The 67th Seminci - Valladolid International Film Week opened last Saturday with the Spanish Belgian co-production Staring at Strangers [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Félix Viscarret
scheda film], the adaptation of the novel Desde la sombra, published in 2016 by Juan José Millás, with a cast led by Paco León and Leonor Watling, directed by Félix Viscarret. We met with the director to exchange views on the film.

Cineuropa: You have adapted Millás' novel together with David Muñoz. You also brought books to the screen with your first film, with the series Patria [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]… Do you feel comfortable in this process?
Félix Viscarret: That's true, but it's not a conscious decision, I look back and I think it was perhaps by chance. They are authors (Fernando Aramburu, Leonardo Padura and now Juan José Millás) who I admired and continue to admire, with the added bonus that I admire them not only for their creative work but also for their morals and ethics. In all three of them, each in their own commitment and career, I see an honesty that I would like to learn from. I hope something sticks!

I suppose that to get involved in the film adaptation of a book, which takes so much time and effort, you need to fall in love with the original material…
At the beginning of this feature film, when the producers Gerardo Herrero and Mariela Besuievsky (Tornasol Films) called me one Christmas from Uruguay and asked me if I wanted to adapt this novel, I couldn't say no. I was very happy to. Today we are monopolised by commercial genres, with everything very labelled, so it is exciting to be offered something as original as adapting Millás' universe, with his observation of how we are from different points of view, with a sometimes strange humour, sometimes surreal and absurd, with a disturbing tension. All this was in the original novel, so the offer was very appealing, plus I had been following Millás' work since I was a teenager, when my uncle Manolo discovered this author and gave me two of his novels as a gift.

You’ve tried to keep the essence of Millás, but there are some changes in the plot compared to the original, aren't there?
Yes, but Millás' praise when he read the script was: “The start of the film has a great pace!" When you adapt, the tree is too big to fit in the cinema, so you have to shake it a little bit and the ripe fruits fall down by themselves: you don't feel like you’ve pruned the tree. This way you are left with the core, the trunk of the story you are going to work with. In a novel, more time is given to the journey, to the development, because there’s no rush to enjoy the story in two hours, because you can read the book in one or two weeks. In film you have to pace yourself a lot.

You have also included in the plot (and in the title) a song from 1990 by the former Galician band Golpes bajos, No mires a los ojos de la gente.
The song and book are like a couple that you know will get along and you just have to introduce them. It’s funny that Millás was not aware of the parallels between the verses of the theme of Golpes Bajos and his book. Both he and Germán Coppini, the late author of the song, look for something poetic in the darkness: they do not shy away from the poetry that lies on the edges of normality and play with it, resulting in a disturbing and touching experience.

The film is also on the fringes of several genres, from comedy to suspense, shifting as the situations demand.
Yes, I am more motivated by multifaceted films. It’s fun when the film takes you to original places and that, in this experience, it helps you to better analyse our own obsessions and our obsession with how we remember and narrate our own experiences, which Millás does in a humorous way, but which you can identify with. We have all wanted at some point to disappear, to get away from it all and hide, or even to be in a group or family to which we did not belong, seeking shelter there.