BIFFF 2011 interview: The Last Circus director Alex de la Iglesia

Alex de la Iglesia is a Spanish filmmaker. Born in Bilbao in 1965, de la Iglesia has established himself as one of Spain's most original and internationally acclaimed filmmakers. Ever since his film debut Acción Mutante in 1993, produced by Pedro Almodóvar, his path-breaking, visually stunning films have acquired cult status.
His latest film The Last Circus, which he presented on Thursday at the BIFFF, was awarded the best director and best screenplay prizes at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.
We met Alex de la Iglesia two days after his film opened this year's BIFFF.
Interview held by Alberto Ramos.

Imitation of Life: Genre mixing is a constant feature in your films. In fact, one could argue you have created a new genre, mixing the traditional Spanish social Costumbrism with the horror thriller and the fantastic genre. With The Last Circus (Balada Triste de Trompeta) you go one step beyond, giving another turn of the screw to that tendency. Is that a natural progression in your work?

Alex de la Iglesia: I totally let myself go in this film. There were many things that scared the shit out of me, but that was precisely the sort of validation criterium I used. Whenever I felt fear, anguish or distress at the prospect of telling something in the film, I went ahead and shot it.

IoL: This is the first time you have written a screenplay without the collaboration of Jorge Guerricaecheverría. Has this fact anything to do with that 'letting yourself go'? How did you approach the writing process on your own?

AdI: I think so. The fact that Jorge wasn't there has contributed to the film being more extreme. I'm not used to writing alone and I felt helpless at times. Jorge is a person that provides sense and wisdom to the writing process, and I think that's why this one has turned out to be so extreme.

IoL: Do you intend to collaborate with him in the future?

AdI: Sure, this is not a divorce. Jorge was busy working with Daniel Monzón [with whom he co-wrote Monzón's Cell 211] and, on the other hand, he told me this was a very personal film and that I should write it on my own.

IoL: The astonishing credits of the film serve here as a statement of purpose of sorts for the whole picture. It's even hard to assimilate them. I've watched them twice after seeing the film and they include images of Franco, ETA members, Massiel [Spain's 1968 Eurovision Song Contest winner], Raphael [Spanish singer whose song Balada de Trompeta gives its original title to the film], Lon Chaney or even a sequence from Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. It's mind-boggling, a perfect summary of the film. How did you come to the design of the credits?

AdI: Exactly, there's a fade-in from Rachel Welch to Cannibal Holocaust. The guy behing these credits is the same that designed the credits of 800 Bullets. His name's David Guaita. He's a genius. Right now he's living in Japan, so I would send the pictures and tell him what I wanted and he would send back the quicktimes. And we workrd like that for months. I would say, 'I want Lon Chaney, and now I want Millán Astray, and from Millán Astray's eyes I want a fade-in into...', and he would say 'Mickey Mouse', and I would say, 'No, not Mickey Mouse, I want Tonetti', and we would built the story like that. At the same time we worked on the music. He had his own ideas about the music, but I wanted to use the typical music from Spain's Eastern processions, and that's why there are pictures of the floats carried by the brotherhoods. Then Roque [Baños, composer of the film's score] suggested to use that background music and compose something new, but I refused. Of course he didn't listen to me and went ahead. When he presented me with the music I had to admit it was better, so we put it in. And then, we had the idea to include a sample of cante jondo [a vocal style in flamenco], so we called our good friend Manuel Tallafé [who plays the elephant trainer in the film] and it's actually him who sings that part in the credits. The credits not only summarize the whole film, but it also shows how my brain works. It's La Cabina, Tip y Coll, the TV clowns, and on top of it, ETA. That's my childhood. I remember I was watching the clowns on TV when I first learnt about the assassination of Carrero Blanco.

IoL: Talking about ETA and Carrero Blanco, the film is a sort of personal settling of scores with Spanish history in the 20th century.

AdI: Well, it's definitely a highly political film, but on the other hand it's also a film about my childhood. I wanted to tell a love story around the two clowns and make it fall into a real environment... Let me think how it all started... So we had these two characters, these two fucking freaks, as we called them. The silly clown, a sexual, cruel, violent guy who, however, loves children; and then, the sad clown, weak and tender, who hates children because they don't love him. To make their infatuation with the beautiful acrobat believable, I couldn't leave the story in our time, I had to relocate it to a barbarous, insane period of our history, and that's how I went back to the seventies, to 1973, and then it dawned on me... 1973, the assassination of Carrero Blanco. Or El Lute. I think El Lute is a key figure to understand what I want to tell. If a guy is sentenced to over 3,000 years' imprisonment for stealing a hen from a yard, then a clown can be a serial killer too for no good reason. The characters and circumstances at that time were so implausible that they make my story and my characters plausible.

IoL: There is a certain parallelism between content and form in the film, especially as regards the casting. You have trusted two of the leads to newcomers, Carolina Bang and Carlos Areces, but the support cast is made up of legendary Spanish performers. They're as much part of the country's collective memory as the historical facts yoi're talking about. Is that parallelism the result of a conscious decision or you simply choose them because you think they're the best for the roles?

AdI: I choose them because I love them, but it's true that there's something about their being a part of our history. It's no coincidence that Sancho Gracia plays the role of Millán Astray. Actually his character in the film is called General Salcedo, but that's only because Millán Astray was already dead at the time. It's a copy of him. And then there is Luis Varela or Terele Pávez.

IoL: Terele Pávez, whom you rescued from oblivion for The Day of the Beast, and who's been nominated once again for the Goya for her cameo appearance in this film... and lost again.

AdI: Yes, it's a pity, I think she deserves it so much, but then again she doesn't need a Goya to prove anything. None of us needs a Goya, actually.

IoL: The influence of the classics on your films is obvious. Hitchcock is ubiquitous in The Last Circus, but there's also the great genre classics, especially the films by Tod Browning, Freaks and especially The Unknown, in which Lon Chaney plays the role of Alonzo the Armless, a knife thrower in love with carnival girl Joan Crawford.

AdI: To say that Hitchcock is an influence on my films is an understatement. Hitchcock is part of my life, I spent years living in his films. As for Tod Browning, it's true that I love The Unknown, it's been a major influence on this film.

IoL: Going back to Hitchcock, you take the famous scenes from North by Northwest in Mount Rushmore and relocate them, of all places, to the Valley of the Fallen for the memorable final sequence of  The Last Circus. How did you shoot those scenes? I guess it must have been technically very challenging.

AdI: As a filmmaker, I enjoy doing production, not post-production, so I wanted to shoot in real location, on the cross and the church of the Valley, as I had done on Schweppes [a legendary neon billboard on Madrid's iconic Carrión building, where some scenes of his film The Day of the Beast were shot], but of course they wouldn't let me. So we built an L-shaped part of the cross and then we did everything on 3D. We shot on green screen everything, and then the whole Valley, including the church, were recreated on 3D. We never went out to shoot any of the scenes, not even the one with the police cars, but I'm very happy with the final result.

IoL: We are on the eve of the election of the new president of the Spanish Film Academy. Are you more satisfied or disappointed after  these two years and a half years as President?

AdI: Extremely satisfied, since it has given me a completely new perspective on the film industry. As filmmakers, we tend to think we know everything about making movies, but it's not true. One of the most rewarding experiences has been actually the debate about the law on illegal downloading. I've learnt a lot about the different positions, including that of Internet users.

IoL: This year's Goya Awards ceremony was tense at times due to that debate and to the clash between you as president of the Academy and Minister of Culture Angeles-González-Sinde, which contrasts with last year's relaxed ceremony, where you managed to sit together, for the first time in a public event, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, and bring back Pedro Almodóvar to the ceremony after some years of estrangement.

AdI: Yes, it was the first time Javier and Penélope were together in a public event. Javier is a friend of mine, so I called him to propose him to come with Penélope, and he said he would but under the condition they came separately and no picture of both of them together was taken. So I told him not to fuck around with me and sit with her during the ceremony. He's a great guy and finally accepted.

IoL: Now Pedro Almodóvar and his brother Agustín have announced their comeback to the Academy membership only a few days before your succesor is announced. I guess this token of support and gratitude must have meant a lot to you.

AdI: I'm extremely happy. It's been wonderful. The sweetest goodbye I could have dreamt of.

IoL: Some flawless scripts are remembered for a memorable line. There's a line like that in your film. When the film recreates the assassination of Carrero Blanco, the clown goes to the four ETA members responsible for the attack and asks them: 'Which circus are you from?'. Everybody remembers the last line in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, when Joe E. Brown says 'Well, nobody's perfect'. It's still not clear if it was Wilder or his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond who had the idea about that line. You have worked here alone on the script, so I guess the line is yours.

AdI: Yes, it's mine, I didn't have any help here. I'm glad you ask about it because I think that line summarizes the whole film. Spain has its own drama, its own circus: two opposing sides, two irreconciliable ways of seeing the world, and to that you have to add the circus of the regional nationalisms. Moreover, the terrorist attack on Carrero Blanco looks rather a show than an attack. It was not simply a car bombing, but a blast that catapulted the car over the building and made it land on a balcony on a building on the other side.