The four awards it won in the ZonaZine section of the most recent Málaga Film Festival serve as a seal of approval for Join Me for Breakfast [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Iván Morales
scheda film], the feature debut by Catalonian helmer Iván Morales. The film is being released in Spain today, courtesy of Filmax, and we met up with Morales in one of the theatres of Madrid’s Renoir Princesa cinemas, where he broke down the elements underpinning his first work.

Cineuropa: Music plays a prominent role in your debut feature…
Iván Morales: Sometimes, you connect with another person through songs – they’re like emotional reverberations.

The title of your film alludes to the fact that not many people stay for breakfast after spending the night with another person. Is that quite common these days?
I don’t know, because I’m not on the market; I have a partner. But that’s already been explained by those who talk about fluid relationships. It’s also true that our bonds with one another depend on the society we belong to: relationships, bodies and connections are petering out. I don’t think it’s a good or a bad thing; everyone should enjoy themselves as best they can and live out their desire, love and sex – and get as much pleasure as possible, without bothering everyone else. But it’s true that connections are important, and that forging them and making them healthy and robust is not easy, as they require commitment.

Is this social climate that we’re living through leading to disorientation?
Those of us with more baggage are able to compare it with other eras, but we are all living through the same social context. It’s complicated. Heartbreak gets brought up quite often when I talk to my young acting students. Because we are not allowing ourselves the space we need to fully experience heartbreak, which forms part of any person’s growth: we run away from it, we medicalise it and make an issue out of it, turning it into a mental-health disorder. How can a person steel themselves emotionally, in a healthy way, if they don’t look heartbreak in the eye?

In your film, one character impersonates Pier Paolo Pasolini, shooting a documentary like the Italian filmmaker.
It’s an idea that popped into my mind at one point, and I recycled it for this role. I saw Love Meetings on TV when I was little, and I wondered: what is this? I thought that if I ever shot a non-fiction, it would be like that. And so, it occurred to me that it could be Natalia’s (Anna Alarcón) project. She’s a girl from El Raval who’s a waitress, but she has the audacity to film like Pasolini, as you don’t need to be a professor to make movies.

The film revolves around four characters. Did you film each one of them in a different way?
The aim was to shoot each one while seeking out empathy, showing the alienation that society forces us to spiral into. That’s what I asked of the whole crew, covering everything from the editing to the sound and the cinematography. And so, the character of Salva is shot from very far away, while Natalia’s is shot at the same height as her wheelchair and with a twitchier camera; Carlota’s character is explained through zooms. These are things that aren’t that obvious to the viewer, but rather, they’re intuitive: we use the weapons of film to achieve empathy.

Which of these characters is most similar to you?
I drew more inspiration from my friends. Salva, for example, is an homage to someone who died and who used to sell drugs in the neighbourhood. Carlota is similar to former partners of mine. Omar makes music, like my son. Natalia is the one who’s closest to me: an overwhelmed mother and an El Raval resident who’s trying to juggle her work that puts food on the table with her passion for cinema. And in my stupidest moments, I’m most similar to Oriol Pla’s character.

Has the film changed compared to the stage play?
The ending is different because over the years, I have grown to love my characters more: I punished them a bit in the stage play, as they were always a tad nasty, like the ones in Husbands by John Cassavetes.

Speaking of idols and masters… Are there any others you could mention?
For the first act of my film, I was thinking about Agnès Varda, and for Salva’s one it was Jacques Audiard, as Dheepan [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
Q&A: Jacques Audiard
scheda film] is one of my favourite flicks. I had Wong Kar-Wai in mind for Omar’s chapter and Cassavetes’ Faces for Carlota’s one. Everyone entrusts themselves to their idols and to a kind of film that’s not afraid of getting personal: nowadays, making them means going against the grain, but it’s necessary.