Fanaticism in Debate | Overcoming Bias & Finding Common Ground

–When the adaptation of a novel is released, the director or screenwriter is usually asked about that tension of deciding what to remove and what to add. In your case the question changes: How does the filmmaker get along with the novelist?

–I didn’t think it would be so difficult. He obviously knew what it was like to adapt a novel. I also knew, because I have many writer friends who have had adaptations, the insecurity that occurs in the writer when it is done. But what I was not aware of was that I was going to encounter something more difficult to manage, which is the encounter between the me of today and the me who wrote the novel. It was a very particular novel, ‘Blitz’, because I had written it while I was writing ‘Tierra de Campos‘. It was like a release of a vital moment. Then, of course, when you pick up the story 15 years after what you wrote, you confront that writer and it’s like… Why did he make such a big deal of this? At that time I was very close to the main character. On the other hand, in the film, I already felt very close to the woman’s character, who is an older woman who is in another moment of life, that moment in which you are no longer in that kind of competition, in that being “in the market.” And then that subtly changed my life perspective on the novel, even though it is a very faithful adaptation.

–Does the fact that it was a short novel help or complicate it?

–There is always confusion. Novels are not good traveling companions for a film, because they are always too long. And on the other hand, a story, a long story or a short novel, helps, yes.

–Any writer always has a problem when cutting himself because he ends up falling in love with his scenes…

Completely. I think that’s usually the biggest tension. There is a kind of “chaining” to something without understanding that you have to make a transformation. Many times, when I have been asked, because unfortunately for me I have been invited to many conferences on cinema and literary adaptations…

–Unfortunately?

–Yes, because in the end people do not know very well why they have raised this debate. They always think that very good novels make worse movies. And that is a cliché that is not entirely true. In other words, what usually happens is that widely read novels provoke knowledge in the reader that they do not have in a little-read novel. And when he meets her he perceives that there are things that are not there and are missing. At the same time, when people say that “movies are worse than novels,” they subconsciously eliminate films that they don’t know were based on great works of literature. From ‘The Godfather’ to ‘Apocalypse Now’ or even ‘The Leopard, ‘The Holy Innocents’… We forget that these are literary abstractions. Of course, if you remove those that have gone well and leave those that have gone bad, you think that they are all bad. And when you analyze those that have not turned out well, which are usually novels by Vargas Llosa or García Márquez, it happens that the respect with which they have been brought to the cinema has been so reverential that in some way the film is born as a small captive of something that does not fly alone. Azcona always told me that he liked to adapt because he started from an elaboration that someone had done. Maybe he was right. At the time I discussed it with him because he was very contrary. I didn’t like novels being adapted, it seemed to me that it was something that was done because the industry demanded it. It is easier for the producer to buy the rights to a novel than to bet on an original script. The producer would go to the bookstore, buy a book, read it and say “Hey, Victoria Abril or Carmen Maura would be great here!” who then, in the 90s, were like goddesses. It was more difficult to start from scratch. ‘It’s Always Winter‘ and ‘Soldiers of Salamis’ are the only adaptations I have made.

–Why do you see it differently now?

–Over time you become less dogmatic. I used to argue with Azcona and now if I think about it, I understand that it is normal for the industry to seek that claim. But I still think that if you adapt something it has to be to return it to its originality.

–He said that he has become less dogmatic. Does one become more conservative with age? And I’m not just saying this ideologically…

–Less fundamentalist, I would say. I still like movies to contain some discomfort… In fact, when I think about my novels or my movies, I think that being popular, I haven’t had enormous successes. And I haven’t had them because there has always been some discomfort in the stories I told, in the characters I wrote. Something that makes the viewer, let’s say “massive”, if it exists, not feel completely comfortable in the film you are making. So, I like that discomfort because it reveals that one is not so clear that people are one hundred percent defensible, but rather that you think that all people contain something that makes us defective, wrong and even that we have erroneous behaviors. When you put that in your protagonists, there are a series of readers or viewers who say “but what is this?” In this one, for example, I really enjoy those moments where you generate discomfort, which even during filming the actors themselves tell you. David told me: “Holy shit, man, they’re not going to forgive me for this.” And I told him that that is precisely what it is about.

–In ABC Cultural there was recently a debate about whether the director should love his characters or not… [léalo aquí y aquí]

–What I cannot conceive is making a film about beings that do not interest me, that do not matter to me: the heartless, the violent, the people who physically resolve their conflicts. Yes, I have tried to ensure that my characters are not like Mrs. Perfect, that thing where you are watching the movie and you see that no one fails. And it is interesting to make an effort to understand your characters, look at Martin Scorsese with ‘Raging Bull’ or ‘Taxi Driver’, what was disturbing is that he tried to understand them, get into their violent heads but somehow trap them in the difficulty that this had. ‘Raging Bull’ is a movie that I have seen many times since I was 16 years old. Also ‘Stolen Kisses’ or ‘The 400 Blows’: Truffaut identified himself even autobiographically with the characters, but the characters were complex, with erratic behavior, it was not easy to love them. Look at the boy from ‘The 400 Blows’ with his relationship with his parents… It wasn’t this thing now, that since he is a victim and he is a poor thing, we all have to love him. Sure, that’s easy.

–In ‘Blitz’ the economic crisis of 2008 marked the character with the emigration of a generation of architects, journalists, recent graduates in general… I don’t know how the adaptation of the novel fits now in this current social moment, where many things are different from then and many others, heirs of that crisis that has not been resolved…

–In what you say about emigration and the 2008 crisis, there is now a subtle variant: Although the crises return or are always latent, now the economy is not Spain’s big problem. To be fair, the novel was assigned to a temporal context. So what I did was push the character, because of course, ‘Blitz’ has a secret for me. The continuation of ‘Blitz’, for me, was ‘To this side of the world’, which is a film that I made in Melilla with a character who was the character of ‘Blitz’, and that partly due to the crisis ends up working in Melilla on a reevaluation of the immigration containment fence. And his name was Beto, and he was played by Vito Sanz and he had some adventures. And at one point in that film he said… I met my partner in Germany because I had broken up with a partner after five years. That is, it gave data. It was funny because no one saw it, which I was so happy with. And when the time came to adapt ‘Blitz’, one of the things that happened to me was that I realized that that character from the novel no longer exists. So, forgive the digression, as I said, I pushed the character, changed his name, and named him ten years after ‘Blitz’ took place. Now he is a person almost ten years older, he is now around 40. I also took him out of the context of the crisis. These are things I do to not go crazy with my own characters.

[…]

–You asked me before how I get along with my characters. The crisis did not have as much relevance for me right now as the personal and age crisis of a man who is already abandoning this prolonged youth that we live now. Before it was at 26, but now it is at 36. I’ll give you an example: I wrote the novel ‘Four Friends’ at the end of the 90s, when I was that age and felt the end of youth. I made it trying to be very honest with the behavior I had fled from. It is a novel that is still read and those who read it still have a connection because it is a very sincere book. And I think that is no longer done now. In other words, now this thing that has greatly elevated the reactionary world, which is what is politically correct, I denounced it at the time because it seemed disastrous for the literary and cinematographic world. We have to be completely oblivious to what is politically correct in art. Obviously, in social life I am an advocate that no one insults minorities and that no one insults women, but that does not mean that you cannot portray that in films and novels. We return to the case of ‘Raging Bull’. Is it a sexist film or is it a film that portrays sexism so that you can better identify it? I have it very clear.

–Portraying a reality does not imply agreeing with that reality…

–The other day I read it regarding Paco Plaza’s series about bulls. One of the actors had to defend himself by saying that he was playing his role without getting into what the series is about. A few years ago I wrote something that had to do with bulls and I couldn’t get it started because the production companies I took it to told me that it wouldn’t be understood. I told them that it is precisely about two characters who did not understand each other. In this case they were a man and a woman. It has to do with how you put a person completely against the bullfighting world and see that when they meet it they make an effort not to judge it without knowing it. Now it’s too late to go back to it, but when I saw the Paco Plaza series I was glad they had done it. Because I think that is what is needed in the debate. That the debate is not about dogmas but rather about coexistence. I have had some conflicts with this because, not being a bullfighting person, I am not in favor of prohibition because I don’t like to prohibit anything. And I always think that something that causes this to people and that has been going on for so many years, you can’t go and close it from the outside. That is to say, they are things that deserve a much calmer and much more thorough debate than the debate of fans, both on one side and the other. And I think that here, those of us who are not fans, have to give ourselves a piece of skin in that debate. Debates are won in the center, it could be this one or, without comparing them, the immigration debate, the feminist debate, transsexuality… They are not won at the extremes. They gain from people understanding the pros and cons in a reasonable way… I know that they are debates that have nothing to do with each other, be careful, I don’t want to compare them, but I am tired of debates being carried out from fanaticism.

–We live in an echo chamber via social networks.

–On Pilar weekend I was walking down the street with my son and a group of not so young people, who were probably coming from the parade, asked us to take a photo of them. They were there singing and shouting and I told my son to do it for him. When we were taking the photo, one of them recognized me and then started: “Man, Trueba, Trueba, I don’t know what…”. I looked a little at the profile where I was going and as we left one of them started: “Trueba, we love you even if you’re a red guy.” We left and I didn’t care because I’ve been told that many times and because I know that people categorize you too hastily. Then, walking I said to my son: «Can you believe that some kids who have no fucking idea what that word means are calling me red, that my father fought on the Franco side and that my maternal grandfather was killed in the war by the ‘reds’, let’s say, to call them something?« When they say that to me, it shocks me, because I come from a much broader world and broader sensibilities in my family. What a mania to identify terms of 36 in the year 2025. It hurts me because I think everyone is taking society to a place that I don’t like. We are all more complex.

–To return to the film, their relationships and experiences are also complex, they are not archetypal.

–The film, when it is uncomfortable, is because it has to be. David Verdaguer himself always tells me about the sex scene that it was long and uncomfortable to shoot and uncomfortable to watch. And I always answer that it is “necessary”, because that discomfort is what we base our prejudice against women who have grown older. Society disregards them because we do not understand that there can be beauty in something decadent. On the other hand, we have admitted that Sean Connery or Harrison Ford can still be beautiful at 70 and that their belly or bald head does not make them less attractive. Instead, we consider anything that harms, say, “what is not youthful beauty” in a woman to be ugly, when it is not true. The wrinkle can be beautiful, the woman who grows older can be beautiful, and we do not understand this; and that’s why the scene has to be uncomfortable. A sex scene between an older woman and a slightly younger man, or even if they were both older, continues to surprise. And when we shot it – the team was very young with many girls – there was a very tense silence. In that silence, I told them to pay attention because we were precisely making a film about that silence, because it is social silence, that is, even in women’s magazines that would be considered, in some way, the banner of women’s demands, young women and smooth women without wrinkles are abused; of the woman with a filter, of the cosmetic woman. If in a language that is addressed to them that is something so abusive and dictatorial, imagine it in the masculine language.

–I was talking before that the female character in the film “has already left the competition, the market” and that at her vital moment she is no longer in the competition. The one with a phrase from the movie script that comes from the novel: “In Spain you can’t make a living from the arts.” What has it been like to find your place in the industry, if there is an industry in Spain, when moving between cinema and literature?

–In Spain the artistic world is perceived as a world of subsidies, of state aid, because it is a world that needs state involvement in all parts of the planet to exist. But of course, when you travel and get to know the world you realize that here it is practically impossible depending on what arts. My brother, for example, it is impossible for him to have a career as a sculptor if he did not combine it with a drawing teacher at a high school. That doesn’t happen in France, Germany, England… There those people live from their work. In Munich the state has apartments for artists that are impressive. That is impossible in Spain. And you realize, and I feel it because I know that in Spain, and your newspaper is very belligerent in this, the world of the arts is identified as a very politicized world that receives aid and that in some way that disqualifies it from giving its opinion publicly. I have always, and I have tried to do it in the most honest way possible, said that it is not going that way: State aid is incentives to industries equal to those that have many other industries that are not artistic. But this, no matter how much you say it, does not make sense, because it is used a lot as a political weapon, a weapon that is too tense, and which I believe even harms the visibility of cinema and theater within Spain. And it starts from a premise that is not true: in cinema and theater there is a progressive majority, but there are also many conservative people. I work with many of them regularly and we always talk about how it is them who are hurt the most because in some way it makes them invisible as if they did not exist. Then, look at the language: the vision of art in Spain is a vision of “living by the story”, of “making theatre”, of “don’t tell me movies”… The language itself has this pejorative thing.

–But, your position in that industry?

–Well, I told you, in the world of literature it was difficult for me because I was perceived as a person who came from cinema and therefore in literature I was never invited to fairs or literary conferences, and I achieved that thanks to the readers, who placed me there. In the cinema, the suspicion came more from being Fernando’s brother and a bit like a new name that appeared in the shadow of the great figure that Fernando was then. It was difficult to find that they recognized me. With patience you are aware of those prejudices and you simply put one more stone, one more stone, one more stone, and then there is a day where people realize everything you have built. The ease you have to start, because you have relationships and meet people, you have as a difficulty for recognition; but one thing compensates for the other. Both in literature and in cinema I have been very well educated and I have accepted it because I thought it was natural, that the people who had that prejudice were not crazy people who were against me, but rather that it was natural that they had it and I had to live with it.

–And the transcendence? Do you think about what will remain of your work?

–I am a great reader of Pla, and even though Pla had killed himself so that his work would have significance, he always fell into the temptation of saying that time will pass us by. I don’t think much about what will survive, because if I thought about transcendence I would tend toward despair. I see the older colleagues in cinema and literature who were true figures in the 80s and 90s and how little relevance they have now despite how important they were… What will remain of all this? Nobody knows.