Paco Plaza (Valencia, 1973) manufactures nightmares like the ‘REC’ or ‘Verónica’ saga with the trade that provides enjoying horror movies as a child. After that complex moral fable in the form of a thriller and the landscape of the Galician drug trafficker in the background that was ‘Who kills iron’, Plaza returns with ‘La grandmother’, a film with a script by Carlos Vermut that was presented at the last Festival of San Sebastián and that after multiple delays arrives in theaters on January 28.
His ninth feature film warns us from its opening bars that he is going to tackle time and its ravages. The stopped clocks are the visual leitmotif of this story about old age as a demon, in which a model (Almudena Amor) is forced to leave the fashionable environments of Paris in a hurry to return to Madrid to take care of the grandmother who raised her, stroke victim (Brazilian Vera Valdez, favorite of Coco Chanel and muse of Avedon in her youth). The film aspires to two Goyas and is one of the great hopes of Spanish cinema to return the public to theaters this year.
-Have you made a film about burnt caregiver syndrome?
-No, for me the approach is different. ‘Grandma’ speaks of old age like a demon. I told Carlos Vermut: imagine a movie about possessions, but the devil that possesses someone is old age. You see that person and you know it’s not her. All part of an experience I had with a great aunt of mine who suffered from Alzheimer’s. When I went to visit her, I had the feeling that it wasn’t her. Furthermore, in our society old age is a demon that no one wants to see. We are 50 years old and we are dressed as when we were 25. We all resist the passage of time. ‘You are super young’, is said as a compliment. Youth and beauty are glorified, and therefore the passage of time is demonized. It was very interesting to codify all that with the language of horror movies. Old age is what scares us the most and what ends up possessing us all, transforming you into who you were not before.
-Like ‘The seed of the devil’, only with a grandmother instead of a baby.
-Ha ha. It is a basic reference in the movie, we have even copied the typography of the credit titles. Polanski is my favorite director and ‘The Devil’s Baby’ my favorite movie of his. Like her, ‘La granny’ takes place almost entirely in a closed place, an apartment, and the protagonist is trapped in a spider web that she is not aware of. Much of the action takes place outside the film, in voiceover, as in ‘The Devil’s Seed’ with everything the Castevet couple did.
-I told him about the burnt caregiver because it is easy to fall into depression and loneliness if you dedicate your life to caring for someone.
-The protagonist realizes, like many people, that when you take care of someone as dedicatedly as an old woman demands, you leave your life. Her friends in Paris become a voice on the other end of the phone, things happen that she is no longer a part of. Time stops and he feels that there is a life in progress from which he has stepped down. That also causes you a guilt complex; if I take care of my grandmother I lose my life, if I don’t I feel bad. But your grandmother is no longer your grandmother, that is the most atrocious thing about seeing someone you love grow old. You notice how that person is gradually dissolving. They are more clumsy in their movements, they forget things… And you know that the end of that is unsolvable. When I shot ‘Who kills with iron’ I spent a lot of time in residences. And I thought that those old people were not going to move anywhere else, except to the cemetery. The residences are like a kind of junkyard where you park people to spend time until they die. That caused me a lot of anxiety.
-That the protagonist is a model is not free either.
-The two leading women are prisoners of their bodies. The old woman because she begins to feel incapable of doing certain things due to the decrepitude of age and the young woman because she is trapped in the prison of being young and beautiful. But the hourglass keeps ticking. There’s a scene where he sees a 14-year-old model on Instagram, and of course he can’t compete. At a social level, the passage of time continues to be punished more in women than in men.
Almudena Amor and Vera Valdez in ‘La granny’.
-What unites you with Carlos Vermut?
-We are close friends. I saw ‘Diamond Flash’ and I knew I wanted to be friends with the guy who made it. Carlos had a gap after writing ‘Manticore’, his last film. The simplicity of the elements of the script for ‘Grandma’ is his, I would never have managed to make the film so bare, without dialogue, where few things happen. Carlos has inspired me to eliminate the superfluous.
-It has a point of children’s story.
-It’s like a fable with nods to tales: the snake, the matryoshka dolls, the little bird, the braid… A classic witches’ tale that perpetuates itself and wraps itself in different shells. I liked the symbol of the matryoshka: on the outside you are one but inside you are many. Sometimes I find myself talking like my father, inside I carry the family burden and I cannot deny that heritage. ‘Grandma’ also talks about living through your offspring.
-Does it cost you more and more to be scared in a movie theater? When was the last time?
-I’m not especially scared… There are many scares, but the last heavy impact of being scared in a cinema was with ‘The Lords of Salem’ by Rob Zombie. I felt that there was something evil there… A very disturbing film that I don’t recommend to anyone, because it left me with a bad body for two or three days. Ah, ‘Hereditary’ scared me too.
«’Annette’ by Leos Carax has fascinated me, and in Filmin I would have removed it after half an hour»
«We never imagined that a pandemic would be so boring, the Apocalypse is a pain in the ass»
-He is happy if we pigeonhole him as a director of horror films.
-I feel very proud. It’s what I want to be, I don’t aspire to anything else. I have watched horror movies since I was little, they are the movies that I enjoy. From Aesop’s fables to the Bible, fantasy is a stylized way of approaching reality. Doing ‘Amor’ by Haneke would be very painful for me, however with ‘La granny’ I explain my own vision of old age using the prism of the genre. That makes her more accessible, but at the same time more badass. Launch depth charges that stay inside you. ‘The Exorcist’, for example, is a movie about a mother who feels guilty because she doesn’t pay attention to her daughter. ‘The prophecy’ is about a man who lies to his wife, who adopts a child that is not his and does not tell her. All the stories can be told in the genre, you can make a ballad or a heavy ballad, ha ha. It does not limit, but gives you freedom.
Almudena Amor and Paco Plaza on the set of ‘La granny’.
-Do you see platforms as an ally or an enemy?
-More audiovisual content than ever is being consumed. There is a hunger for movies and series. And I do not consider that there is a battle, but that they are different terrains. The explosion of platforms in the last two years has been brutal. Its success is a stimulus to try proposals that legitimize the movie theater. ‘Annette’ by Leos Carax has fascinated me, and in Filmin I would have removed it after half an hour. It is a film that demands you as a spectator, and the conditions of a cinema favor its enjoyment. You go to the bathroom or look at a WhatsApp and disconnect, you no longer reconnect. There is a place for every movie. I also enjoyed ‘The Irishman’ in a room and on Netflix maybe I wouldn’t have finished it. Awesome things are being done on television that fulfill the function of serials in the 19th century, but the field of experimentation is in the movie theater.
-Horror films continue to work at the box office. And the immersion it demands can only be achieved in a dark room.
-Clear. It is not the same to see ‘Grandma’ in a cinema than on the iPad. In horror and comedy there is a shared experience, an escape from reality. It is not nostalgia, but an objective fact. I saw ‘8 Basque surnames’ and it freaked me out. In my house I would not have enjoyed it so much.
-He interrupted the filming of ‘La granny’ with three weeks left to conclude when the confinement arrived. What went through your head?
-When we stopped, Vera Valdez, who was then 85 years old, told me: I will stay alive. You didn’t know what was going on. I remember the feeling of unreality. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to finish the movie. There was a scene in a nursing home that we couldn’t shoot. And most importantly, it changed the perception of the movie. It went from being the story of a bastard grandmother to someone who is taking revenge on the society that has cornered her. All films feed on and dialogue with the reality in which they are produced. But in this case it is extreme. We used a ‘tagline’ before the pandemic: “How long have you not seen your grandmother?” Can’t use today. The world has changed.
-How does someone who lives by imagining horrors experience a global pandemic?
-Jaume Balagueró told me one day that we never imagined that a pandemic would be so boring… You’re at home, you do gymnastics, you watch YouTube videos… The Apocalypse is a pain in the ass. It is not an action movie, but rather one about downtime, about making croquettes. Jota Bayona told me that on IMDB (internet movie database) ‘Contagion’ was science fiction and
now put drama. We cling to optimism because we haven’t finished dating.
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