Álex de la Iglesia: "Venice is a bit of a farce, it's nothing more than a corpse"

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Álex de la Iglesia (Bilbao, 1965)

is a film director and prophet.

The first thing they give is his movies.

Of the second, too.

is his new work that opens this Friday and, in his own way, it is worth both as one and the other, as a film and as a prophecy.

It is the story of a group of tourists lost in the Serenissima, but it is also the agitated story of a death foretold.

It tells how beauty disappears among the canals harassed by cruise ships and, incidentally, announces the arrival of a new time that is necessarily confusing in which cinema is already something else.

is the first installment of the film project

that lives (or will live) also on the Prime Video platform.

It is cinema and it is prophecy.

And so.

The last time he spoke about this project was in Venice, in September 2020. He presented the

series and was about to shoot

.

Now he presents the latter and is involved in the filming of the second part of

It is as if reality and desire coexisted at the same moment and in the same films.

Have you seen his wish come true in both cases? If you can make reality fit your ideas, you're Kubrick.

If it's the other way around, you're a director like any other.

Then the worst thing is that you do not get your ideas to come to light.

In that case, you are not even a director.

Things never turn out exactly the way you want, but I imagine it's the same in all professions.

this reminds me of

, when the protagonist has the idea of ​​making headlights that rotate with the road.

He couldn't make those headlights, but the car is what he wanted.

Well that.

wants to be a horror movie and it ends up being a portrait of the commodification of beauty... Basically, he wanted to make a farce in Venice, a great puppet, with the excuse of a

.

The origin of the farce is none other than to take a situation and, through histrionic or macabre elements, seek to astonish the public.

It is about creating a distance or rejection that precisely facilitates understanding.

If it were a comedy, you would end up kindly assuming what is presented to you.

In the farce the opposite happens.

What you feel is shame because you know that you are also guilty, that you are one of them.

That's what I was looking for. Is Venice a farce? A little, yes.

You arrive at a hypothetically wonderful and iconic place;

you arrive in the city that represents the best of European values, the great place in Europe... and suddenly, when you set foot in Venice you realize that you are in a place that is no longer more than a corpse. Do you think that today's society when doing tourism in Venice gives,

because of the farce that I said before, shame? First of all, to point out that when we talk about today's society, we talk about ourselves, about myself.

It is I who feel that he is embarrassing when he arrives in Venice and joins the masses that trample each of the places of worship.

I am one of them.

I am not Thomas Mann. What cruise tourism is doing with Venice is what we are doing with everything... Yes, without a doubt.

We act right now without considering the consequences for the community of our individual actions.

They have sold us that we are special and that as soon as we arrive in Venice we are going to live a unique moment.

You can't say no to that man.

The problem is that millions and millions of unique acts generate the destruction of what we thought was special.

And that happens to us in Venice, in Madrid, in Barcelona and in so many cities...

They are cities where no one lives and there are only tourists passing through.

The climate crisis is one more consequence of this way of acting and reasoning. Perhaps that same degradation is what cinema is experiencing with the irruption of platforms. I think there are enough keys in the film that lead there.

What is happening we knew it was going to happen.

The emergence of the platforms and the change in the market model was a fact.

It was not wanted at the time to safeguard the cinematographic format from the tsunami of platforms and there is no remedy.

But I'm not obsessed with the format.

I think there are enough clues in the movie that lead there.

What is happening we knew it was going to happen.

The emergence of the platforms and the change in the market model was a fact.

It was not wanted at the time to safeguard the cinematographic format from the tsunami of platforms and there is no remedy.

But I'm not obsessed with the format.

I think there are enough clues in the movie that lead there.

What is happening we knew it was going to happen.

The emergence of the platforms and the change in the market model was a fact.

It was not wanted at the time to safeguard the cinematographic format from the tsunami of platforms and there is no remedy.

But I'm not obsessed with the format.

An image from 'Venicephrenia'.

Is cinema dying? No, I don't understand those who say that Marvel movies are not cinema or that cinema is dying.

More audiovisual content is being made than ever before and the possibilities of financing a film have increased fivefold.

It is a fact that now many more interesting things are seen, although many nonsense are also seen.

But the truth is that

are the only ones that work right now at the box office.

will not drop below 200 million the first weekend.

And next to him we have the failure of

It seems that what is going to disappear is the cinema that we used to call normal;

The cinema that is neither a great blockbuster nor a small independent production will disappear in the short term.

It seems that we are left without the middle ground, but I think it is a momentary effect.

We are going to live the vinyl effect. I don't understand. There will be cinemas where people will premiere as if it were a play.

Directors who will premiere, but only in a cinema.

And that will make it special. It would seem that the same passion that kills Venice kills cinema... It is the destiny of beauty.

When you love someone, you destroy them because, in some way, you manipulate them and adapt them to you, to your desire.

I remember that when I was little I wanted to live in the show flats of El Corte Inglés.

Until you realize they don't exist in real life,

that as soon as you enter you destroy them. The most radical question would be: Is beauty itself possible?

Is it possible to see Venice, the cinema and life itself as when we fell in love with them? Perhaps we should do with everything like what we have done with Altamira.

Close and organize visits in small groups [laughs] But no, the solution is not worship.

I think of Cannes and it is a bit like the oracle of Delphi.

People go after a fasting period to see movies in Cannes.

And no.

You realize that what Cannes awards is what Sitges used to award.

They have discovered that the only thing that remains is the fantastic that is the purest thing in cinema, the heritage of Méliès.

Cannes is now claiming an extreme cinema because the cinema that they adored is no longer made by anyone... It seems to me that we have gone astray. I don't want to be pessimistic,

but the change we are experiencing is so radical that I do not dare to respond for fear of getting it right.

The curious thing is that many of the things that I did not take into account before are now essential to me.

I watched Spanish cinema and saw what I didn't want to do.

And now, with the passage of time, I am Mario Camus.

I've become that traditional director, albeit in a different way.

I think I've strayed from the question again. What has a traditional film director like you learned from the new television? To shoot fast. Is that all?

A technical issue? The technical issue is very important.

I am a technical director.

with the passage of time, I am Mario Camus.

I've become that traditional director, albeit in a different way.

I think I've strayed from the question again. What has a traditional film director like you learned from the new television? To shoot fast. Is that all?

A technical issue? The technical issue is very important.

I am a technical director.

with the passage of time, I am Mario Camus.

I've become that traditional director, albeit in a different way.

I think I've strayed from the question again. What has a traditional film director like you learned from the new television? To shoot fast. Is that all?

A technical issue? The technical issue is very important.

I am a technical director.

it has nothing to do with television, it's cinema, but I'm shooting it with three cameras, which is how television is shot.

This sounds very bad, but it is substantial. As a student of Philosophy that you are and a student of Philosophy that you were, how important do you see it to continue studying Philosophy, which goes from compulsory one year to two years in Baccalaureate? Philosophy today is like Venice ;

an empty set without great thinkers.

We have rethinkers of rethinkers.

Thought is not liquid but vaporous.

But I don't think that's why it should be put in a museum, because the books are still just as good.

Philosophy is one more form of fantastic literature that serves to understand realistic literature.

The only way to understand the difference between fiction and documentary cinema is to have seen many fiction films.

So,

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