The Spanish film director Juan A. Bayona was in Buenos Aires to promote The Snow Society, his fifth feature film, in which he recreates the Andes area tragedy that occurred in 1972, and how a few survived two months in more than hostile conditions. Produced by Netflixis a candidate for Spain for the next edition of the Oscars, has just been nominated for the Golden Globe in that category and is released this Thursday in theaters and from January 4 it can be seen on the streaming giant’s platform.
“He wants to be called by his first name, Juan,” warns one of the press officers who populate the charming meeting room of a five-star hotel in Recoleta. The warm setting with flowers, the sweet table for the press, and the army of production assistants watching their cell phone screens, contrasts with the extreme circumstances of isolation in which the film’s scenes were shot.
While waiting, an enigma comes to mind. Would Bayona have dedicated himself to directing if his father had not instilled in him a passion for cinema? He and his twin brother Carlos come from a simple family; mother a seamstress, father a painter and installer of marquees in cinemas in Barcelona.
“What is your name?” he asks the chronicler with a seductive Spanish accent when he appears with a frank, relaxed and cordial face when opening the dialogue. “I am fascinated not only by movies but also by everything that involves cinema, standing in line, watching them collectively. I remember the close-up of Christopher Reeves flying in Superman, by Richard Donner, in a Barcelona cinema that recently closed. For someone who lived on the outskirts, going to the center was quite a program,” he says and reveals the mystery that we had posed.
-What does cinema mean in your life?
-When I was little I thought I could fly, and I watched movies where the characters flew. And that behind the windows there were monsters, and Jack Nicholson would come with an ax and smash my bedroom door. That is to say, there is a sense that cinema speaks to you in a more direct way, how you understand the world when you are a child. Then, when you’re older, you start using that fiction to defend yourself. I created a whole world where I enjoyed movies. Then I made films and now I defend myself and make a living as a director. Cinema has helped me understand life, articulate it better and defend myself in it.
-Did your father unleash your passion for movies?
-He was also a big movie buff, we really watched a lot of movies together. As a kid he took my brother and me. I remember that a classic that impacted me was Tarzan in New York, with Johnny Weissmuller.
At 48 years old, Bayona has transformed into a contemporary version of the mythical King Midas: everything he films he transforms into gold. He started directing music videos at 20 and was followed by a couple of short films. He made his film debut with the disturbing The orphanage (2007), starring Belén Rueda and produced by her mentor Guillermo del Toro. It was a box office success as were the following feature films.
“I knew him from festivals where I pretended to be a journalist. Thanks to the radio at the civic center in my neighborhood, I went to the press screenings. We established a friendly relationship in which I showed him my first works, and one night, at dinner with Santiago Segura, he asked me what I was going to do. A terrifying one, I told him. “He got involved and got the financing,” he recalls about the development of the project that earned him the Goya award as a new director.
It would be followed by the explicit and hopeful The impossible (2012), where it told, from the real angle of a family made up of Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and a teenager Tom Holland, the devastating tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean. The film gave its female lead the chance to be nominated for an Oscar in her category, and she won five Goya awards.
The trilogy of mother-son relationships would culminate with A monster comes to see me (2014), with Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver and the voice of Liam Neeson as the tree that comes to life. It is the story of a boy who, in order to cope with his mother’s terminal illness, tries to overcome fears with the help of a supernatural being.
From Spain to Hollywood
After refusing to direct sequels to the popular Twilight y The Hunger Gameswas summoned by his admired Steven Spielberg to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), fifth in the saga, with Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Jeff Goldblum. “Spielberg’s films helped me a lot to understand the world. I share his vision of cinema and life,” he stated in the Master Class that he gave at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, where he received the Astor for his career.
-What did it mean to work with those actors?
-The first time you sit down with them they impose themselves a lot because you have the image of Hollywood stars. Then, the moment you start talking about the character, the movie matters more than all that. They stop intimidating you quickly. Because the first approach is a little intimidating, but then, as soon as you start talking about work, that’s what matters most. There the figure disappears to start talking to the actor.
-Were they permeable to your instructions?
-Yes, also, I have to tell you that I have been very lucky with everyone I worked with. I have never had a bad experience with any. You hear it from colleagues who do, but I from none.
For ten years he was obsessed with the project of carrying out The Snow Society, based on the book of the same name by Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci, who, in 2018, 35 years after the tragedy, had meetings with the survivors with the idea of telling the story from the point of view of those who died. “It impressed me a lot because it brought inner life to some events that I had seen before in the cinema, but not with that level of influence. At that philosophical, almost existentialist human level, which makes the sphere of influence of history much larger than that of the facts, which is what had been repeated in previous films and documentaries,” he says.
The film, a blockbuster that cost 70 million dollars, is visually impressive without leaving aside the moving union of that group of human beings and has an Argentine-Uruguayan cast in which Enzo Vogrincic (plays Numa Turcatti) stands out. ), Agustín Pardella (Nando Parrado), and Matías Recalt (Roberto Canessa).
-How many times did you rewrite the script?
-Many (smiles). Every time we reduced Vierci’s book to a script, we made the mistake of reducing it to actions and dialogue, but what we really needed was an angle that would give new meaning to the story. That was when I turned to what struck me most about the book, which were the conversations between the living and the dead. It was necessary to give cinematic form to that conversation and establish a point of view that would give the survivors the possibility of giving a voice to the dead with their testimonies.
-In your vision there is sensitivity and feeling, without falling into morbidity. Why did you choose to tell this way?
-I think this story delves into the darkness of the story to affirm life. It cannot be understood without talking about suffering and without talking about death, although it is a film about life. It was necessary to find an angle, a point of view that really expressed the story from both places, looking for a bridge, a connection between life and death.
I was reminded a little of Hitchcock when he says that the protagonist of a film can never be killed, because the audience would feel cheated. I would also feel cheated if I boarded a plane and crashed in the Andes, so I think the beauty of this story was to give it the opportunity to “scam the public”, and then follow the story through other characters, because that is what what the protagonists did, giving themselves in life so that the other could arrive.
Filmed during the pandemic, in the most realistic way possible, with scenes that take place in the mountains, filmed in the Sierra Nevada of Granada, it was an unusual logistical job. With the remains of the plane’s fuselage reproducing the accident at more than 2,000 meters above sea level, it was a challenge to film without using cranes and tracking shots. This had an impact on the team and the actors who ended up offering a work almost close to the documentary.
“I am very happy because I am very proud of all the work that the team and the actors have done. We have the support of our colleagues at the Film Academy and the luxury of representing Spain at the Oscars. But the film itself, beyond the happiness that being selected gives us, is the prize,” he summarizes.
We will have to wait until January to know what happens with the Oscar, but the forecast indicates that not only could it be competing for best international film, but also that several areas (acting, photography, music) are in a position to deserve an Oscar nomination.