‘The daughter’ is already in our cinemas. The last dose of suspense icily calculated from Manuel Martin Cuenca puts us on the phone with one of the most unpredictable filmmakers in our cinema. We chatted with the director about his great new movie.
Tension and containment
Kiko Vega (KV): Did you feel more pressure after the success of ‘The author‘?
Manuel Martín Cuenca (MMC): No, not really. I feel the same pressure with every movie. Be aware that you can be wrong, but I have gotten used to taking as many risks as possible and making it a game. I’m not afraid to take risks. Also since I shoot outside the city, I isolate myself, I stay to live where I do it, and I don’t have that pressure: I enjoy it to the fullest and if I’m wrong I’m wrong. But in life you have to take risks and play and make each movie differently. You still put the stamp on it, even if you don’t want to, unconsciously.
KV: In the film what you say breathes a lot, tell me about the location, about that mountain of madness.
MMC: For me it is fundamental. I always do it. I don’t start writing until I put a story in place. I go to that place, I do research, I meet the people, I see the space, I imagine the history there … I take a trip to that universe that you want to create. For me that is fundamental. For me the first thing is the geographical and then the story. Space speaks, and space is where stories, life, are located.
KV: In your films you move between taboos like a fish in water. Were you afraid that more criticism could come for dealing with the issue you handle in ‘The daughter’?
MMC: You are always worried about touching songs that can sting, but I also think art is talking about what people do not want to hear, it is not pleasing. On the one hand it worries me, but on the other it also excites me to dare to do that. I feel very free and fortunate to have made the films that I have made and to treat the stories that I have treated in the most stark and lucid way that I have ever known.
KV: You return to work with Alejandro Hernández, a relationship that has already been established. Do you no longer see yourself writing alone or do you get bitten by the bug?
MMC: Yes, yes, it itches me. Now I am writing another script with someone else. Writing is an encounter. Alejandro and I are great friends, we find ourselves writing a first script that was never shot. I always say that we became friends between the lines of writing. Our work is an exploration, an encounter that must always be alive, but obviously we both do things on the other hand.
KV: Is this cruel thriller so yours the place where you feel most comfortable?
MMC: I’ve never thought of my films as thrillers, but then they come out that way. But since my first film (‘The Weakness of the Bolshevik’) I have always been interested in dosing emotion and mystery. I believe that anything you want to tell has to have mystery. It is not something that I have consciously elaborated but it is a knowledge that the cinema that I have seen has provided me and it has shocked me. Somehow that comes out unconsciously, because I am not mathematical or intellectual at all. I get carried away by what happens to me.
KV: How was the casting for Irene?
MMC: It was a very long process with my casting directors, Eva Leira and Yolanda Serrano. We saw a lot of people in Jaén, Malaga, Seville, Madrid or Barcelona. We saw about 2000 girls until we reached Irene Virgüez, that she was very young when she did the test. I was 13 years old. I found her mixture of innocence and perturbation fascinating, and I loved her naturalness. She is a very not strident person, and I tend to be restrained and take the actors there, she already had it as a series. On the set he called her ‘my Japanese actress’ because she has incredible acting restraint.
KV: Are there good and bad in your film? I think another great success is not knowing who is what.
MMC: You said it, they are all good and they are all bad, like human beings. Unfortunately most of the evil in this world comes from ordinary people who lose their reference, who lose their bearings. And that we can all be. On the one hand I try to understand everyone, follow them, not judge them, that nobody seems good or bad to me. Hell can be full of good intentions. Each character reacts in a way in extreme situations, it is the acts that speak. There are no good and bad, things are not black or white. The world is not digital, it is analog and analogies are much more complex.
KV: How was it for Patricia López Arnaiz to return to a convulsed motherhood after ‘Ane‘.
MMC: You had a magnificent delivery. We rehearse a lot, we prepare the character a lot. To me later I like that they let themselves go, that they interpret unconsciously, that the body is speaking and that the silences and what is not said is loaded with meaning. He delivered in an incredible way, a great journey that we all took together.
KV: How do you get to Vetusta Morla? They have achieved a soundtrack that is very special.
MMC: I was very clear that the film had to have a very naturalistic light, use natural light and find the space and time to have that light. It was also clear to him that the sound environment and the music had to be atmospheric, electronic, giving a contrast to the naturalistic photographic approach. I wanted something that came from sounds that might be in nature, but processed electronically. I like old Morla a lot, but not only at the song level. I really like the sound work they handle, their bases. Thinking about what musician or what group could make the music I dreamed of in Spain, I came across them. I called them and proposed about the music. I did not talk about songs, I talked about what is in the second or third term in their music, and they found it an impressive challenge. Make music with the environments we record. From there they were musically inspired and built a soundtrack that gives the feeling of emerging from within the screen, it is not a soundtrack that is outside. They are great musicians.
KV: If I don’t say it, I’ll burst: during the third act, examples of the grand-guignol from the early 2000s came to mind, but it sure is my thing. What cinema you are passionate about and influences you.
MMC: As a viewer, I really like a tradition of Spanish cinema that goes through Fernán Gómez from ‘The strange journey’, ‘La tía Tula’, ‘Furtivos’, Buñuel … There is a tradition of Spanish cinema that I soaked through much. And then there is a European current that I am passionate about. Chabrol, Melville … depending on the time of your life you are discovering and soaking up different authors, like Haneke. The cinema that influences me is from that tradition of our cinema that I passionately embrace and contemporary European and Asian cinema.