15/11/2021 - The Spanish filmmaker’s latest film had its world premiere in Seville – a film with songs that takes place in 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto

(© Lolo Vasco/SEFF)

Rodrigo Cortés is sporting unexpectedly long hair –as a result of the pandemic, he claims– after his usual shaved-headed look of our previous meetings: “You can’t work in films without grey hairs: they’re always there”, he jokes at the Seville European Film Festival, where he has just presented his new feature film, Love Gets a Room [+see also:
trailer
interview: Rodrigo Cortés
film profile].

Cineuropa: Just as you have changed your hairstyle, you have also hopped over to a different film genre. After several suspense films, I was surprised to see that you have released something more like a musical.
Rodrigo Cortés: I have been wanting to film a musical for a long time, and at the same time, this film isn’t exactly a musical, because in that genre there is a very specific setup: camera, not necessarily a realistic approach to the story, emotions expressed through music … Love Gets a Room isn’t like that: it is a realistic film about a group of actors who perform a musical, but it has to be set up, the musical has to be written. And in this case, as the original work existed and the words to the songs survived although the music did not, we had to compose it and then produce the whole musical, rehearse and perform it, with dance and songs, in order to make the film about the musical.

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A project like a Russian doll …
Yes, stage drama in the theatre of life, within a film: a continuous game of babushkas, hatching from the egg and disappearing back into it the whole time.

The film starts with long sequential scenes … Why did you use this narrative resource?
It starts with a really long sequence lasting almost 15 minutes, where we travel through the whole ghetto: it was a decision to provide a physical experience. Almost all the film takes place inside a theatre in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto: it was important for the audience to feel it, not just know it, not just for the actors to say, “It’s really kicking off out there!”, but for us to experience and see that setting, with the main character who we will be stuck to, in real time, throughout the performance. And this means we can see what is happening outside: the markets, the ruins, the scooter cars they got around in, the German checkpoints, how cheap death is and how, despite this, there are still people who will gather in a theatre to forget about the real world for a couple of hours. We take the action into that theatre without cutting the shot, we explore the rooms we will be in for the rest of the film –green rooms, hallways, backstage…– and this gives us an overall location for what will come next, until the curtain comes up, we see the packed theatre, the title of the film appears, and we now have that physical experience that allows us to join the plot with an emotional and spatial context behind us.

In this new film there are traces of Red Lights and an amount of claustrophobia, like in Buried [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Rodrigo Cortés
film profile]: there is the throbbing trademark of Rodrigo Cortés.
It isn’t deliberate… I just think that a film should be like its creator, it should encapsulate his or her likes. When you watch a Fellini movie, you can tell it is his: the Italian maestro used to say it felt like he was always making the same film. You can’t always feel it, but your mark is always there. In Blackwood [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] there was a very specific use of music; in Red Lights [+see also:
trailer
interview: Rodrigo Cortés
film profile] there was a specific use of scenery and performance: what is true and what is false; and in Buried there was the tightest possible confinement and it also took place in real time.

Your film has an air of classic cinema about it.
Yes, just as in Buried I lit a candle in honour of Hitchcock and dedicated my prayers to a pagan god, this time I was thinking of Billy Wilder and Ingrid Bergman. From the outset I embraced that classical spirit, although I approached it with a radically contemporary stylistic touch.

You publish books, you write music, you direct… Does Rodrigo Cortés not put procrastination in its place?
I still have many things I want to do, from a proper musical, addressing its format full on, as I was saying before, to a western or a 16^th century movie of Spaniards in America … I have several scripts I need to finish: I am always more interested in the physical and sensory side of things, in making my films into an overall experience for the audience.

(Translated from Spanish by Alexandra Stephens)