In two years, Sebastián Lelio (Santiago de Chile, 48 years old) chained three films, two of them in English, and collected countless awards, including the Oscar.
She still remembers that to promote
A Fantastic Woman
—with which she won the Hollywood statuette— at the 2017 Berlinale, she was only able to miss a few hours from the shooting of
Disobedience,
a love drama with Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz as two ultra-Orthodox Jews in love.
“And when I released
Disobedience,
I was already filming
Gloria Bell,
with Julianne Moore”, he recalls from Toronto via video call.
“Personally, and I say this with all the respect in the world to those who have had a hard time, the confinement of the pandemic was good for me to stop and think,” she insists.
And that stopping and thinking led him to
The Wonder,
which after its screening in Telluride (Colorado, USA) and Toronto is competing this Thursday in the official section of San Sebastián, and starring Florence Pugh, the actress of the moment for her talent and because of the controversy that has surrounded
Don't worry, my dear
,
at the Venice competition, because of his disagreement with its director, Olivia Wilde
.
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Sebastián Lelio: "My protagonist is someone whom society tells him he doesn't deserve a movie"
The Wonder,
which will arrive in commercial theaters before its premiere on Netflix on November 16, returns the period costume to the wardrobe of Pugh, who became famous with
Lady Macbeth
(2016), before entering productions with a higher budget, such as
Little Women, Midsommar
or
Black Widow.
She brings enormous physicality as she fills the frame as Lib Wright, an English nurse who is hired by the forces in rural Ireland in 1862 to observe a 12-year-old girl who has not eaten for months, and who ensures that it feeds on manna from heaven.
Saint or impostor?
And, as Wright soon discovers, who cares if there is a miracle in this muddy, poor Midlands town?
“She is the gateway to a patriarchal society.
And as a good rationalist, she only believes in science, in research, and senses that somehow the baby is being fed.
That is why there are many moments of reflection and that is why I needed an actress who would make her thoughts almost palpable, ”develops the Chilean.
fanaticism against humanity
In
The Wonder
the game does not progress between miracle or science, but between fanaticism and humanity.
“What matters is that Wright and the public discover the mechanics, because once they reveal it, they understand the reason, a devastating reason, which is what led me to make the film, and that pushes the nurse to blow up her health system. values”, insists Lelio, who has projected himself in that character.
"Pain traps and alters morale."
I admire Florence more every day, that's all I can say”, says the director about the disagreement between his leading actress and Olivia Wilde, the director of 'Don't worry, dear'
The film has been benefited in various aspects by the pandemic.
“It's almost my first film after the Oscar, because on cinematographic scales two years are nothing.
In that winter of 2017 I already knew that I was going to chain these projects and I decided that at the end of them I had to stop.
The covid lengthened the time for reflection and pushed me to make a new cinema," says the Chilean, who defends this theory: "You can see in today's cinema that many films are the daughters of the crisis we went through."
In his case,
The Wonder
defends the prevalence of science.
"Reason more than magical thinking, or science more than superstition," he replies.
“But let me go further: the film illustrates a collision between belief systems.
Science versus faith.
The Wonder
it is itself a construct and uses the same mechanism by which the viewer believes Lib, which Lib develops to believe her own story.
At the end, a question is thrown to the public: what do you believe in?
As a final note, Lelio insists: “It is not worth sheltering in thought, because by its very nature a thought can be deconstructed, altered.
That is, what is happening today, with the attacks on science, with the vilification of rationality, and people who claim to have known an immutable truth, what the rest of us call fanaticism.
The Wonder
is a film against fanaticism and its dangers”.
Florence Pugh, in the center, with Tom Burke and Kíla Lord Cassidy, in 'The Wonder'.
Two other names, beyond Pugh, chain
Lady Macbeth
and
The Wonder:
the screenwriter Alice Birch, who has adapted the novel by Emma Donoghue together with Lelio;
and cinematographer Ari Wegner, an Oscar nominee for
The Power of the Dog.
“The first time I saw Florence was in
Lady Macbeth,
and I was very impressed”, recalls Lelio.
“But Emma, Alice and I wrote the script without names in our heads.
Florence entered the end in a very fast way.
Three days passed from the time she received the script until she signed the contract, to the great joy of everyone, especially Alice.
We had a movie and we started looking for the actress to play the girl."
And from the stands, how has Lelio seen this disagreement between her leading actress and Olivia Wilde in the promotion of
Don't worry, dear?
The Chilean breathes, smiles and says: "I admire Florence more every day, that's all I can say."
Lelio has a natural fondness, “never programmatic”, for female lead characters.
“In my first exercise in film school I already made a parallel story between the lives of four women.
We're talking about 1997, so she's always been there,” she replies.
“I look for characters who deserve, because of their feelings and desires, a film where society doesn't seem to see it.
With
Gloria
it is evident, there is a deep and real connection, and because of that impulse I triggered all these scripts.
Gloria deserved her movie.”
Actually, there were two: the 2013 one with Paulina García, and
Gloria Bell,
with Julianne Moore moving the character to Los Angeles.
“She is absolutely right [laughs].
However, we are still in the debt of female narratives and the number of female filmmakers.
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