18/10/2023 - The producer-turned-director’s sophomore feature involved several challenges when it came to adapting a Catalan novel for the big screen in a realistic way

(© Bartosz Jakubowski)

Spanish director Pau Calpe Rufat premiered his sophomore feature, Werewolf [+see also:
film review
interview: Pau Calpe Rufat
film profile], in the Warsaw International Film Festival’s International Competition, and when he introduced the film to audiences for the first time, he was sure to warn them not to expect a horror flick. In fact, the film is based on a Catalan novel named Lobisón, where, according to a local legend, the seventh son in a family turns into a werewolf.

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Cineuropa: Werewolf is based on a novel, but how much of your input was informed by folklore and mythology? And how much was informed by the social themes at stake?
Pau Calpe Rufat: It was a peculiar coincidence. The book was always there in bookshops; I’d pick it up, look at it and conclude it wasn’t for me. But when I finally bought it, I read it in one day. As described there, the strange character of the boy had the potential to lead to two different films: we could simply have told a werewolf story with a physical transformation, or we could have chosen the more realistic option – the inner conflict between social life and nature, or wildlife. Do you need to adapt in order to be among other people? Or do you stay true to yourself? These are questions relevant to filmmaking, too. Do you need to change your film in order to please the audience?

What about the seventh son? What is the myth there?
It has a real-life origin in Spain, the lobisón, which is a kind of werewolf. How can I explain this? He’s not the hombre lobo, or the wolfman; that’s a tradition stemming from Europe. In the north of Spain, we adapted that tradition, and we call it lobisón: the seventh son can become a werewolf.

Is Werewolf about being different instead of just sticking with reality?
Werewolves can be a metaphor for the wild and primitive way of being ourselves, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It's the struggle between the social part that every one of us has and also our wilder nature – nature versus nurture. This is something that we were striving for across the whole story.

The three main actors are very different in their presence, but they still made sense together. How did you help them achieve that synergy?
We were lucky because the brother [Pol López] and his girlfriend [Maria Rodríguez Soto] have been theatre actors in Barcelona for more than ten years. They’ve known each other since they were 20, but they’d never worked together on a film. On one hand, they knew each other very well; on the other, they were happy about this new experience. For the role of Adrià, we auditioned another person, who did a wonderful casting, but he was performing. The casting director simply said to me about Leon [Martínez]: “You need to get to know him. He's still looking for himself.” His voice, his face and his presence, in that sense, worked very well.

Did you discuss the acting style?
We spent around three days working on movements and positions, and trying different things. It was important to get his speed of movement right, as I didn't want it to be too fast or too slow.

It’s an unsettling performance that gets under your skin, but how did you decide to keep the violence he perpetrates mostly off screen?
We use a lot of ellipses because it's an interesting way to “activate” the audience and [force them to] reflect on what they’re seeing. Because when you read the book, you adapt your imagination, and you can shape things as you wish. Even if we’d kept everything as described in the book in the script, while we were producing the film, there had to be blood. What was surprising was that half of the team was saying, “Oh, no, there’s too much blood; you can’t do that!” And then the other half was like, “Oh, no, you need to add more blood!” For me, that was also a sign that I was on to something and that I couldn’t please everyone.