26/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: The Portuguese director sat down with us to unpick the secrets behind adapting a 900-page saga into a three-hour-20-minute film

(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

We met up with Portuguese director Tiago Guedes to discuss the complexities of Aquí, which was presented in the Cannes Premiere section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Aquí lasts three hours and 20 minutes – very long, in a world where audiences increasingly struggle to concentrate. When the script was being developed, what duration was initially envisioned, and how much footage did you ultimately work with in post-production?
Tiago Guedes: As for the script, we had an initial version that had 190 pages. The books account for something like 900 pages overall. So, we started to pare down the first draft in order to get to 150 pages. And we made it, somehow. Then, we went off to shoot, and we ended up with a four-hour-45-minute-long movie, in the first rough cut. At one point, we had this idealistic goal of managing to cut it down to three hours. But then, when we started watching the edits, we realised we couldn’t cut it down further, and we stopped at three hours and 20 minutes. Luckily, I had a producer who allowed me to do so.

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How much did your choice of actors for David – Álex Peláez and Hugo Encuentra – change the original script? How much did they contribute to it, and how did you find them?
It was casting. They were actually the only roles that I cast through a normal process, because I didn’t know any young actors in Spain. Álex and Hugo were in the very first batch of auditions I received, and I immediately marked them out as ones to bear in mind. I watched more tapes, but the more I watched, the more I felt they were already there, ready to go.

In the books, David is a combination of both of them. Hugo has this incredible energy and likes to fight back, while Álex is sweet, introspective, rational and very articulate. Together, they created something very special. I felt we could really make it believable that it was the same character growing up. We rehearsed in a normal way, with their acting coach, who was always with them, and I pushed them to influence each other. I wanted them to absorb qualities from one another.

Aquí deals with religion and magic, and there are many things left unsaid. Was it difficult directing the actors when the story itself has many layers? Why was it important for you to shoot it in Spanish?
Starting with the language, it came quite naturally because the story in the book is in Spanish. For me, not being Spanish actually put me in a good position as an outsider. The film talks about foreigners and people trying to adapt to new situations, so that really helped. It was important to experience that authentically because although I speak the language to a certain extent, I still had to learn much more. Then, on top of that, I was directing the actors in Spanish.

For me, it’s all about creating an atmosphere and a situation that they can explore, where they trust you and you trust them. Building that trust is always the best way to create meaningful work. With this kind of script, there are moments when they don’t know exactly where things are going, and I want to retain that ambiguity. I don’t want to point them in too many directions, because I want to preserve what the literature provides. I want the audience to build their own world while watching. I want them to project their own feelings onto David’s responses, his eyes and the silences in their reactions. That was my intention from the script stage onwards. I don’t need the actors to know everything or have everything overexplained. I think that’s true across all art forms.

There are a lot of dancing scenes involving different types of choreography. What was the most difficult thing about approaching this aspect?
I don't have an extensive knowledge of dance, so I worked with two choreographers who are friends of mine and who are incredibly talented. I didn’t want to put a label on it, and they did an excellent job. Particularly with David’s dance, there was some amazing improvisation. Well, it was more that the dancer would improvise, and then the choreographers would select certain movements. That’s how we eventually shaped it for the shoot, filming it from many different angles and capturing a lot of material – but in the end, we used just one shot. It was so powerful to watch him move like that, and I felt we had to keep it exactly as it was. We had plenty of other shots we could have edited in, but that one felt like it was enough.