It’s a Sunday morning in a sweltering October in Rome, and to reach the hotel near Via Frattina where Rodrigo Sorogoyen is waiting for me I have to take an absurd detour, because the heart of the city is all cordoned off for a marathon, and I must weave through Via Due Macelli dodging runners. If this weren’t one of the most important contemporary directors, the author of films that are truly powerful and beautiful, like his new The Being Loved, I might have given up: yet here I am, seated on a flamboyantly red damask couch while Sorogoyen, who clearly rose not long ago and hasn’t had to deal with any runners, sits smiling on a sofa opposite me, smiling and available.
And for the start of this interview it seems almost compulsory to begin from the film’s radiant opening, that intensely charged scene where Esteban of Javier Bardem and the Emilia of Victoria Luengo meet in a luxury Madrid restaurant, and we know nothing about them: neither that he is a filmmaker of international renown nor that she is an actress, nor that they are father and daughter who haven’t seen each other for about twenty years, nor that he is about to ask her to become the star of his new film. And at the start they may even come across as almost former lovers, with a deliberate and almost insistently ambiguous air (here is an excerpt of that scene).
“The viewer’s perception is curious,” Sorogoyen laughs, who will speak the whole time alternating Spanish and Italian, “because I don’t think it’s very insistently ambiguous. With my co-screenwriter Isabel Peña [in this film and in all of the Spanish director’s works, nd.r.] we thought it could be interesting to open with this ambiguity, but without overdoing it. It’s an ambiguity that grows from something very common: we see someone enter a room, greet a person, we understand they know each other but we don’t know what their relationship is until we start listening to what they say to understand it. Of course, she could have greeted him by saying ‘Hey, Dad, how are you?’, but it seemed odd to us that she would speak like that at the start of that encounter; we wanted more uncertainty, given the ages of these characters: Esteban is 55, 56, Victoria 33 or 34, they have about a twenty-year difference, he is a very young father. And that already says something about the film’s story, because having a daughter at just over twenty isn’t problematic in itself, but it can tell you something about him regarding the relationship he and she might have or have had.”
Regarding this first scene, two things struck me. The first, in that scene, is how the camera stays extremely close to the faces of these two characters. Why did you shoot it like that?
“When I began thinking about how to present this scene to the audience I knew I wanted to begin with something radical, something very strong. Also the way it was shot was quite radical: it was the first day of filming and we did a single take, because I wanted the experience of the first encounter between Victoria and Javier to be as close as possible to that of Emilia and Esteban. We didn’t rehearse it together: I worked alone with Javier on one side, and alone with Victoria on the other, and I forbade them to talk to each other. If we had done 2, 3, 4, 5 takes, the force of the scene and this approach would have been lost, so I chose to do just one, which was very risky. It was the first day of shooting; Victoria had to tackle this extremely difficult scene with Javier Bardem and she asked me, “but it’s the first time I’m working with Javier and you’re doing a single take?”, and I told her to stay calm, because we would shoot for about an hour and a half, improvising, an hour and a half of conversation while they eat, with the sole obligation to recite about ten pages of the script when she would have preferred otherwise. And the scene is radical also from a formal point of view: I imagined that for Emilia and Esteban in that restaurant, at that moment, there was nobody else but whom they had before them, and the way to translate this idea visually was to place the camera behind them, very far away and with a long lens to give the sense that they were very far apart but at the same time pressed against one another: because they are two characters who are very distant, yet very present in each other’s lives. And the camera was positioned there, right behind them and not laterally anymore because every now and then they move, hiding the other’s face: that’s another symbol of the relationship between them.”
That scene is also the first of several key moments between Esteban and Victoria that unfold around a table, or while they are eating. There is the lunch scene on the set of the film they are making together, there is a moment of glances during a hotel breakfast, and then there is a final confrontation that takes place in Esteban’s tent on the set while they both eat a sandwich. Is there a reason for this?
“I think it’s an organic matter tied to how we write stories, because it happens in all our films: we like showing people sitting at a table and eating something, because it’s something very natural and universal to everyone: whether you’re a police officer in a riot squad, or a soldier, you still have to sit down and eat from time to time. In this specific case, we really liked the idea that the final scene, the sandwich scene, would mirror the first one. It amused us that in the first scene, set in an elegant and expensive restaurant, we witness a conversation between two people who can’t tell each other what they must say, while at the end of the film these two people find themselves seated on a plastic chair eating a lousy sandwich like those eaten on film sets and yet they manage to say what they need to say. We liked this mirroring.”
The Being Loved: the film’s trailer
The Being Loved is clearly the story of a father and daughter, and of their difficult relationship. But why did you make Esteban and Emilia a director and an actress and not, for example, a lawyer and a young intern?
“There are two main reasons. The first is because the film speaks to the world of storytelling, of telling stories, which is a very important topic. Already in their first scene the two of them are telling each other a story, that of their lives, and the film underscores that each of them tells a different story. This is a theme very close to Spain’s heart, due to the Civil War: you have your story, I have mine; I cannot impose mine and I must respect that you have yours. The key is that the two narratives somehow approach one another. The problem arises when the two versions are too far apart and when I don’t accept yours. These characters are two storytellers, and so we decided they should be filmmakers, because we liked the idea of making a film where two people must tell each other their stories and mutually accept them while spawning another story yet to come. The second reason comes from the fact that the film world is highly hierarchical, and it was clear to us that by making him a director and her an actress we could place them in a situation where he had to tell her how to eat, how to dress, how to behave: all those things that he never did during her childhood. She, on the other hand, wants to be an actress, wants to get closer to her father, but she doesn’t want that person to tell her how she must behave. Making them a director and an actress was thus the way to put them in the worst possible situation. Doing the same in the world of lawyers, to revisit your example, wouldn’t have been the same, because those kinds of situations would occur less often and with less weight.”
The Being Loved seems to work through a theme that runs under all your films, namely a meditation on what it means to be male today—the role, the ways, the excesses of masculinity. Is that something you’re interested in?
“Certainly. Isabel Peña and I are interested, but I’m not sure I can quite say why. It’s a clearly fascinating theme, just as femininity is. Perhaps it has to do with our upbringing: we are from the Eighties, I was born in ’81, she in ’83, and we grew up with a male-dominated cinema, the cinema of that era, but we are part of a generation that has pushed hard against that model of masculinity.”
As with your other films, The Being Loved is a work of enormous emotional intensity, and Javier Bardem does incredible things, as Denis Ménochet and Luis Zahera did in The Beasts. How do you work with actors, what do you ask of them to reach these results, that incredibly delicate balance between anger and suffering that you find in Esteban?
“The answer is that I don’t really know [laughs], but I think something is already in the script; I believe a actor reading it can find there a sensitivity, a direction, a style. As a director I think it’s very important to choose to work with actors who are sensitive and with whom you can build a rapport: that’s why every time I ask them to talk at length first, to work together first, to understand how they relate to the project. And there’s a third thing: I’m not one of those directors who tells actors ‘you must do this, you must say that.’ That’s not how I work. What matters to me is giving security to my actors. For me actors are sacred, they do the most difficult job in cinema, they are the bravest and at the same time also the most insecure, because they expose themselves bravely. And so I think it’s necessary to make them feel very safe, constantly asking them what they need. There are actors who need very direct guidance, others who need you not to talk to them; some who need positive reinforcement from the director and others who, conversely, want you to tell them clearly when something isn’t working. It’s a matter of psychology: you have to try to understand the human being in front of you, the person and their sensitivity, and what’s the right way to draw out their best traits. All of it starts from the script, from what is in the screenplay, from the film’s own material.
And inside Esteban is there something of you, as a director and as a human being?
“Well, he’s a man and a director, like me [laughs again, n.d.r.]. But he has nothing to do with how I am on set and with the way I like to work. On my sets we’re all friends, we’re all of the same generation, we laugh a lot and there’s always great respect: I’m very put off by acts of violence, I don’t like them. Some directors, at least as I’ve been told, worked by making people suffer, by putting them under pressure: but I can’t imagine that as a good way to work. The Esteban we wrote isn’t only a tyrannical director, but also a sensitive man, a man who loves cinema, who obviously has his faults… there must be something of us in him, a way of understanding life, just like with every other character Isabel and I have created. Definitely, in what being a director is about, when things are calm there are things that can be traced back to me: but certainly not when he gets angry!”
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