Roberto Bueso has previously screened his prior works (Love Beats, Full of Grace) at festivals of the likes of Málaga and San Sebastián (in the Made in Spain section), but he is now taking part in the latter's Official Competition with El mal padre. He discusses the themes found in the film below.

Cineuropa: Isn’t the film’s title a bit of a spoiler?
Roberto Bueso: A bit, yes. The central character is a bad father to those children who have grown up with a deep wound in them. But he’s someone who, as much as he may have got things wrong, and even if he carries that burdensome label, tries to make amends. Yet it's irksome that it has to be at the very last minute, so you no longer know whether or not it’s a selfish act or an act of generosity. Those kids didn’t grow up with a father by their side.

(L'article continue plus bas - Inf. publicitaire)

Is there any personal inspiration in the script, or is it based on some well-known case?
The bad father is a figure that has cropped up a lot, although I had a good father, albeit not without his flaws, which is common in our parents’ generation and which ours is trying to remedy, even though we’ll make other mistakes that our own children will call out. The script’s origin has to do with my father’s passing and, a few months later, the news that my wife and I were going to become parents for the first time. We were scared by the reality of parenthood; we may have had a more or less decent role model close by, but there were things we’d absorbed at home that didn't seem quite right and that we couldn’t afford to repeat ourselves now. Today, people are reassessing the figure of the man, and the same is happening with that of the father.

Don’t you think the role that Eduard Fernández plays in your feature has something to do with a strict form of patriarchy, which those very fathers have also been victims of?
Absolutely, and it has to do with building masculinity through virility. I think that, if we can free ourselves from that to a certain extent, we’ll be more vulnerable, and we’ll be able to talk about what we’re feeling without that burden of having to be strong. Rather, we can be ourselves, and we will be able to say out loud that we need help or that we don’t know how to do something. That’s very liberating and human. That is changing, fortunately: it’s a major step forward.

The film also portrays the children’s fear of resembling the bad father.
It’s starting to happen to me: I see tics, gestures and phrases from my father that I thought I wouldn’t have and that were painful for me, and I’m trying to shake them off. For example, punishing people with silence - when my father would spend three days without speaking. My wife has done a lot of work with me because I felt that sometimes my knee-jerk reactions led me to do exactly that. We are trying not to repeat the mistakes.

But some things are hard-wired, aren’t they?
Because we’ve normalised them, and they turn into habit. You’ve seen it constantly, and you grow up with it; freeing yourself from that isn’t easy. And when you have an absent father, you’re constantly trying to earn the affection he owes you, and being validated is very important: it’s so painful when a father doesn’t even give you that.

The movie’s dialogues are natural, funny and moving. How do you strike that balance?
When you know the characters well, you’re fond of them, you treat them with respect and you seek to empower them in the writing process. I’d say there’s something about trying to narrate it honestly, and in that case, comedy and drama are tightly interwoven. I try to make that happen in my films. It’s very hard for me to put labels on what I do. I think that’s how life is, as everything gets jumbled up: we’re sitting here so relaxed, and in a little while, you’ll be crying and then laughing.

So would you say El mal padre is therefore an optimistic film?
I want to believe it is. Again, we’ve tried to be honest about these characters’ pain. I try never to do it in a saccharine way. For me, being cold and being embarrassed by emotion are just as awful. In any case, those are the red lines I try not to cross: on the one hand, coldness, and on the other, mawkishness. I look for a balance between emotion and sensitivity in my films, which are hard to define as comedy or drama because they’re character-driven.