http://www.lajiribilla.cu/articulo/%E2%80%9Cel-cine-debe-dejar-un-espacio-para-el-pensamiento%E2%80%9D

Interview with Daniel Díaz Torres

“Cinema must make room for thought”

Lorna Bazán • Havana, Cuba

Released in the 34th International New Latin American Cinema Festival, La película de Ana (Ana’s Movie) was selected by our critics as the best Cuban film shown in 2012. Director Daniel Díaz Torres, whose greatest box-office hits include films like Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown), Kleines Tropicana and Hacerse el sueco (Playing Dumb), has notched up almost a hundred editions of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (Cuban Film Institute’s Latin American Newsreel), about a dozen documentary films, and nine motion pictures.

A critic and professor at the International Cinema and TV School who’s always on the go, Díaz Torres announces new projects, some of which already have a script, as he discusses the various interpretations that we can put on La película de Ana and how cinema, its faces and resources can become metaphors of reality.

Ana in the mirror

“There are classics like Day for night which gave us a cinema-within-cinema plot, but others have used this style as a formal and somewhat playful resource intended to remind us that everything we see in the movies is an artful device to try and reconstruct and represent reality and nothing is really the way we see it. I chose this resource because it sprouts from the concept itself, from the deepest corners of a story that tells us about someone who’s somehow forced to feign –inasmuch as she’s supposed to– and therefore to manipulate the surrounding world as much as herself by giving a fanciful account of a life that never is.

And negative as it may sound, cinema’s also about manipulation. Even in movies designed to be more objective and naturalistic, the framing of the camera is already conveying a different reality. That’s what this film is about. The actress makes up a story full of artificial facts, topics and places, and through that mask she starts revealing her own truths and feelings, as when she speaks at the end about the special period with a very loud ring of truth. We seldom speak our thoughts all the time, using euphemisms instead to say what we mean. Ana wears that mask to do so, and has a profound impact on the foreigners who came expecting to tape the usual platitudes.

All films and especially the documentaries about prostitution are so full of clichés that it’s become almost a genre of itself. My movie pays a little homage to Whore’s Glory, a documentary that won awards at the Venice Film Festival two years ago. At some point you see a sign that says Whore’s Story, even in the same font as the original. Reference is usually made to this kind of documentary, as well as to a recurring fact: the presence in the Island of foreign filmmakers who came to make a blatantly manipulative and superficial movie about the Cuban jineteras (sex workers).

At first Ana delivers, but then the filmmakers are surprised about her passionate words and the way she starts questioning their purposes. She speaks from the heart, and people appreciate that, judging by their applause in the theaters during the Festival, and that’s because there’s still a lot to be said about the events portrayed in La película…. I don’t think cinema is the right tool to do a historical or sociological study of a country’s hard times, but it can certainly be used for that. Ana speaks out, but she feels guilty for telling the truth through a lie. However pushed into the background, her double-talk is to me one of the film’s most impelling features.

This actress who pretends to be a prostitute uses in turn a real jinetera who also has her own set of values and principles. At a given moment she says, “If we start, you go on.” As Ana starts filming her own family and taking shots of a neighborhood party that she edits to make it look vulgar and underworld-like, she realizes how easy it is to doctor audio-visuals to make them favorable (or not) to something and becomes aware of her ethical responsibility towards the whole thing. The movie shows that it’s quite easy to lie in a movie, on TV, etc., the reason that it ends when her own new film starts and doublethink about her day-to-day begins to set in, precisely when she herself has changed.

Of all my films, this is the one that comes closest to the tone I wish to attain. I don’t want to stick to comedies of manners. I’m not against commercial cinema, I like to get through to the audience, but leaving my message at the level of jokes is the easy way out. I’d rather enjoy a baseball game or a party.

Cinema should try and find a way of being entertaining to people and making them think at the same time, and that’s why we wanted Ana to be a very human character, proud and ethical despite her weaknesses. We tried to avoid any cynical character. Ana manipulates her husband –who feels professionally frustrated due to some codes and prejudices we have to deal with here– but he in turn makes good use of it all, not without a certain degree of opportunism. Everyone has their reasons to do what they do, even the German guy, who is alleged villain.

Prostitution is approached metaphorically. First of all, it’s the exchange of sex for money, so most of the time a prostitute must never turn down a client, not unlike what we do sometimes in our professional life when we make concessions and do things we dislike in return for a benefit. That’s when we hear people say, “You’re prostituting yourself.” La película… does not end saying she will become a film director or something better, but at least we know that she will do something different. At the end the character has another view of her environment and her goals in life.

Using the cinema-within-cinema resource worked just fine because of all the manipulation involved, which we notice as soon as Ana gets a camera and starts filming her own real world. Since one of the foreign filmmakers is a left-winger and doesn’t want to manipulate anyone, he fails to realize that he’s forcing her to do so the minute he gave her the camera.

The so-called self-ethnological documentaries are very fashionable nowadays, as befits a certain democratization of audiovisual work, but they try to be truthful without taking into account cultural influences that turn them into very conventional, cliché products. All of us take such a risk, even the most experienced filmmakers, for lack of information and culture, and sometimes we’re just conveying provincial views. To give you an example from La película… : the Austrian producer told me, “A detail that Cuban audiences find significant is not important at all in my country, the fact that the sister’s husband comes from Miami. In Austria we couldn’t care less where he comes from. To me, he’s a big-headed and high-handed guy that she dislikes for something from the past.”

Now and then we bring up topics in our films that we think anybody in the world can understand and find important, but we’re wrong. If we compared the migration issue in Cuba with the thousands of Africans who try to reach Spain in open boats and die trying, or the tragedy of entire populations fleeing from war zones, we wouldn’t play down the importance of our own problems, but we would rank them accordingly. When we reflect very local subjects, the challenge lies in the ability to turn local into universal. Some directors have made it, and I’m thinking of Fernando Pérez’s Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) or Suite Habana; [late director] Titón’s Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) or La última cena (The last supper); and Humberto Solás’s Lucía, but it’s certainly difficult to give a local issue another dimension and still be truthful.

La película de… another woman

This script had been made around six years before. I made Lisanka first, and fortunately I had some time after that to think a few things over, for I realized that this story is the story of this actress, and that’s why it’s ‘Ana’s movie’. It’s a polysemic title, since it’s also the film that she’s making. I thought about the age of my character –which couldn’t be very young because a twenty-something has her whole life ahead of her– and who could play her, and I said, Laura de la Uz. Laura is an exceptional actress who has played very good supporting roles since she starred in a classic Cuban film of the mid-1990s like Madagascar, but no leading roles ever since.

Laura made the film possible, as a good performance wouldn’t have been enough. I needed someone who could give something of her own to Ana. We spent a lot of time reading the script, first with Laura, then with Yuliet Cruz, and later with Tomás Cao. Everyone offered new ideas, particularly Laura. A scene like the one on the roof was only outlined in the script, but she got so emotionally involved with the character that we decided to go ahead with it after all.

I couldn’t help centering the whole film on her, although Yuliet was a worthy counterpart. At some point she spurs Ana on a bit and gives her fresh impetus to move on to the second half of the movie, and always offered many opinions and ideas. I call into question my role as movie director here, because all I do was make sure that they felt as free as possible to make contributions rather than limited by a script. Changes were made, but fortunately in line with what we wanted. Somewhere I read that the film starts as a comedy and ends as melodrama. As I see it, it never becomes dramatic because there’s always a certain tone of irony. It does get gradually bitter, but it’s more drama than melodrama.

I’m so grateful to the cast, even the foreigners, for their devotion. Oddly enough, I hardly had any time to do any previous work with them –we would meet online from Venezuela– and it was risky, since the German can’t speak a word of Spanish but had to memorize his lines and make them sound credible, and that’s how he had to get inside his character. The Austrian speaks Spanish, so it was easier with him. I was worried, because we only had one day to talk about the film before the shooting started, but they were very kind and hit it off with the Cuban cast right away. It was a benefit of coproduction, as the story needed two foreign actors who didn’t speak Spanish so that the scenes in which they talk and Ana doesn’t understand could make sense.

This has been my least time-consuming movie: five and a half weeks and 26 calls, including three repeats. I was surprised at how fast we were going even when we were shooting in dozens of locations, some of them very difficult ones like the seafront avenue, where we had to interrupt part of the traffic. I don’t like to do a lot of rehearsal on set because I think it’s bad for spontaneity, so I spend more time reading the script. And I like to make room for improvisation, as long as I’m sure about what I want from each scene.

The owners of the script

Eduardo del Llano and I have worked together before and, despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. Eduardo had first heard about the story from Tamara Morales, and we both thought it would be a good idea to capture it on a script to make the most of the elements of simulation and manipulation and the ethical bounds an actress would be facing. I have a great deal of respect for my cast, unlike other directors who treat their actors like dolls that come in and out of the scenes and stay in the back all the time, although they end up with interesting films sometimes. I have never even tried to appear in any of my films precisely because of my huge respect for the cast.

I had worked with Eduardo before in classic comedies like Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas and Hacerse el sueco, but we managed to put the right spin on the script and bring it closer to what some people call ‘dramedy’ and the Italians describe as ‘tragicomedy’. I’ve also worked with scriptwriter Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, and for my next movie I’ll be with Alejandro Hernández, a Cuban scriptwriter who lives in Spain and teaches at our International Cinema School. However, my great work experience with Eduardo let communication flow perfectly and us do things the way we did.

He has grown as a director –not only of many short movies but also the film Vinci– and has a far greater command of cinema’s language. We don’t see eye to eye about everything, and although we sometimes have disagreements –luckily!– and even a good argument or two, we get on well and learn from each other. I was very happy for him when he won the Coral award for Best Script of the New Cinema Festival, especially because he has a long string of scripts under his belt and it was about time they recognized his work. 

On the road to the audiences

After the nationwide premiere comes a real mix of different festivals. We’ll try to enter various circuits through ICAIC, but that’s up to the undependable selection made for these contests. Everything is in unexplored territory. We waited expectantly to see how film would sway the producer, and as it turned out he was very impressed with the Cuban audience’s reaction in Yara Theater. In his opinion, the film may relate very well with the Austrian-German context. I have my doubts about the effects of dubbing, an indispensable requirement to show it on TV in those countries.

As an example of how La película de Ana can work nicely on foreign screens there’s Stephen Bayley, an Anglo-American theater director with close ties to filmmaking. Impressed by Laura’s performance, he recommended the movie to the American actress Annette Bening and a member of the Hollywood Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences], who went to see it on their own, liked it very much, and then spoke for almost two hours with Laura de la Uz. I joined a good part of their conversation, which I found highly motivating and made me feel that my movie had made it beyond the local context and could reach other places around the world. And that’s important, as Cuban cinema in general benefits when a Cuban film makes a major impact abroad. So we’re waiting to see how La película de Ana will do out there.