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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.
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