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Paco Plaza: "There is a kind of dictatorship of youth and beauty"

2022-01-27T03:30:21.007Z


The film director premieres 'La granny', a horror film in which the devil is old age The film director Paco Plaza, at his home in Madrid. Víctor Sainz The film director Paco Plaza (Valencia, 48 years old), creator, together with Jaume Balagueró, of the successful saga [Rec] , premieres The Grandmother after several delays due to the coronavirus. The confinement stopped filming, and Vera Valdez, one of the two protagonists, 85 years old and with pulmonary emphysema, told her: “I w


The film director Paco Plaza, at his home in Madrid. Víctor Sainz

The film director Paco Plaza (Valencia, 48 years old), creator, together with Jaume Balagueró, of the successful saga

[Rec]

, premieres

The Grandmother

after several delays due to the coronavirus.

The confinement stopped filming, and Vera Valdez, one of the two protagonists, 85 years old and with pulmonary emphysema, told her: “I will stay alive.”

The pandemic altered the film and Plaza believes that also the reading that the viewer makes of the film, the first of which he feels “fully proud”.

Ask.

Do you remember the first sensation that the cinema produced in you?

Answer.

The first time I went to the cinema was with school to see

The Jungle Book

and like any child, I was fascinated by the big screen.

The first time that cinema interested me in another way was in high school.

They took us to see

The Battleship Potemkin

and they gave us a talk.

How important are teachers at a certain age.

There I understood that films did not exist, they had to be made, decisions made and depending on who made them, the film was one way or another.

I thought: 'I want to be one of those who make them', I bought a subscription at the film library and that click occurred, the path from going from a spectator who enjoys to never enjoying the cinema again because I can't abstract myself, stop trying to discover how things are done.

It is a kind of condemnation.

I dedicate my life to this, but I am nostalgic for the ability to innocently watch movies.

Q.

Something similar must happen to magicians when seeing other colleagues.

A.

Sure.

The cinema continues to be a form of magic, of illusionism.

If the viewer were watching a movie thinking they were actors doing a text, they wouldn't get excited, but somehow they flip a switch in their head and it happens.

Horror cinema is the best chronicler of the time

Q.

Why did you choose to tell stories through horror?

R.

When you make a story circumscribing yourself to the limits of the logic of the real world, the field of play is limited, there are things that cannot happen.

When fantasy comes in, you break down that wall and expand: you go from playing on a little football field to Camp Nou.

The evocative, poetic, metaphorical capacity of terror is not found in any other genre.

Appeal to our fears and you can talk about things without being pamphlet or literal.

There are great movies that move you because of what they say, but just as if you read it in a book, if a witness explained it to you or if you saw it in a documentary.

In terror, the way you explain it is as important as what you explain and you can hide deep messages within the plot.

I think that horror movies have always been the best chroniclers of the time in which each work is circumscribed.

Q.

For example?

R.

The exorcist

, for example, is a film that talks about a mother who feels guilty for not taking care of her daughter because she is busy working.

The way Friedkin, adapting William Peter Blatty's novel, tells that is to explain that this girl is possessed by the devil.

The beauty of terror is that it appeals to the viewer's unconscious and we return to the magicians: with my left hand I do something so that you don't see what I do with my right.

You explain stories by telling others, there is something very beautiful in that trompe l'oeil.

Q.

Is the profession condescending to gender?

Is it scary to give non-technical awards to horror movies?

R.

You look very down on terror and comedy.

I don't know if it has to do with a certain elitism of contempt for the popular.

Why doesn't the performance of an actor or actress who makes a blockbuster comedy deserve many awards?

It is as if what is very popular is considered not worth admiring.

There are wonderful comedy or horror films and there is a certain condescension for being more popular genres, as happened with the copla in music.

Time has to pass.

Armando Manzanero or Manuel Alejandro were also looked upon with condescension and now they are vindicated.

The new generations have fewer prejudices and that distrustful attitude towards what is popular is no longer as pronounced as it was 15 or 20 years ago.

We reach absurd extremes of denial of reality, men of 50 dress like C.Tangana

Q.

Did you start thinking about

La Abuela

in

Who kills with iron

, shot in a nursing home?

R.

That had a lot of influence.

I think that all movies are autobiographical, they respond to a vital moment, to some concerns.

To see how my parents grow older, to the vertigo of seeing that the people who have been your guide begin to stop being so.

An aunt of mine had Alzheimer's;

She had been a woman with a lot of initiative and I remember going to visit her one day and having the feeling that the person she had known had vanished.

He looked into her eyes and she didn't recognize me, but I didn't recognize her either.

I remember the pain and confusion that this produces: having someone in front of you who is no longer who you thought you were.

I told Enrique López Lavigne, the producer, that I would like to make a film in which the devil is old age.

We have come to that, to demonize the passage of time, which is paradoxical because turning years is the only way to stay alive,

01:18

Trailer 'Grandma', by Paco Plaza

P.

The actresses of

The Golden Girls

interpreted to have in the series the same ages as the protagonists of the sequel to

Sex in New York

.

What happened between Betty White and Sarah Jessica Parker?

R.

There is an aspiration to perpetual youth.

Frances McDormand swells to work because she is like the only Hollywood star who looks her age.

The actresses of her generation live with an Instagram filter on their faces.

It is very difficult to see wrinkles, slightly flaccid bodies... that is why I liked to show the naked body of an older woman so crudely in the film, because it is as if from an age they staple your clothes and you can no longer appear naked never.

in

grandma

even the photographer tells Almu [actress Almudena Amor] that at 24 she is an old woman and she told me that when she worked in Paris and Milan they told her she was fat.

There is a kind of dictatorship of youth and beauty.

We become more interesting the older we get, but the focus of the hegemonic discourse is on people who are perhaps half done or who don't have much to say and despise the treasure of experience.

In some way I feel that the film is a vindication, a revenge of the elderly against a society that marginalizes them and ignores them.

P.

Why is it revolutionary that an actress does not dye her gray hair?

R.

Because few do.

The first big scare of the film is that she finds a gray hair, a gray hair like a horror sequence.

The idea of ​​hiding the passage of time has been imposed.

It is a taboo.

There is a kind of cultural modesty to talk about death and old age.

It seems childish to me to think that if you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist.

The unfailing fact is that our body degenerates and aging has both good and bad things.

P.

The total confinement caught you in the middle of filming.

How did the pandemic affect the film?

R.

It caught us in the middle of the movie with the uncertainty of not knowing if it was going to be able to end and with an 85-year-old protagonist with pulmonary emphysema.

She told me: 'I will stay alive' and it was chilling to know that it was not a set phrase, that she was talking about a possibility.

The movies feed a lot on the circumstances surrounding the shooting.

And in this case it is very different from how it would have been if everything that happened had not happened.

The viewer's reading will also be different.

The figure of an elderly person, going to see your grandmother, taking care of someone elderly or seeing a residence is not the same now as it was three years ago because we all have an inheritance acquired by seeing tremendously dramatic images.

P.

How did you choose Vera Valdez, the protagonist along with Almudena Amor?

R.

Arantza Vélez, my

casting director,

showed me a video of a Brazilian group in which she was dancing naked with some veils. I was mesmerized. It was going to be a Spanish actress, but I was fascinated when I saw her. Then I investigated her life and discovered that woman who is like a mythological animal, a centaur. In his gaze I saw the girl, the teenager, the woman and the older lady. They were all in there. Turning years is not to evolve, but to accumulate layers. You never stop being the child, nor the adolescent, everything settles and it's like the rings of a tree trunk, but at the core you never stop being who you are. It's you, your parents, your grandparents... That's why I liked to play with the idea of ​​the Russian doll, because it talks about a woman who has many women inside.

P.

You usually bet on little-known actresses like Almudena Amor, Sandra Escacena... Why?

A.

When you see Scorsese's

The Irishman

, the fact that the actors are Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci, which you've seen in other similar characters, adds a lot to the film.

I believe, however, that in the case of horror films it is very gratifying to discover the character before the actor, or at the same time.

Terror requires an empathy with the characters that helps a lot not to have seen them before to be scared.

There are plenty of examples of well-known actors doing it, but I like to feel that the audience's relationship is with the character and not with the actor.

P.

You premiered

La Abuela

at the San Sebastián festival, which for the first time distributed acting awards without distinction of gender.

Do you think it's necessary?

Does it harm the promotion of more films?

R.

It is a somewhat cumbersome subject.

I understand and respect the festival's decision, as a gesture it is laudable, but it reduces the chances of promoting more films because it means eliminating a prize from the list of winners.

Q.

How much attention do you pay to criticism?

A.

A lot.

You can learn a lot from a good, reasoned, negative review.

I've had bad reviews where I agreed with the critic on what he was proposing for a review of the film.

When it is a personal taste, criticism is less interesting.

There are wonderful movies that I don't like and very bad movies that I love.

P.

And how much attention do you pay to the box office?

Is the public always right?

R.

There are films that have a very popular vocation and others that are more aimed at a certain type of audience.

With

La granny

I aspire for horror movie lovers to see it and enjoy it.

In terms of box office, I think we are all a bit confused because now there is a lot of domestic consumption and I don't really know what the rules are.

P.

You usually put South Korea as an example of the compatibility between auteur cinema, genre and popularity.

What do Koreans have that we don't?

R.

Sometimes we compare ourselves with France, but we should do it with South Korea, a country that comes out of a dictatorship, with a population similar to ours, and that was even behind us in terms of literacy: in the seventies it had the same levels as Afghanistan in that aspect.

The Korean Government decided to make a very strong commitment to arts and culture as a way of selling itself to the world.

And it worked.

It has been a brutal promotional tool for them:

The Squid Game,

Parasites,

who won I don't know how many Oscars... There is a commitment to cinema as the flag of a culture and a country abroad and it is something that I do miss in Spain. They invested heavily in the Seoul film school and have achieved a much higher screen share than the French, around 50 or 60%, telling stories that interest their citizens and using above all genre films, thrillers, terror… like great cultural events. The one who won the Oscar with

Parasites

came from making

Memoirs of a murderer

,

The host

, which is a monster movie... There is an unprejudiced approach to the popular genre that is very enviable.

We have had a tradition of seriousness or a propensity for drama that has not helped.

But they are also things that change and sometimes we are a bit self-conscious.

At the time of

Rec

, when Jaume [Balagueró] and I were traveling around the world with the film, we were surprised by the attention paid to Spanish cinema.

We still lack a little self-esteem.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-01-27

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