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Luis Martínez Venice
Venice
Updated Saturday, March 9, 2024-00:00
Cannes Film Festival Wes Anderson: "I love the deep garlic smell of Chinchón"
Asteroid City Review: We are all Wes Anderson characters in Chinchón, it's like that (*****)
Venice Film Festival Wes Anderson creates and recreates himself in the perfect 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar' (****)
The cinema of
Wes Anderson (Houston, 1969)
is exactly the cinema of Wes Anderson.
It sounds like a truism and, indeed, it could be if it weren't Wes Anderson we were talking about.
Just look from the greatest of his achievements (
Trip to Darjeeling
, for example) to the tiniest of his whims.
And it is in this last category where
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar comes in,
a 40-minute short film that is currently nominated for an Oscar, which can be seen on Netflix and which is the gateway to three more mini-movies.
Both the long and the short, the maximum and the minimum, are Wes Anderson in each of its particles and in the complete globality of him.
Wes Anderson's universe is an infinite sphere whose center is located at each point on its surface.
Based on the story of the same title by his beloved
Roald Dahl,
which he already dealt with with
Fantastic Mr. Fox
, the story of the fakir's apprentice played by Ben Kingsley is told, which is in turn told by the doctor played by Dev Patel. that he left it written in a book for Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) to find and he ended up referring it to Roald Dahl himself (Ralph Fiennes) in an animated conversation with, we have arrived, Wes Anderson;
a Wes Anderson who, finally, tells it to us.
Again in the author's filmography, creation is nothing more than recreation and stories tell stories simply because they are retold.
Narrative is not fact but action.
Suddenly, established authors like yourself or Pedro Almodóvar return to a format supposedly reserved for beginners.
And, furthermore, you are a candidate for the Oscar...First of all, cinema is not sport.
It is absurd to talk about competitiveness in art.
Neither Almodóvar nor I were thinking about the Oscar when we decided to make short films.
It is simply a format that suits certain stories well and that, for commercial rather than artistic reasons, has been put aside.
Cinema was born as short films and for a long time there were episodic films that were nothing more than a collection of short films.
The problem is that with these types of movies there is always the temptation to compare and say which episode is good.
And we return to the competition.
I simply like the idea of the short film with its own entity and living the cinema experience in another way.
Perhaps the problem is that the idea of the short film is associated with the illustration of a gag or a joke.
I prefer the ones that maintain the perspective of a movie where a complete story is told.
What references do you have in mind? I am fascinated, for example, by the short films that make up The Gold of Naples, by Vittorio de Sica.
Or The Pleasure, by Max Ophüls...The same year he presented
Asteroid City
he released this short.
One is filmed in Spain and the other in the United Kingdom.
His previous film was French by adoption, The French Chronicle.
It gives the impression that there is an effort not to be from anywhere... In
The French Chronicle,
Jeffrey Wright's character focused on this argument, on the idea of not being from anywhere.
I think that in some way I have always tried that and I have ended up turning filming in Italy, the United Kingdom or Spain into something more than just the search for a location.
I could have filmed
Asteroid City
in Texas, but I preferred to do it in Chinchón because the experience of the entire team living isolated in one place made coexistence different than if everyone went home after each day of filming.
Although, in truth, everything takes place in the Arizona desert, the feeling is different.
It has nothing to do with me considering myself more European than American or anything like that.
I simply like to live different customs and stop for lunch like they do in Spain. But doesn't that isolation you talk about turn each Wes Anderson film into the same film even if it is shot in a different place? My sensitivity and my way way of seeing the world always changes as everyone else's changes.
But it's true that every time you make a movie the options of what you can do next necessarily narrow down.
My obligation as an artist is to look for new things to say, but the truth is that many times you surprise yourself by telling yourself that what you do is too similar to an old idea.
But I imagine that happens to you because you are getting older.
I prefer to think that some films produce echoes in others.
When you have made more than ten films it is inevitable. How would you define your relationship with Roald Dahl?
What attracts you so much about it? My first contact was with
Fantastic Mr. Fox
and it was because I simply wanted to make a stop-motion film and that story fit perfectly.
Then I met his family, his wife especially, I spent a lot of time with them.
My next goal was Henry Sugar, but I wasn't sure how to do it until the idea of the shorts came up.
For the rest, I am fascinated by the story of
Poison
.
And I love
The Hitchhiker
.
And
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
And
The Glass Elevator.
And all the stories that were brought to the screen in
Tales of the Unexpected
or
The Limits of Reality...
They are all very funny stories. There are two elements that stand out in the film.
On the one hand, the narrator's voice that unfolds over and over again, and, on the other, that theatrical aspect that guides the staging...As for the first, the entire film revolves around the voice, in fact .
I remember that the first thing I did when the book fell into my hands was read it aloud.
The voice is fundamental, but not just any voice, but Dahl's own that gives meaning to each of the words.
And that's why I asked him to cut the story.
Everything evolved from there.
And when it comes to theatricality, I can only say that I love theater, because I love the magic that what happens on stage gives off.
It's not real life, but at the same time it's completely real because the actors are real.
I would describe it as that special authenticity that comes from what happens on stage. Your position on rewriting Roald Dahl has been made clear, but, in a way, you also rewrite him in your film. I don't like changing words and I try to respect him as much as possible. what was written by him.
If I change anything it is to make it more effective in cinematic storytelling.
But I don't think Dahl or anyone should ever be rewritten.
It bothers me even when the filmmaker himself changes his work.
When we watch a movie, the audience, all of us, are already part of it.
And the same thing happens with the readers of a book.
I don't even think the author is authorized to change his work.
Once published it is too late.
So, of course, the idea that it is someone else who changes a work when the author has died seems aberrant to me. Returning to the topic of the Oscars.
It seems that this year it was the authors who saved the box office.
Do you think it's a symptom of something? The truth is that everything is very confusing.
You see, on the one hand, that Nolan and Gerwig take a lot of people to the movies and make a lot of money.
And, on the other hand,
streaming
is the only way for certain small films to reach their audiences.
It's a bit of a contradiction.
We are in the middle of a revolution and it is impossible to predict anything.
We, to speak of myself, think of
Henry Sugar
as a television movie, but as they were thought of in the 80s;
like the BBC did a long time ago, for example.
It is shot on 16 mm film although it is projected on a small screen, which is its natural place. I don't know if you have had the opportunity to see the imitations that are made of you and your cinema and that circulate on the internet. I know that they exist, it seems to me fine, but I refuse to see them.
It's like someone imitates your voice.
I'm sure it's a lot of fun, but I don't want to do something that makes me feel bad.
In any case, I approve.