Chino Moya’s resume (Madrid, 46 years old) does not leave much to the imagination: Bronze Lion at Cannes in 2015, nominated for best new director of video clips at the UK music awards in 2011, more Lions at Cannes in 2008, awards at festivals like the Silver Shark Kinsal and the Cammon Community, work for agencies like McCann Erickson, TBWA, Euro RSCG, Young & Rubicam, JWT Barcelona, SCPF, Shackleton, Rushmore, Villar-Rosas, or Contrapunto and video clips for bands the size of St Vincent, Years and Years, Hurts, Will Young or Ladytron. Nothing related to the world of advertising and music is foreign to this man from Madrid, on his way to being one of the great totems of a hyper-competitive world until he decided to go off on a tangent. The diversion of it is called undergodsand it is one of those films that do not leave you indifferent.
“It has cost me a lot to get to this feature film. Very much. Thousands of refusals, thousands of closed doors, very complicated moments, but here I am, ”Moya tells ICON, a few days after her film adventure has reached Filmin. undergods It is a walk through a desolate Europe, almost utopian, populated by characters that seem to come out of the Canterbury tales. A film with an enormous aesthetic imprint on which Moya has poured five years of obsessions: “Being my first film, I suppose that happens with first films, since it had many references, a lot of auteur cinema that I have seen since I was a teenager, a somewhat eclectic selection: from Italian neo-realism, European cinema such as Possession either Christiane F.to the world of my childhood. I was born at the end of the seventies and I grew up with Fassbinder or Passolini. Then I added ultramodern loneliness, movies like Safe by Todd Haynes, Ulrich Seidl, Enki Bilal’s comics and all that mix of pop culture and auteur cinema ”confesses the author about the populated mythology of his debut feature.
Despite this, Moya acknowledges that his great inspiration has been none other than “Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which are more than 250 stories, where there are no cuts but transitions. Each story turns into another in a different way, sometimes it’s a character who starts to tell something, sometimes a character turns into a completely different one, but the story never stops. Even The Quijotewhen he and Sancho Panza are walking down a path and someone appears and starts to tell something and the next hundred pages are of that guy explaining his story… I guess I had so many things to let go that I ended up letting them all go.”
undergods It has been enthusiastically received by international critics, who have praised its incredible visual apparatus and the way in which Moya dresses a familiar territory with a blanket of dust that ends up settling on the viewer. A look that the director had very clear: “The visual part, form and content, always go hand in hand, I am convinced of that. That visual part was essential to tell the story and I put a lot of effort into developing that aesthetic because it also pulled the script: the two things went hand in hand. I must also say that what I liked the most was having the time to think about the idea, to work on it thoroughly. With the public it happens that many times you only scratch the surface, because we must not forget that in the end the message is ‘buy this’. Of course, and I can’t deny it: I didn’t go to film school, so my film school has been advertising”.
In his first film, one can also see the great influence that genre cinema has on Moya’s work, something that he himself admits unequivocally: “I consumed a lot of science fiction and horror films and that shows through. I read an English critic saying that nothing defines an era like science fiction and I think that’s totally true: if you think about 2001: a space odysseythere is nothing as sixties as that; rollerball or similar in the seventies or, of course, terminator in the eighties. Nothing defines those decades as well as those movies.” When asking Moya about the role of his film in the future, the director takes a minute before answering: “What happened to us with the movie is that we just finished it and the covid began and that gave it an extra dimension that we didn’t I had. I guess that’s been a pretty defining thing in how it’s perceived now.”
Moya is a child of pop culture and his references in that sense are no strangers to the usual cosmos, something he confesses between laughs: “Well, I have many references, but if I had to talk about three I suppose it is true that Pablo Escobar has produced me always a lot of fascination, as is often the case with great villains. Tiziano because he is one of the great painters and Stanley Kubrick because you can’t not like Stanley Kubrick (laughs). I’ve been watching his movies for so many years… lately I’ve seen Barry Lyndon Y clockwork orange in the cinema and it still seems unmatched to me. There are many more, but this trio seems quite powerful to me.”
There is no rest for the warrior and after three years of struggling with his first film, Moya now begins the battle to launch his second feature film. “Do you know what I realized at the end of the movie? That I’m still the same. And also, when you finish it, it’s anticlimactic, you don’t feel like you’ve finished something. A film like this in which every day is a battle, in which you leave so much energy, and which has also coincided with my greatest personal catastrophes… total that when I finished and the adrenaline left me, it was not a slow process. Months passed before all those substances that my body generated left me, apart from that, with my daughter, doing my homework every day… there was no rest, none. Now I look back and think: well, at least I’ve made a movie.”
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