28/08/2024 - The Spanish director reveals the latest on his new feature film, winner of the Europa Cinemas Label at the last Cannes Directors' Fortnight

(© Juan Ballester/Los Ilusos Films)

Jonás Trueba won the Europa Cinemas Label for the best European film at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight with The Other Way Around [+see also:
film review
interview: Jonás Trueba
film profile], which he has written together with its two main stars: Itsaso Arana (director of The Girls Are Alright [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Itsaso Arana
film profile], seen last year in Karlovy Vary) and Vito Sanz (like Arana, often seen in the director’s filmography including The August Virgin [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonás Trueba
film profile] and You Have to Come and See It [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonás Trueba
film profile]). The film opens in France with Arizona today, 28 August, and in Spain with Elastica on Friday 30 August.

Cineuropa: As in The August Virgin, Madrid is again the setting for your new feature film.
Jonás Trueba: I like the idea that cinema works well with repetition. Life is so often repetition. I’ve always liked the idea of routine, of going back to the same places and meeting the same people. That’s life. It made sense to me to transfer that to films, as we change and there are variations. Making these films over the years ends up being an asset, insisting on the same things most of the time.

In The August Virgin, Itsaso's character took a look at her city with different eyes, as if she were a visitor or a tourist, but in The Other Way Around there is a desire to break away from the past to start something new, clean of nostalgia.
The Other Way Around is about the idea of repetition, but not just any way. Continuing to live together with the same people also means a kind of pact, a loyalty that is not automatic, but has to be renewed. The film is also about that: it’s a couple who want to separate as a way of thinking separately. The same goes for the city, looking at it differently and trying to create a new contract with it. Repetition is not something mechanical for the sake of it, but it’s something that also involves coming to terms with it almost every time, every day. We can also apply this to love, to friendships, to your attitude to your city and your job, to film, forcing you every day to rethink it, to reformulate it, to reinvent yourself.

The initial idea of The Other Way Around, which is quite unique, is ground-breaking. How it’s so unsettling and how others react to other people's decisions!
It's a crazy idea and it shakes up some of the mechanics of what separation, break-up and drama are supposed to be. I like this paradox of celebrating something that is theoretically sad. But deep down, if you think about it and look at it, you find that it also makes some sense. It even has a much deeper feeling than what may seem simply an outburst, a notion. There’s something there: an ideal, a desire not to take things so seriously or to turn them around.

Love can be a habit, a custom or a way of life. Does it also need to be worked on?
It’s the idea of love and partnership that is renewed every day and if you don't do it like that it is probably doomed to die. I like to vindicate an idea of the conventional or old couple, but it can still be defended and is almost admirable. The couples that last not because of inertia, but because they are constantly reformulating and reinventing themselves. There’s something admirable about couples who know how to make it last because they push each other, especially in these times when it is so difficult to make something last. The idea of recycling can also be applied to love and partnership: there’s something organic about it.

Why do the main characters have almost identical names (Ale and Alex)? Because they have come to mimic each other after years of living together?
Maybe, there’s something to that. Instinctively, we were drawn to call them that, as if they were one and the same thing or a variation of each other. This mimesis also happens when you work on the same thing and share everything. There’s something about it that is both good and, at the same time, somewhat confusing. You mix everything up so much that one is in the other, or you say what the other has thought, and the other's ideas become your own. It is both beautiful and problematic.

And how was it receiving the award in Cannes?
It has been a natural step after a journey over the years at many levels, at other festivals and particularly in France, where a small distributor has been releasing my films and has made our work known there.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)