Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. One of the most haunting films of 2007 is, coincidentally, a film about haunting. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, THE ORPHANGE (Spain's entry for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar consideration) is a beautiful work from first-time feature director Juan Antonio Bayona and first-time feature screenwriter Sergio Sanchez, who has written what will likely be Del Toro's first post-HELLBOY 2 screenplay 3993, the third of his Spanish Civil War trilogy. Quint interviewed these two fine gentlemen in October, when THE ORPHANAGE played at Fantastic Fest, back when very few people knew anything about this movie. But as its release quickly approaches and more people see this astonishing and downright scary movie, fans of good old-fashioned ghost stories are beginning to stir and take notice. I hosted a screening of THE ORPHANAGE in November to a packed house in Chicago, and the post-screening Q&A with Bayona and Sanchez was one of the most fun I've ever done. The crowd was extremely excited to talk about this film and so were the filmmakers. Earlier that day, I sat down with this creative pair for an interview, and we talked about scary movies and other films that inspired them. I tried not to repeat any of the questions from Quint's interview, so hopefully if you read the two together, you'll get a nice sense of these two filmmakers. The film opens December 28, and if you're in one of the city where it's opening, check it out immediately. Enjoy…
Capone: Why are ghost children so scary?
Sergio Sanchez: I have no idea. [laughs]
Capone: It's a device that Guillermo has used before. And clearly a whole series of Japanese horror films have leaned on the idea in recent years. Why does that trouble us so much?
Juan Antonio Bayona: I suppose, terror deals with the transgression, and it's interesting to work with the idea of working with an innocent child turning into something threatening. The movie deals with concepts as childhood, innocence, deformities, sickness, illness, and it's always twisting those concepts around and catching the audience off guard. I like the ideas mixing the concepts and death. I remember one of the movies I used to talk to Sergio about was OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE [1967] by Jack Clayton, which is a wonderful movie that works like a rhyme between horror and poetry. It's a movie about childhood and death. It's quite unique movie that puts the audience in a very tense situation because they don't know what to expect, and we tried to do that. At the same time, genre movie or horror movies or fantasy movies, they have a lot to say about the gaze, if you think about PEEPING TOM. And of course the way a child looks at the world, it's a gaze that is completely free of prejudice and interprets the world in a completely different way than grown ups. If you think about PAN'S LABYRINTH, for example, and think about the movies that Guillermo and I were obsessed with, like SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. I remember we talked about Ana Torrent, the child in that movie, who also is in CRIA CUERVOS by Carlos Saura, where Ana Torrent was playing the child and the ghost, the memory of her dead mother way played by Geraldine Chaplin. We used Geraldine Chaplin in our movie.
Capone: I wanted to ask you about her. The sequence with her where we see her entirely through small TV monitors is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. How did you approach her with this material?
JAB: It was like a dream for us to work with Geraldine Chaplin. We remember her from movies of the '70s, they were political movies, but for us as a child, they were like scary movies because their atmosphere was so strange and weird and eerie. So for us, they were like scary movies. I remember we were very excited about the idea of sending her the script, and when she finally got it, she loved it.
SS: She also had a blast making that scene. The movie is very low budget, so she didn't have much time to shoot that scene. And that whole sequence, the whole thing was shot overnight into the morning, and everything else was shot in the afternoon, all in one day. What they did was put video cameras with Nightvision around, and she kept walking room to room, and it was all done in about two hours. When it was over, when the first take was over, she was jumping up and down with joy and was like, “Oh my God, I've done so much stuff in my career, but this is first time I get to shoot something in the dark. It's so much fun, please, I want another take.” And Juan Antonio had everything he needed, and she was playing like a kid, “I want more, more, more!.” And then she finally walked up to the monitor to see the take, and said, “Oh, you can see me.” And we were like, “Of course, what would be the purpose otherwise.” She was taken away completely with the game that she forgot that this was a movie.
Capone: You play with our perceptions with your screenplay of what is good and what is bad. During the course of the film, threats are coming from different places, and things that seem threatening at first turn out not to be later. And you toy with the audience a bit with our preconceptions that ghosts are bad or that people who are deformed are scary. We learn that those things are not necessarily the case. Is that something you set out to do?
SS: Yeah, it was all there from the beginning, and this is a movie that is completely open to different interpretations. It was interesting to have those either/or concepts like that. For example, the scene where they are about to open the residence and all the kids with Down Syndrome come to the house. It was written as a party where everybody is wearing masks so the appearance of Tomas would not be as frightening. But Juan Antonio took it to the next level and he decided that all those masks should be really scary and frightening, so that the “normal” people were scarier than anyone else. That was one of the ways that we twisted around and played with all those concepts.
JAB: It's funny. That's probably the most crowded sequence in the movie, but you can feel that she's [Laura, played by Belén Rueda] completely alienated from the rest of the people at the school. That's what we were trying to do, trying to leave her alone, make her feel alone.
SS: We also were having dark mirrors of every character. Like Benigna [Montserrat Carulla] is what Laura might have become if…not to give away the ending of the movie. But if Laura hadn't gone there, she might have turned into something like Benigna, this old lady pushing a carriage with a baby doll inside. And the some thing for Simon [Laura's adopted son]. Simon and Tomas are also like mirror figures, the same kid, only one of them is supposed to be normal but be dark on the inside because he's sick and he's worried and he doesn't have a mother. And the other is horrible on the outside [he was born with a deformed face] but all okay on the inside. So it was always playing with concepts like that. It was very playful, a lot of fun, and it invited a lot of interpretations when the movie's over. I wanted to pick up on something that came up before. You mentioned children and why are there all these children in horror movies. Whenever you see a child, there's more. There's the theme of motherhood coming up, and it comes up in many of my favorite horror films. It's there in THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN, THE SHINING, even ALIEN if you think about, DARK WATER, OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE. Every single horror film I enjoy deals with that. I don't know if you've seen it, a Spanish film called WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? And I thought, okay that's bad children and motherhood has nothing to do with it. But no, because the woman is pregnant, and it's actually her baby that ends up killing her from the inside. So there's always motherhood there, and I can't put my finger on what it is that's so scary, but it is there.
JAB: That's probably the best scary movie ever shot in Spain. For me, it's a complete masterpiece. And it's such a shame that the director, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, he only did a couple of movies. He did that and LA RESIDENCIA, which is also an amazing movie.
Capone: I'm seeing your film again tonight before the Q&A, and I'm really looking forward to watching it a second time because I suspect it's going to be a very different film the second time.
SS: It's going to be a different film.
Capone: I wanted to talk a bit about influences on this film. I know you've mentioned CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as something you watched just before shooting started. And people are going to bring up POLTERGEIST because science is introduced to investigate the spirit world. But the way you handle the scarier moments, a lot of the time you just use sound or light or unusual camera angles.
JAB: Look at the beginning of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. It's just darkness and sound. This is quite an amazing movie. We were trying to go back to the storytelling that Spielberg used in that movie, which is like the perfect mix and inheritance of classic American storytelling of the '40s, '50s, '60s. And then Spielberg mixed all that together and created such a wonderful experience. And I remember when we were showing the script to all the studios and agencies, and they told us that it was impossible to making something like that, to mix horror and melodrama. I remembered CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, it's like science fiction, melodrama, that deals with the disintegration of a family. It's also a movie about fantasy, like our character who finds a solution in the end that deals with fantasy. We talked a lot about that. I remember talking about Vilmos Zsigmond [CLOSE ENCOUNTERS' cinematographer] to the DP all the time. I was so close to getting a t-shirt that said “Vilmos Zsigmond.”
Capone: Both your film and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS deal with obsession, with the lead character being so focused on one thing that everything else around them disintegrates, as you said. The other film that your film reminded me of was THE HAUNTING, which uses sound and light to achieve horror. And the acting is so re-active and key to making the audience terrified. Were there any influences on the screenplay at all?
SS: The things that I drew from were clearly not films. Things that inspired me were Peter Pan. I always say the same thing, it's the drawing of their mother sitting by the window waiting for her kids to come back from Neverland. That image was very haunting, and that gave me the idea of what if we told the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother in a very dark and twisted way. That was one. And “The Turn of the Screw” [by Henry James] was another, because we also wanted the film to be ambiguous and invite different readings. You can see the film as a ghost story, or you can see it as something else, but as you watch the film for the second time tonight, you'll see it's not a ghost story at all. So those were the two big influences. And then, of course, I grew up watching all these horror movies. They were like my food when I was growing up. So I guess some of that stuff was floating there, but never consciously, other than CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. As I was structuring the movie, I was thinking CLOSE ENCOUNTERS with ghosts instead of aliens.
Capone: The one thing I found interesting about the premise of the film is that Laura wanted to move into the orphanage where she grew up. Throughout literature, film history, whatever, orphanages are always portrayed as a hell house, but she wants to move back in. One of the interpretations you could have of this film is that Laura is crazy. Were you trying to leave the option open that all of this is just her instability?
JAB: I remember, we rehearsed with the actors for about three months. We used to record all of the rehearsals, and I remember watching the rehearsals with a friend, who was an actress. And I asked her about Belen Rueda and Fernando Cayo playing husband and wife, and she told me there is one thing I don't believe: I don't believe they are making love. And I said, well, that's important to question. This couple is not making love anymore; that's why she's going back to the town because she needs to fill some gaps in her life. It's very significant that there is not any information about her from the moment she left the house [after being adopted as a child] and the moment she came back. For me, there is nothing important in that. It's just a house, it's just the idea of going back to her childhood, the idea of this portrait of happiness. And the way we portray the house of the house in the past, it's an idea of happiness, even a fantasy.
SS: It's more a state of mind than a real place, and for her, that's childhood and those other kids were her family, the only family she ever know. So it's not a horrible, dark place to go back to, quite the contrary. Again, like we were talking about at the beginning, it's like perverting all those concepts of what was the perfect childhood. And suddenly she's going to have to learn that it's nothing like what she had pictured it.
Capone: As is often the case when we revisit places from our childhood that we thought we loved.
SS: One of the ideas we had, but the film was such a low-budget thing, that didn't make it to the screen is the opening sequence when she's there the orphanage was this huge place with very big rooms with very long hallways. And when she come back, it was this tiny place. It was the same thing but as if someone had pushed the walls in. That was one of the idea we had in the script but, then again, no money [laughs].
Capone: With Guillermo as a producer but his also being a director, was he on the set a lot or at all, was he hands on? Or did he trust you enough to do your own thing and make your own mistakes?
JAB: Guillermo, he's a director who was produced by another director on DEVIL'S BACKBONE, which was produced by Pedro Almodovar. And he remembered something Almodovar told him: a good producer is one who is never there when you don't need him but always there when you do. And he was trying to do that with us. He was very sensitive that I was the director, so he never gave us an idea—maybe a few suggestions—but he never gave us an idea more than once. He was there just to protect us, and we're so lucky that Guillermo wanted to help us, because without Guillermo there wouldn't have been a movie.
Capone: Can you talk about what the two of you have coming up? Sergio, are you still planning to direct your own film?
SS: Yeah, it's called THE HOMECOMING, and I should be shooting that in late 2008 or, at the rate things are going, if I have to keep doing press for THE ORPHANGE, it could be 2009 [laughs]. It's a fantasy film, a horror story about the end of the world. And it's basically about a the end of childhood and meeting God. I know it sounds very strange…
Capone: Or at least ambitious.
SS: But it's going to be a lot of fun. And I'm also writing another movie for Guillermo, which should complete his Spanish Civil War trilogy.
Capone: That's 3993? He told me about that last year. If I remember, there are two timelines, one in 1939 and the other in 1993. Can you tell me more about the plot?
SS: Yeah. It's about this woman who goes to a coal mining town in Asturias, and she wants to gather a group of people who will help her go down an abandoned coal mine where there is supposedly this common grave of these 39 corpses from the Spanish Civil War. And they go in, they run into trouble, and if I tell you more Guillermo will kill me [laughs].
Capone: He has so many projects on deck, do you have any idea when he'll get to this?
SS: I have no idea. Every week, he announces a new one. I have no idea what he's going to do. Probably since he just finished HELLBOY 2, I think he's going to want to do something small next, so this might be it. But the trend up to now has been two English language, one Spanish language, so I may have to wait for another movie.
Capone: Juan Antonio, what do you have coming up?
JAB: I cannot tell you too much about my next project, but it's a wonderful story. I'll probably work with Sergio again on the script. It deals with many of the same things as THE ORPHANAGE: childhood, adult life, loss. It's quite a unique story; I can't think of anything similar to it. But I could tell you it's a science fiction story with the least amount of science fiction in movie history.
SS: It's a sci-fi love story.
Capone: Sergio, since you are writing one of Guillermo's Spanish Civil War films, I can ask you about this. He explained this to a degree to me last year, but to Americans the significance of the Spanish Civil War may be lost on us. What has been the reaction in Spain to having him set two films so far in those times?
JAB: In Spain, everybody used to say they were so tired of watching Spanish Civil War movies. It's a joke they used to say in film school, “Oh, it's a Spanish movie, there must be something about the Spanish Civil War.” Then when Guillermo retold all of these stories in a quite unique way that no one has done before like that. So for me it's like, there is a great film out there about the Spanish Civil War, probably the most important and significant movie hasn't been done yet. But Guillermo del Toro has done a couple of movies that no one has done before, and that displays that there are a lot of things to say yet on that.
SS: I just remember the day that I met Juan Antonio, about 10 years ago at a short film festival in Spain. And I'd just gotten to the festival, and he was at a panel and they were talking about what's wrong with Spanish cinema today. And I remember him saying, “I'm so fucking tired of movies about the Civil War. It should be forbidden.” And my short film was a horror story that dealt with the Civil War, and I just thought “Oh well, we're just not going to get along.” And now look, we just made a movie.
JAB: I was so young when I said that. [laughs]
Capone: I could spend an hour talking about the ending of THE ORPHANAGE, about the implications and the interpretations of the ending. But the idea that fear shapes and directs and rules our life, it's not the happiest thing I've ever contemplated, but it's essentially true. We lead our lives either avoiding or confronting the things we're afraid of.
SS: Actually, all the studios that read the script and all the coverage they sent back to us saying “There's no bad guy in this movie. You need a bad guy.” And I always tell them Fear is the bad guy. Fear drives Simon back into that cellar; it's fear that makes life impossible for Laura. They are unable to do anything healthy with their own fear, and that's why they end up how the end up.
[At this point the publicist comes to break up the interview.]
Capone: We'll talk more tonight at the screening, and we'll talk more about the ending without fear of spoiling it for anyone.
SS: That sounds great. Nice talking to you.
Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
