Behind the makeup of 'The Snow Society': “Bayona discarded shots of brains taken from severed heads because he felt they were unbearable”

David Martí did not want to work in The Snow Society. “I didn't want to do another melodrama with Jota [el director J. A. Bayona]. We had already done together The impossible and A monster comes to see me, a film that I took especially badly because my mother died of cancer and for me it touched on a touchy subject. I wanted a comedy, an adventure, something like that. So when she confirmed to Montse and me that in the end she was going to face The Snow Society, which I had been thinking about for years, I looked at him and said: 'But what are you telling me!', recalls the makeup technician in a video call from his DDT studio in Barcelona, ​​accompanied by his partner Montse Ribé. In the end, the studio agreed. Thank goodness they did. Their names are the ones that appear prominently in the double nomination (at the Goya Awards and at the Oscars) that they both share with the team of makeup artist Ana López-Puigcerver.

We are in the same city and just a few metro stops away, but Martí and Ribé are grateful that the interview is telematic. They claim to be “overwhelmed” by the media interest that their Oscar nomination has once again aroused. Something that they already experienced in 2007, when they took him away for his work in makeup and hairdressing under the orders of Guillermo del Toro in The Pan's Labyrinth. “We are a bit like we don't know where we are,” emphasizes Ribé. After that magical night in which Steven Spielberg asked them to borrow his Oscar and they ended up at a Prince party, this creative couple will return to Los Angeles at the beginning of March after their studio took charge of the technical makeup part in a film that has become a conversational and viewing phenomenon on Netflix (more than 50 million views in the first 10 days of being uploaded to the platform).

This technical team had to investigate – through medical reports, accounts of those involved and material from the time – what happened during and after the 1972 accident in which 16 men survived for 72 days thanks to practicing cannibalism after the impact. of his flight, 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, against the Andes mountain range. Their work consisted of replicating how and where the bodies were hit, what they looked like after the accident and during the survival process, or what the bodies looked like as the days passed. From DDT, hyper-realistic replicas of inert bodies, torsos of living characters, severed heads, damaged teeth, false cheekbones to mark skull-like faces, glue ears – the ones worn by Tomás Wolf as Gustavo Zerbino – and even rickety legs animated with hair embedded by hand hair by hair by his team. Yes, they are those that star in a crucial shot almost at the end of the footage and that almost no one imagines are totally artificial. “One of the most satisfying sensations of this job was when I heard the murmur raised in the cinema by the moment in which the survivors undress to take a shower and our leg appears in the foreground in the Chilean hospital after the rescue,” he highlights. Ribe. And anyone who has seen the film, whether at home or on the big screen, understands the reason for that group sigh of astonishment.

Without fauns or magical creatures, but with a lot of hyperrealism, his objective was that the viewer was not aware of his work. That normalized both the physical deterioration of the survivors and the appearance of the corpses that timidly appear in the shot. Martí assures that this could also have been “a gore movie” about anthropophagy. One that only Bayona saw and the rest of us will never see. “Jota always likes to record all the possibilities, to have the footage ready for the final cut. So we did a lot of things for him. From eating bone marrow to cutting off heads to remove brains, everything. We told him: 'But is this necessary?' “He wanted it all,” says Martí. These explicit shots were seen in the first cuts, but they do not appear in the final edition. “When I asked him why he had taken down our work, he himself told us that he took it down because he found it unbearable to watch. 'If people saw it, he would walk out of the cinema,' he told us.” Ribé clarifies that those shots, precisely, were dissonant with the intention of the film. “Jota wanted it to be very realistic, to tell everything, but always respecting the privacy of the survivors. We had already felt that this could not be included,” he says.

From DDT they already knew the methods of the Barcelona director, but the one who did debut with JA Bayona was the makeup artist Ana López-Puigcerver, whose team was focused more on the non-technical part. The Madrid native came to the film in spring 2021 through one of the producers (Sandra Hermida) with whom she had already worked. “She called me and told me that she had a very nice project that I was going to love. “She wasn't wrong,” she says on the other end of the phone, from the hallways of a central Madrid hotel, while she works on the fourth week of filming Daniel Guzmán's latest film. It doesn't stop. His is a life marked by cinema. Her husband is a director of photography, her son is a camera operator and her sister, Belén, is part of her team, focused on hairdressing work.

“In The Snow Society It is very difficult to know where one makeup begins and where the other ends,” he clarifies regarding what separates him from DDT. Her function was to provide logical and chronological continuity to the physical and capillary degradation of the survivors —she created the raccoon effect in Fernando Parrado's eyes after the coma: “The medical reports assured us that it must be a totally symmetrical effect, as see in the movie” —, find out what type of beard grows at 4,000 meters above sea level (“there are people who don't believe that they barely grew, but in Uruguay there are many hairless me
n”) or contact the survivors and their families. relatives to replicate their hairstyles. She even interviewed Laura Surraco, Roberto Canessa's partner, to find out how the eyeliner and know how to apply it in the mass scene.

“The actors lost a lot of weight, and we had the support of DDT with their prostheses, but the most complicated thing was to normalize this passage of time and the consequences on the bodies of the living, to understand the temporal ellipses,” clarifies this new Instagram star. . The interest that the film has aroused has made their filming videoslike that of the physical degradation of Enzo Vogrincic (Numa Turcatti in the film), go viral in a matter of hours.

López-Puigcerver did not expect the Oscar nomination. Since DDT, they didn't see it clearly either. Martí and Ribes believe that Teacher, despite the heated debate it raised online and complaints about Bradley Cooper's exaggerated nose prosthesis, could win the award in its category. López-Puigcerver, who will debut on the red carpet at the Dolby in Los Angeles, has already received messages from American stylists offering to dress her. “I don't know if they will give it to us or not, but I am clear that I took my style from Madrid. And to choose it I will have the best help: all my friends from the costume teams,” she says. Another proof of the other community that no one sees, but has also been woven, thanks to The Snow Society.

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