, isn't it?" "You put it there so it couldn't escape." "Sure, if it had escaped you couldn't stop it." "We filmed one scene that doesn't come out precisely for these problems, where a... one of these sheep from Iceland, they tried to catch it they threw themselves on it, they couldn't grab it, it escaped, there was nothing we could do." "But it's lovely the way he grabs it, I really like it." "How do you work with the camera?" "I don't worry about the camera much." "That is, I rarely look in the viewfinder." "I talk to the operators a bit about the idea of the mise en scène." "What the shots should be like." "What we liked in the other film..." "There are some complex mise en scène tricks that I did think about, but as far as working shot by shot," "I never move the camera because it's complicated and it needs an infrastructure that would be boring to set up but we have some overall ideas about the mise en scène for the whole film." "In the case of Honor de cavalleria, there was one idea that I really like, that we used quite a lot, and it's almost unnoticeable but very effective:" "if you pay attention, the most transcendental moments in the film, where Don Quixote is in this delirium of looking at the sky," "or when he says:" ""Look at the sky..."" "when he's delirious, when he sees the olive trees like giants..." "We had the idea of making it more... of using a more dynamic mise en scène, with hand-held camera, and more fast-paced editing." "And with the more banal scenes which would usually be more dynamic so audiences don't get bored, we decided to film these in a very transcendental way, with a fixed camera, much longer shots, etc." "What did we achieve by this?" "Simply two moments in the film, which are very different types of moments" " one is Don Quixote's mental delirium and the other is the day-to-day of the two characters -, seemed less different simply by using a mise en scène that seems to go against its own essence:" "you wouldn't film mysticism dynamically, and, on the contrary, filming the banality of everyday life in a very transcendental way, seems to go against the grain." "But in fact, through this small trick which you can see almost all through the film, we manage to do it, and I think it's one of the successful decisions in the film, to fit these two aspects together" "in a very natural way." "There's not much estrangement, caused by these moments inside the film." "This is a little mise en scène trick we used." "But I rarely, almost never look in the viewfinder." "The last one is a bit different, it's all fixed shots, no hand-held camera, but that's a different mise en scene concept that is consistent with the film, but almost never..." "I always work with two cameras at the same time, so the camera operators work intuitively, they know the actors, and I do talk to them but I very rarely look through the viewfinder and we don't make camera movements," "obviously, it's a practical thing but it's also aesthetic." "I like it this way, the sobriety and so on." "When we used a hand-held camera for the parts where I think it works quite well in the film, although I'd have liked to do it a bit better, improve it a bit, we used it because of reasons to do with the mise en scene," "not with agility, and it had the same energy or inertia as the shoot." "I think that even if you follow a character, there comes a point in the film when I decide that the camera starts to dominate the technical team, the sound, and the object being filmed." "For example, in this latest film we shot, Liverpool, all the camera work, apart from a couple of moves where we used a steadycam operator from Barcelona," "Carlos, who went over there, the rest is two fixed shots..." "But what I'm trying to say is that the camera has to be independent of the character." "When I get tired of seeing the character" "I look around and aim the camera wherever I like." "Because I think that describing the environment in which the character moves, even if he is not inside the image, helps us to keep thinking or to think more about the character." "For example, in some shots in this new film, the character walks out of a fixed shot, and the camera holds that frame for maybe a minute." "Because I think that it's appropriate for the story." "A moving camera is dangerous, because it always seems to emphasise something, because it moves, and in films that are so strongly contemplative, a camera that moves or emphasises something creates an internal contradiction, and what Lisandro does, as he just said," "is to move it a little, but very freely in a way that doesn't show anything related to what you've just seen, and without any causal or narrative need arising from what you're watching." "He moves it, and I have to admit that it tires me a bit, but he always moves it in this way that is very free and surprisingly coherent with the idea of contemplation, that doesn't allow for emphasis," "or for a camera showing you different aspects of what you're seeing." "There's one issue that I've often discussed and I won't repeat it, but it's very different to shoot in 35mm than digital." "In 35mm you have to prepare a shot and the shot is a whole world for a director for Lisandro the world is the shot, obviously." "With digital you can prepare the shot but the world is everything around you in the sense that you can film here now, then here, here... you have automatic focus... the camera is very mobile, you don't need lighting," "that is... if you wanted to you could really do it... you don't have to prepare shots when you shoot with digital that's why I have the freedom to not look at the shot composition because I don't see how it's important" "for the final result or how it will improve or worsen the final result." "I trust in the operator's good taste, based on these basic ideas about the mise en scene, that's it." "He freely chooses what he films, more or less, based on a few ideas and on what we're doing and what's supposed to happen," "but he chooses so freely that as soon as it isn't the director, there's no attempt to emphasise anything because the poor operator doesn't have a film in his head." "He knows the actors a little, because the operator is my friend and so on." "But he can't emphasise anything because he doesn't have any idea of the film that we're making, ultimately." "And that helps me quite a lot." "I think, particularly in La libertad, where we had a more "documentaly" camera, that was following the subject, the woodcutter, once the camera moves away from him and decides to do something crazy, travel, or frame to one side" "or frame whimsically, or pan right past him and let him exit the frame," "I think we were pointing out that..." "I don't know how to put it... there was something cinematic that went beyond the subject portrayed." "There were two levels, the woodcutter and the information, how he cuts the trees, but also a kind of flight, an aesthetic, visual and narrative flight that contributes a lot to Misael as a human being" "and as a worker in nature." "I think that these two things converge and the result" " whether it's documentary or fiction - the result generates that estrangement and I think that's how we filmed and produced that shot in aesthetic terms, and what Albert says is true, when you film in 35mm or 16mm or whatever," "you have to plan it more or less, because somebody has to light it, you need to pull focus, to plan a little and also... film reels don't last 60 minutes so it requires a basic plan" "so you don't end up with half of what you wanted." "I don't know if it shows in the films but I'm sure that anybody who visits a shoot of mine orAlbert's cannot help noticing a kind of camaraderie and venturing and risk and adventure and familiarity because otherwise it'd be illogical to get good results." "If a super professional photographer came and said:" ""Do you think we should use the 50 or the 20?"" "and I have to explain visually:" ""No, this should look like a painting..."" "Half an hour later I'd give him a kick in the bum that sends him to Jupiter, or he'd kick me." "So it's obvious that all of us pull towards the same side, the side we're aiming for." "And the same goes for the actors or non-actors, the thing is to control them from a more familiar place, more manageable, less professional, even though we're certainly professional in what we do." "If an operator gives you a painting as a reference the film is bound to be bad." "Except for the great masters from the Hollywood classics where it may make sense for them to say:" ""Now I'm going to do it like this or that painting..."" "In general, if you read an interview where a DOP or director says:" ""The lighting is going to be like a Rembrandt or whatever..."" "these people know nothing about film." "So you'd give them a kick in the bum, right?" "Yes." "He said it, not me." "Right, I said it."