Jaume Balagueró, in the bowels of the Bank of Spain

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Title: Way down . Director: Jaume Balagueró. What is it?

First what is not: it is not the paper house . That said, Balagueró proposes a heist movie with humor, intrigue and a lot of nerve. Something unprecedented in his career. Origin of the idea:

It just seems like a commission. "And it was, but as soon as you accept it it is already something personal," says the director who refuses to look for references. "Think of Indiana Jones, " he says.

In Morel's invention , Bioy Casares imagined a device capable of hiding the greatest secret: his own falsehood. The machinery devised by the Argentine writer allowed to create something as bold as an unreal reality and yet more real than reality itself. All false and, nevertheless, perfectly true . In effect, the tide tide. On a desert island, a fugitive is imprisoned by a strange device capable of inventing a world; a subjugating and voracious universe because of which the protagonist falls in love. Is there anything more real than love itself? Or better: is there anything real beyond love even in the most unreal of the worlds? And so.

It is worth the preceding paragraph to present Way down , the last work of Jaume Balagueró that has barely completed the filming phase. Everything else remains. And it is a lot. The tape, hence Bioy Casares, is solved in a great and perfect artifice. The images on the page describe the crucial moment. The police (or the army itself) enters the vault in which the Bank of Spain keeps the secret of all secrets. The most valuable. "That is not just gold," says the director. As soon as you put your foot in the belly of the beast, law enforcement officials realize the disorder: the sancta sanctorum has been tainted. Nothing remains. What was supposed to be a perfect machinery against any intruder is no longer. Everything is a lie.

«The whole film is held on this immense trap that is nothing more than an engineering prodigy, but built a long time ago. More specifically in the 50s when there were no laser beams, cameras or motion detectors. If you want, it is a fight against digital technology. And there, the almost artisanal appeal of the great enigma, the great confusion of all this, ”says the director between excited and only confused. And laughs. Not with a laugh like Dr. Gang's, but almost.

To place ourselves, the film takes place in the fervor of the World Cup in South Africa, which, as you will remember, Spain won. The more times it is brought to memory, the better. A group of thieves from a company specialized in searching for sunken treasures is responsible for carrying out what, by force, must be an impossible mission. "It is played, or that is the idea, with the parallelism between the two teams: one has to win the final against Holland and the other get his goal of taking the treasure, " says the director, takes a second and he dares with one more key: «I will only say that the water, whether from Cibeles where sports achievement is celebrated, is in the device that functions as a safe, plays an important role. She is the key and the key. If you look at one of the drawings, a kind of drain appears. And here you can read.

Remember, to better place us all, that the Bank of Spain shares a place in Madrid both with the headquarters of the City Council and with the source of Mother Earth .

Balagueró says that little or nothing has to do with this project with any of his previous ones. Neither retains the harsh and dark gesture of his most obviously horror cinema ( The Nameless or Rec ) or the murky and obsessive look of his murky and obsessive cinema ( While you sleep or Musa ). «At the outset, it can be considered an order. Although in purity, when you accept it and make it yours, it becomes a tape as author as all the others. Then, it is the most casual of my films, the most fun . It is a heist movie (of perfect robberies), but without giving up the simplest and unprejudiced adventure. There are pirate galleons and even hidden treasures. Even the privateer Francis Drake has his place. I do not say that the reference is Indiana Jones ... but I will not say no, ”he says.

What does not change, however, is its way of working. The director is convinced that imagining too much before shooting ends with the nerve that every shooting needs . “I am very passionate and intuitive and I leave the precise drawing of a scene for only the complicated scenes or with many effects,” he says and returns to the scene that concerns us: “Actually, the storyboard would not have been necessary here. All the scenery was completely built. It was awesome. And that makes it very easy and makes you move in your air without measuring in detail where you focus.

The cast is made up of people as diverse as the Englishman Freddie Highmore ( The Good Doctor ), the Irishman Liam Cunningham ( Game of Thrones ), the Dutch Famke Janssen (X-men) the Franco-Spanish Astrid Bergès-Frisbey ( Bruc , the challenge or Pirates of the Caribbean: in mysterious tides ) or the very Spanish José Coronado, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba and Luis Tosar). "I will only add that it has nothing to do with the paper house, " he concludes. Be that as it may, the camera is turned into an artifact, a gadget, a trapntojo, an enigma, a lie, an adventure ... In cinema. The solution, next year.

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