Since 2002, Ernesto Sevilla (Albacete, 43 years old) has been concerned with framing and camera shots. It was then that he began to do some of the sketches for ‘La hora chanante’. Then came ‘Museo Coconut’, ‘Return to Lílifor’, short films like ‘Do they live?’ or the hilarious ‘Chapter 0’. The man from Albacete is now directing his debut film, ‘Camera café, lapelicula’, an adaptation to the big screen of the comic strip that between 2005 and 2009 enlivened Telecinco’s ‘access prime time’, and which arrives this Friday to the billboard with the original cast.
How was it to approach these beloved characters? Were you afraid of disappointing the fans?
-Yes Yes. When they offered me the project I started to think that we were competing against a memory and I think that’s the worst thing that can happen to you because everyone remembers ‘Camera café’ as a piece of series, which it was, but in a slightly distorted way because they think it is more costumbrista than it was. The series was very crazy, surreal and absurd. People see the movie now and say it’s very funny and in reality all the elements that appear in it were taken from the series, what happens is that they were not seen in fiction, they were lines of dialogue in front of the coffee machine . So yes, I felt nervous pressure and a bit of vertigo, but I also saw that the project offered a lot of possibilities with which to make many films, and that is what I have done.
–He allows himself to experiment a lot with the camera. Did they have to stop him?
–(Laughs). Yes, because I would have made it crazier if they let me, but Arturo Valls was there as the guardian of the tone and essence and I trusted him a lot.
–He writes again together with Miguel Esteban and Joaquín Reyes, with whom he has already collaborated on countless projects.
–They have been working together for many years, I think they will do twenty. There is a lot of complicity and we love each other a lot. We have a lot of respect for each other. But the thing is that on top of that, in the last project, which was ‘Chapter 0’, we took on a muscle writing awesome. The scripts came out very quickly and we hardly even had to talk to each other. Finding something like this is like winning the lottery.
–It is easy to see him on Instagram posting photos of movies that he is about to watch at home. That love for the cinema, has it grown as she was putting her head into directing or was it already there?
I’ve always had it, since I was a child. I’ve been a big movie buff for as long as I can remember, wow.
–When did you begin to see that it was in the direction where you wanted to direct your steps?
–Always, what happens is that until recently I didn’t get serious.
–Well, he directed ‘Museo Coconut’.
–Yes, and in ‘La hora chanante’ I already did many sketches. I was lucky that none of my colleagues were interested in where to put the camera and I saw an opportunity to learn by working. I was always killing the director bug with our projects and when ‘Return to Lílifor’ finished I saw myself at an age where I said «god, man, if you don’t take it seriously you’ll miss the mark and you won’t direct anything». I started making my shorts, I tried to take gigs where they let me direct, like the fake trailers for ‘El hormiguero’, which later allowed me to do ‘Chapter 0’. From there, people already saw that he could direct.
-And as a spectator, do you now see cinema differently? That is, do you dissect more every detail?
-No, I’m a great spectator, I’m still innocent in that sense. I keep getting into movies. On a typical day, I watch at least five movies, and I’m not very picky. I enjoy a lot and I try to like what I see; I go in favor I have many movie-loving friends and I end up being the one who defends them all.
–It is your first feature film, what weaknesses have you seen?
-The truth is that I have noticed a lot that it is a movie, a feature film, especially in the pressure. Doing ‘Chapter 0’ I didn’t have any kind of concern. It will be put on Movistar, if people see it, fine and if not, then too. This is a movie, there is more money at stake, people want it to work, they want people to see it. This is something that made me nervous many nights and one morning I went to the set almost without having slept at all because of the nerves. If I ever make movies again, which I hope I do, I’ll try to be more relaxed with that.
– And strengths?
-I’m still very fast directing, I’m very to the point, I don’t shoot many shots, I have it quite clear and that’s an advantage.
-In all your projects, humor is the central element. Do you see yourself playing other genres?
–Yes, in the future, I will experiment with other shades. Terror catches my attention… Perhaps something that is halfway between a horror film and a humor one. Things like those of Jordan Peele, the director of ‘Let Me Out’, really catch my attention.
–The aesthetics of the film is also surprising. Judging by the CRT monitors in the office, we’re in the 2000s, but there’s a touch of the ’70s, too.
-Yes. To begin with, the offices of today are very ugly, they are not at all cinematographic and they all look like dental clinics, they are like space, they are not cool at all. I really like ‘vintage’ things and for me everything old is much more beautiful than new, that’s how it is. Also, I like it when movies have a kind of universe of their own. I did the exercise of thinking of the corridor with the coffee machine, which leads to the office, and if we had found ourselves in a modern office, with those characters dressed almost like comics, it would not have worked. I think it was much more interesting to shoot the other way. I told the art people: «We are going to act as if it were the 90s and early 2000s, but don’t get obsessed with the time, we are going to try to confuse people, who don’t know when it takes place, who have their own universe.
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Jesús Quesada, the protagonist played by Arturo Valls, is still a rogue, but that machismo that the character oozed has been greatly reduced. Was it a conscious decision?
-Yes, we have done it consciously and several things have come together. The mood has indeed changed. Quesada closed sales in whorehouses, something that a sales agent, in the early 2000s, would do very normally. Now, I was horribly lazy to make another Spanish film where the protagonist is a male chauvinist and drinker. I preferred to take those other facets of the character, the snooty look, the guy who shirks.
-He plays a lot with the camera and in fact he has allowed himself to honor tapes like ‘Casino’ or ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’.
–I really like doing that kind of thing, playing shots from my favorite movies. For me, that day with a shot like this is already a fun day. If I have the plan of ‘Casino’, I’m already happy. And then it works well as a joke. That in a movie like ‘Camera café’ there is a tribute to Scorsese or David Fincher is cool and it works because it’s still a parody.
-They have cameos like Ibai’s or Karina’s. Where do these crazy things come from?
–We planned cameos from the script. We say, hell, because in this sequence it would be cool if someone cool, famous, who drives people crazy, appeared. As the shooting date approaches, those names dance because some don’t want to, others can’t because of the agenda, they are almost favors that you ask people. We have been very lucky with the cameos that have ended up appearing because some of them have drawn applause, but I am telling you that they are almost accidental things, they are part of these wonderful miracles of cinema.
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