One of the recipients of this year’s Honorary Mikeldis at Zinebi is Bilbao native Pablo Berger (the other being regular Almodóvar producer Esther García). We took the opportunity to chat to him about the festival, the prize and his latest feature, the Oscar-nominated Robot Dreams [+lire aussi :
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interview : Pablo Berger
fiche film], which is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Sara Varon.

Cineuropa: Do you have any past history with Zinebi?
Pablo Berger: I have a strong connection with it because I’m from Bilbao myself, and when I started in cinema, there were no film schools in Spain, so my film school was Zinebi. I also premiered my first short film, Mama, at this festival, and it won a Mikeldi, so this is a key event in my life and my career, and to come back again to get the Honorary Mikeldi is like a dream. I don’t know if it’s a Robot Dream, but it’s Pablo’s dream!

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The festival has highlighted your “creative freedom” and “artistic rigour” in presenting you its honorary award.
I can definitely boast of creative freedom in my work – when I made Mama, which I wrote and directed, I called it my punk era. I made it without knowing it, but it really connected with the audience and did well on the festival circuit. The biggest lesson I learned with that short was that if you make films that come from your gut and that you believe in, you will find an audience. And I followed that motto in all of my subsequent works.

As for artistic rigour, I like the word “artistic”; I like the idea that all of my films are very different in their own artistic way. Each one looks very distinctive, but they all have similar DNA. I like the idea that every movie is a challenge and a journey that will take me to an unknown destination.

There was quite a gap between 2017’s Abracadabra [+lire aussi :
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interview : Pablo Berger
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It’s just the process of making an animated film. You have to write it, which is one year; you have to do the storyboard, which is a little over a year; you have to finance; and you have to actually make it – and when you talk about production in animation, you have to hire artists and animators, and that can take a couple of years. So yes, I was completely focused on it; I didn’t do anything else between the two films other than leading some writing courses and travelling.

How hard was it to keep an eye on all of the animation being done in various studios at the same time?
There were two studios, and they were both based in Spain. One was in Madrid, where the biggest team was, with the animation director, the art director and the lead animators, and I was there day to day. Then we had another studio in Pamplona, where there were also many animators. So there was some travelling and there were video conferences, but there were no studios outside of Spain, and there were no artists working remotely, which meant we could control it quite well. Of course, I had a lot of help. We always say that a film “belongs” to the director, but Robot Dreams is not a film by Pablo Berger; it’s written and directed by him, but it belongs to a big team.

Do you have personal experience of New York City in the 1980s, when the film is set?
I went many times in the 1980s, but when I really lived there, it was the 1990s. I arrived in the summer of 1990, to study a Master in Film at New York University. Then I stayed until the late 1990s. I thought it would be sexier to have the film take place in the mid-1980s than the mid-1990s. So, because I had experienced New York in both decades, I said to myself, “I know what it must have been like in the 1980s.” It didn’t change that much – it’s not like now, when the world changes so quickly every year.

This is your second silent film after Blancanieves [+lire aussi :
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interview : Pablo Berger
fiche film]. What problems do films without dialogue pose for you?
I wouldn’t say Robot Dreams is silent; there’s a lot of noise, and it’s got probably the most complex sound design of any film I’ve made. But yes, it’s dialogue-free. And yes, it was written with images. But this element is a pleasure for me. What makes cinema a unique art form is the camera, the editing, and being able to tell the story using images. So for me, it’s not a disadvantage or a problem. There is definitely some uniqueness to the technique: if there’s one main characteristic, it’s that if you don’t have dialogue, you have to shoot from many different angles.