Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas • Director de Luna
"Lo primero que dije fue que teníamos que hacer una película en donde los personajes no pudiesen tocarse físicamente entre ellos"
por Olivia Popp
- El director español habla sobre rodar toda una película con actores en trajes espaciales, inspirándose en el cine independiente y consiguiendo magia espacial con un presupuesto pequeño
Este artículo está disponible en inglés.
From Gravity [+lee también:
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Cineuropa: You’ve dealt with a number of distinct genres across your filmography, such as war films and dystopia, and now you're working with science fiction. What brought you to this particular story?
Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas: I don't have a particular reason; it's not because I like science-fiction movies. I wanted to create a place where the characters could be isolated. They are not only isolated there on the Moon, but they’re also isolated in their own spacesuits. That was important for us – that’s why we put them on the Moon. We could have put the characters in a desert, in Iceland or something like that. But on the Moon, there is this utter isolation.
This constraining environment was actually more conducive to creating something compelling.
What I have to show in the movie is how they feel: this isolation. That is important. In the wide shots, you only see people with suits on. You can’t even see the actors, right? And that's why I like that, because I can put the camera here, see the faces and feel the agony. I like that in the movie they never take off the suits. The first thing I said was that we had to make a film where they could never physically touch each other. You have no skin to touch. You can’t dry your tears with your hands or other things that we do here on Earth. We are losing sight of the value that the touching of skin on skin has, or that a hug has. That's why I wanted to make it so that they can never take the suits off, and that's why we never see them go into the space shuttle.
You use a few different spacesuit costumes throughout the film, including a base, white one as well as one with something that looks like gold foil. Can you talk about how you developed these?
We needed ones that you could believe in, so we rented some parts of the costume from the USA, those from the movie Ad Astra. If you look at the helmets, they’re the same, and then we added some things to them. I didn’t want anybody to have anything too fantastical come to mind. For these kinds of movies today, you do the shoot with the helmet but without the glass, because you have too many reflections. In films like Gravity or Ad Astra, you add the glass in VFX. Here, we made the entire movie with the helmet glass because we wanted the actors to also feel the claustrophobia. I think it's really good work by Edu [Eduardo Mangada], the DoP. Of course, it’s unrealistic to think that we wouldn’t have reflections in the movie. We didn't clean up any reflections with VFX. But when you see the reflections of the other actors in the helmets, it’s like magic to me.
Did you have any references for your overall style?
I saw all kinds of movies with a bigger or a smaller budget than ours. But I did have one reference: the film Moon [+lee también:
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How did you work with the actors to cultivate the psychological aspect of the film?
What I did was speak with the actors all the time during shooting. For this film, we didn’t have too much time. We shot it in June and finished by 1 July, and I completed the editing in ten days in order to send the film to Sitges. It was a very fast shoot, but I spoke a lot and I listened to them a lot, because if the actors don't believe in what the characters are doing, they can’t make the characters real.
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