“The driest place on Earth.” It was in Chile’s Atacama Desert, in an authentic but now-disused mining village, that Demark’s Lone Scherfig decided to film her new feature, The Movie Teller [+lee también:
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Cineuropa: What attracted you the most about this story?
Lone Scherfig: Maybe it’s the reality of the mining town – to be able to go back in time and travel to a place I have never been to, and invite the audience into that world. But it comes with a big responsibility, making something that's so far away from me. I made a lot of films [set] in the 1960s, and I was a child in the 1960s, so it's a period that I have a feeling for, but South America is completely different. Another reason is that [the protagonist] Maria Margarita and I both love cinema.

What was it like to shoot this film in “the driest place on Earth”?
Quite tough. The climate is very hot during the day and cold at night; there are tornados, earthquakes and deadly spiders, and there were practical things that were harder than what I’m used to. The town that serves as the backdrop was a real village. When we first went there, there was no electricity or running water. We renovated some houses, the school, the supermarket, some of the interiors and the swimming pool. We were there for four months. I was looking for authenticity, and the first source of inspiration was Italian cinema.

Yet we see many excerpts from US movies in the film…
The influences of Italian cinema permeate the film language, which recalls neorealism or at least the 1950s-1960s, which is the period in which The Movie Teller is set. Obviously, neorealism started earlier, but I wanted to capture this familiarity and bring it into the film. There is also an echo, albeit a vague one, of Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, even though my film is set in another country and against a different political background.

The first part of the film is focused on a dysfunctional family who love cinema, and the second part on a dysfunctional country and on a world that is changing. Was it like this in the book as well?
No, there’s a big time jump in the middle of our film. It’s not like that in the book, where Maria Margarita is four years old at the beginning and then grows up. The flashback structure of the movie warns the audience that she will be a different person. There’s a lot of symmetry: you see small details at the beginning, like a dress or a scarf, that you don’t know the significance of, and they come back. We repeat things and give them new meaning; it was really fun to do, and I think people will find these little clues. They’re not important for the story, but it makes it more organic. Then, for the first time, I found myself dealing with a mother-daughter relationship, and I immediately decided to focus on this aspect as soon as I read the book.

The mother and the daughter make two different life choices.
The basic difference is that [the daughter] Maria Margarita likes to tell stories but is not craving attention, while her mother can only dream of being on screen and seen by people. Some actresses are like that: you love acting so much that it becomes more important than your husband and children. It’s quite a modern woman that Bérénice portrays. She does not accept her humble life, even though it does not make her unhappy. Her dreams are bigger than that.

Where did you find Sara Becker, the actress who wonderfully plays Maria Margarita?
I spotted Sara on YouTube: she was part of a low-budget series shot in Santiago, and I immediately knew it had to be her. All of the actors in the film have previous experience, and because there was a language barrier to manage [the film was shot in Spanish], I needed to communicate clearly. I am convinced that Sara has enormous talent. I had the sensation of seeing a star growing up, the same as I had with Carey Mulligan when I directed her in An Education. She is now in her twenties, and once she finishes film school, she will reach great heights because she is very expressive and a wonderful person.