Nacho Vigalondo • Director of Daniela Forever
“I’m open to confessing that I remember depression through a Betacam camera in my mind”
by Olivia Popp
- The Spanish filmmaker and contemporary auteur of high-concept science fiction speaks about the personal connections to his latest film and making bold directorial choices
Nacho Vigalondo’s newest feature, Daniela Forever [+see also:
film review
interview: Nacho Vigalondo
film profile], is a contemplative existential sci-fi work following a man who brings his late girlfriend back to life through lucid dreaming. It had its European premiere at the Sitges Film Festival, where Cineuropa spoke to the writer-director about his conceptual approaches to genre film and his unique stylistic choices.
Cineuropa: You work across genres a lot. Daniela Forever is branded as a sci-fi romance, but the blend is very unconventional – it’s not a lovey-dovey film.
Nacho Vigalondo: In these kinds of films, romantic slash sci-fi, the romance tends to become the climactic moment. As the movie goes on, it becomes more and more human. Something that I like about this film is that the sci-fi element gets more hardcore and becomes really radical as the movie progresses to the end. I hope that the characters survive this maelstrom, but I'm proud of the movie for making a higher choice.
It’s committed to that higher choice of privileging sci-fi over romance.
Yes.
When we’re presented with this premise of the lucid-dreaming pill, it feels very utopian, but ultimately, it has the possibility of turning very dystopian very fast.
It’s the very definition of a utopia, like living in a city that is made according to your desires and your indulgences.
For you, where is the line between utopia and dystopia?
The thing that springs to mind is Mad Max. You can see all these people living in this desperate land. For one guy, the villain, it’s the perfect utopia, as he’s surrounded by slaves and humans that he can exploit. He's living in this brand-new world, and everybody else is suffering because of him. Can you call a place a utopia when only one person is getting the benefit of it? That’s the paradox. And I feel that this world that Henry Golding inhabits every night is a utopia just for one person. So, there's a lot to criticise.
How did you come upon the choice to build the real world with this very raw kind of analogue sensibility, using old video recorders?
I just needed a really strong and powerful way to distinguish between both worlds. I needed one half of the movie to look nothing like the other half. I wanted to go really far with it because if we had gone soft in that direction, and the changes had been subtle, like a visual filter or a change to the aspect ratio, the movie would have been confusing. Especially later in the film, when things turn upside down, I need to know where we are, all the time. When the big thing happens halfway into the film, all of the power of that scene stems from the fact that we are on the other side. So, I needed something radical. When I wrote the script, the only thing that came to mind was black and white versus colour. But the buyers of the film were like, “You need to be way more prestigious to be able to shoot something in black and white. There’s no way; this is suicide. You need to come up with something different.”
As for this idea of shooting with this obsolete technology, it’s like the footage has a completely different nature. The aspect ratio changes, but not because we are actively changing the frames. I feel like it was really risky because I don't think it has been done before. It was scary, but it was really thrilling. Personally, I feel like there's something there that I can call magic. You're shooting these fresh faces, these new stars, these people representing the “now” – I'm talking about Beatrice [Grannò] and Henry – with such an obsolete technology. We joked during shooting that maybe we should call Guinness World Records because in this movie, we’ve broken the record for the greatest distance between the relevance of the cast and the obsolescence of the camera. There's something that I could even call perverse in the fact that I'm watching a Crazy Rich Asian star and a The White Lotus star through the lenses of the shitty cameras that I was using in the late 1990s. I’m open to confessing that I remember depression through a Betacam camera in my mind.
I imagine much of this film must be drawn either from your own experiences or from the stories of others.
I pretend all of my movies are pages from my diary. I love to do genre stuff, so I will never make an autobiographical film. I don't feel my life deserves a movie in those terms, but I want to put as much of myself as possible in every film, even the ones that feel completely out of this world, like Open Windows [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nacho Vigalondo
film profile] or Timecrimes [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alejandro Miranda
interview: Nacho Vigalondo
film profile]. I always say the same thing: just tell the truth about yourself, even if you're not making a confession, but express yourself through the character as much as you want. I've been Henry, and I've been Beatrice, too. In a movie like Colossal [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nacho Vigalondo
film profile], for example, I can see myself in both of the main characters, which is intriguing.
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