Feeling fear, doubting if you will come out alive, tells you that you must accept a project
It is difficult to find a common denominator in the unpredictable and diverse career of Rodrigo Cortés (Orense, 1973), to catch the thread that crosses proposals such as Contestant, Buried or Red Lights. However, there is something similar to these projects: their author embraced them with the fear of not stepping on solid ground, they represented a risk. Now, allied with the German writer David Safier (Damn karma, Miss Merkel. The case of the retired chancellor), Cortés recreates in Love in his place the exciting true story of a group of Jewish actors who perform a comedy in a theater in the Warsaw ghetto. A feature film that he presented out of competition in Seville and that will hit theaters on December 3.
-It has hardly been told how, despite everything, life continued in the Warsaw ghetto.
-We tend to confuse the imaginary of the concentration camp with that of the ghetto, and one was not the same as the other. Obviously being in the ghetto was not like going on vacation, they were not idyllic conditions, but life went on and in a very complex way. The rich had access to things unthinkable for the poor, such as meat, or products that could be obtained thanks to smuggling, while the very poor did not matter to anyone, and if they died of cold, the corpses stayed on the street, the rest they seemed immune to these visions and moved on. People tried to do what they did before, so whoever was an artist tried to continue being an artist. The one in this film was a very beautiful story that had to be told. People who are in the middle of a very hard context and who want to live half an hour more, who feel that they still have something to do and want to carry it out.
– Saving the distances with an episode as terrible as the Holocaust, the message is valid today: culture can give us comfort in adversity.
-Always, no matter how dark the environment, there is a possibility of opening a crack somewhere, that some light enters. The time of the film is decisive, we can think of few oceans of darkness denser than that of World War II. But even there, just as in Jurassic Park it was said that life made its way, somehow, here art makes its way. Because it is a drive, it is not even a responsibility, a mission, it is something that the artist cannot avoid doing and, consequently, he will continue doing, whatever the circumstances may be.
–He assures that, just as Buried would have liked Hitchcock, Love in his place would have seduced Orson Welles.
–We already know that Welles's love for the theater was deep, but that was also combined with a very cinematographic component. You had to orchestrate a clockwork mechanism in a story in which there is no stop. For example, one of the actors can leave the play and have a very hard conversation backstage, but we continue to hear the play, and, if the dialogues or the song run out on stage, that actor has to rejoin... All those details ended up forming a circus that was difficult to manage.
–He affirms that it is fear that leads him to choose his projects.
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–Generally you try to protect yourself, and it's logical and reasonable, but if you do it too much you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, that's why you already know how to do it. In that sense, fear is a good guide, if you get into a place from which you are not sure you will be able to get out alive, surely you will come out a little smarter than when you entered.
–There is a long tradition of comedy films, from Journey to Nowhere to Bullets on Broadway. Which ones did you see before filming?
–More than seeing them myself, I made a list for the actors. To be or not to be, Vania on 42nd Street, Cabaret... I told them that the rhythm we were going to follow in the comedy fragment was in Uno, dos, tres, but I also recommended West Berlin, which is one of my films favorites of Billy Wilder even if it is considered a minor work. And in that group I also included Noises Off!, by Bogdanovich, which in Spain they gave the horrible title of What a ruin of a show!. And I also suggested Black Swan, so that they would understand that ours was not going to be filmed theater, that the camera would be very physical, contemporary.
–He is one of the directors who has made the new Stories for not sleeping. What is it like to rewrite Chicho Ibáñez Serrador?
-With Chicho there were two options: either feel crushed by the weight of his long shadow or feel welcomed under his umbrella. We decided that what we were doing was a tribute, we raised it from gratitude, and that took the pressure off us. He would have done whatever he wanted, and the four of us decided the same thing, to take that freedom, for all the doors he opened...
-In recent months he has triumphed as a novelist with The Extraordinary Years.
I do not confuse the two disciplines. Pure literature is hardly adaptable to cinema, and cinema, the art of action, is generally not very literary. The success of the book shows that we know nothing, because it was a bet that did not exactly adhere to the conventions.
