Daniel Calparsoro He has just released his latest work, the series ‘Assault on the Central Bank’, and is already immersed in the next one, which will be released “within a year, I suppose.” It has been difficult to fit in the interview: even though he is promoting, his day-to-day life when filming is more than intense: “I like to do the editing at the same time I’m filming,” he says. He details the process: every day, when he finishes filming with the actors, he sends all the material to the editors, who the next day return a first sketch edited according to the script. As he receives that first version, he looks at it “in my free time, with my cell phone, at snack time, or at meal time, I mark things for them and they redo them.” It is their way of detecting if something is missing or superfluous in the narrative, asking the actors for something different or working with the scriptwriters to change this or that. Crazy.
“This is how ‘Assault on the Central Bank’ was filmed, in ten weeks.” This five-episode series recreates the famous robbery at the entity’s headquarters in Barcelona shortly after the coup d’état of February 23, 1981. The series portrays the thirty-seven hours that the episode lasted, taking as its protagonist the figure of «Number One“, a character with a journey that the filmmaker calls “fascinating.” “There is an aura of mystery that surrounds it,” he says. After having spoken with him and having seen his version first-hand, Calparsoro notes, surprised, that he is “a person with a lot of charisma, very empathetic, and we are talking about a robber, who comes from being a libertarian, an anti-system… ». The series tells that and tells “that time in Spain that is the dawn of democracy, when there was a great desire to celebrate, to enjoy, but there was also fear that that would quickly disappear.”
Two journalists also appear in the narrative, who investigate to try to discover what is happening: “If the robbers are far-right, or are they simply thieves.” The director noticed, when filming the series, that the script handled concepts such as “amnesty, extreme right, corruption… which are words that we are seeing in the press lately as well.” Four decades have passed and, “although the forms are different, the words and concepts are still the same.”
To another shoot, that of ‘to heaveneither‘, Calparsoro must have the worst trip of his life. It was a couple of years ago, in Nigeria, when they had already finished work and were about to return to Spain. His wife suffered “a brutal poisoning.” While the team was partying, celebrating the end of recording, the two of them were at the hotel. “They tried to take us to the hospital, but we refused to go at night.” They managed to get doctors to visit them in the room “who told my wife to take fourteen pills.” Terror. “We didn’t know what to do, but in the end he decided to take it.”
There was no time to wait for them to take effect. The flight was leaving soon and we had to go to the airport. “The team was going the other way, because we had different flights, so we were alone.” Calparsoro’s greatest fear was this: “I thought that if I noticed that I had a fever “They wouldn’t let her board and I didn’t want to leave her alone, nor did I want us to end up in the detention centers that, upon arriving in the country, they had already told us were extremely dangerous.”
When they arrive at the airfield, a man asks for their passports and takes them. Then “another guy appears and asks for our passports.” To all this, “Patricia had a fever of forty, and I was holding her because she was falling to the ground.” In the end, They recovered the passportsthey took the flight and arrived in Madrid. She was already feeling better: “The doctor told us that they had given her the appropriate treatment.” One of the fourteen pills must have worked. In total, it was an intense and brief nightmare: “More or less like the assault on the central bank, thirty-seven hours; “A lot can happen in thirty-seven hours.”
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