Edgar Ramírez (San Cristóbal, Venezuela, 46 years old) was a pioneer by succeeding at the same time in auteur cinema and television with the same project. It was with his interpretation of the terrorist The Jackal in the miniseries Carlos (2010) by Olivier Assayas, screened in full as if it were a film at film festivals. Since then, the Venezuelan advances in both media and is handled with ease in the American, Latin American and European industry. He is the producer and protagonist of his latest success, A Man from Florida, a series that, according to Netflix data, has been one of the most watched content on its platform in recent weeks.
In it, an ex-policeman in debt has to return to his hometown because of his gambling debts has to track down the girlfriend of the mobster to whom he owes money and with whom he maintains a dangerous love affair. The plot becomes entangled and ends up involved in the search for a delirious and lethal treasure. The actor who was Gianni Versace for Ryan Murphy, has already shot the second season of Dr. Death, embodying another real character, the Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who murdered several of his patients, obsessed with advancing his medical experimentations. The Venezuelan does not hide his political opinions in an increasingly polarized Hollywood and attends us in a telematic conversation from Paris. There he shoots with Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña the musical Emilia Perez, the new film by Jacques Audiard (A prophet, Of rust and bone).
Question: The Florida man is the American equivalent of Lepe's man, the guy who's a constant joke (or meme).
Answer: In Venezuela we have two similar names. We make Galician jokes. But also about the gochos, is that just the region from which I come.
Q. What a way to close a circle... He is a tragicomic character, he himself generates, unintentionally, many of the problems he has to solve.
A. He's a deeply dramatic guy, he exaggerates everything. It's like the Road Runner's Coyote, trying to reach what he thinks he needs, ends up blowing everything up in his face, running over a train... He has such self-assurance that it is touching. He believes himself invincible not from haughtiness, but from naivety. Behind the grotesque is the absurd, behind the absurd is the comedy and behind the comedy is the drama. They all connect.
Q. Don't you feel some ambivalence that Cannes, the festival that raised you and where you are a regular, faces the stories of platforms like Netflix?
A. We are living in real time a radical change not only in the way we consume content, it is also an existential change related to the technological explosion in general. Many times, I also find myself in conflict with this issue. One of the things that relieves me is trying to be a man of my time and being open to discussion. The experience of watching a movie in a movie theater, living such intimate emotions in such a public way is irreplaceable. I felt it again last year when I was a juror in Cannes and I wouldn't want my nephews not to be able to live something like that.
Q. But when the viewer finishes watching 'A Man from Florida' on Netflix, they can discover five other works of his without leaving the platform...
A. Yes. On the other hand, platforms have given us the opportunity to democratize content, that a more humble production, in a country that historically has no audiovisual industry, suddenly becomes the most watched content in the world. How many beautiful films, in which we industry professionals firmly believed, in the end reached very few people...
Q: On the other hand, screenwriters are now on strike in the United States fighting, among other things, against those platforms.
A: Writers have every right to strike. I fully and firmly support their struggle, that they be paid properly, with the right contracts. Technology is a double-edged sword. The debate we have to face is how we protect that experience of showing content and at the same time expand it, protecting its authors and also the viewers ...
Q: This reminds me that you wanted to be a diplomat and that you dealt with political issues when you were a journalist.
A: All human interaction is political. Even declaring yourself apolitical is a political position. You can't escape a human phenomenon like that. Making a film is one of the most political acts in the world, because it is a group of people who have to agree to achieve something collectively. I have been lucky enough to work in many places around the world: in Hollywood, in Latin America, now in Europe... I come from a deeply polarized country and the iron affiliations, which also arise in the industry, give me a lot of dandruff. I have learned from the experience of the great tragedy that was experienced in Venezuela that collective obsessions are to be feared. I want to work even in Bollywood!
Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramírez in a frame from the miniseries/film 'Carlos', directed by French director Olivier Assayas.
Q: You participate in Amnesty International's Do Not Disparate campaign, a campaign for gun control in the USA with which you remain politically engaged.
A: What many people are proposing is not to eliminate the use of weapons, as other people would like, but to want greater control. It can't be that you're too young to drink but not too young to buy an automatic rifle... For those of us who were not born in the United States or in that culture, it is very difficult to understand.
Q: But a series like 'A Man from Florida' is full of characters who use weapons...
A: Fiction is fantasy; It is sublimation. I don't think there's a direct correlation. What book is more violent than the Bible? The reality is that a country with greater violence in its cultural manifestations such as Japan, in manga and anime, is also a much more peaceful society than the United States. So that theory that the violence of fiction is going to carry over to real life... It's very complicated. It is the perfect pretext for the lack of political will for gun control. In the campaign we defend that the only place where a gun should be is on a screen. Millions of people play the same video game considered violent and not all of them are killing people. Let's get serious and look for the real reasons.
Q: Guillermo Arriaga, a mentor and friend of his, once said in this newspaper that, when one writes, one investigates oneself, one's own life. Does the same thing happen to an actor?
A: It exists as a secret dance between actors and characters. I talked about it a lot with Juliette Binoche when we made a movie together. She said that in the process of understanding a character you had to find something inside yourself that would make you understand it. In my case, first comes the curiosity, the need to want to go through the experience of the character.
Q: What if they are especially seedy characters like a terrorist like the Jackal or like in Dr. Death?
A: Sometimes you find awesome things in your life and manage to work for the character. Other times you don't, and you're not able to understand it. I'm still digesting the shooting of Dr. Death, I finished it in April. He is a seedier character than the Jackal, because the terrorist uses ideology as a justification to murder people he often does not see or know. Although you cannot justify it, you understand that it is a somewhat more remote process. But this doctor knew the name of his patients, their hopes, their pain, their relatives... That betrayal of trust agitated me too much, although it still kills thinking that it helps a greater good. It was hard and many of the conclusions I will draw from that character will come with time.
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