TARDES DE SOLEDAD - Afternoons of Solitude

Interview mit dem Regisseur Albert Serra, von Ela Bittencourt

THE PLASTICITY OF BLOOD: ALBERT SERRA ON “AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE"
The Catalan filmmaker’s San Sebastian prizewinner locates a paradoxical pageantry in bullfighting.

NOTEBOOK: There was quite a bit of talk in the press conference about how different it was for you to make a documentary, with the process being more chaotic, for instance, having to shoot with three independent cameras. Yet it seems that in your entire career, you’ve always instilled a bit of controlled chaos on your sets, seeking situations that feel raw and unscripted.

ALBERT SERRA:  Everybody said in the beginning that I was applying a documentary method to fiction, which is quite rare, because with fiction people assume that you project your preconceived ideas, imprinting them on the film. This was never my case. I was born with digital technology—I started making films with a digital camera around 2000—so for me it was always about finding something interesting [by looking] through the camera. I guess it was a pretty modest point of view that I didn’t appreciate myself. Otherwise, I find having an idea already in your mind and then merely depicting it on film banal. Asking actors to express something you already have in mind is not rich enough, but if you just start shooting, observing what’s in front of the camera, and then have the energy to transform it into a fiction or a fantasy, with mise-en-scène and casting, then you arrive at something that’s not banal.
Casting is important, because there are some people who expand the limits of their personality to create work that’s more ambiguous. In this sense, Afternoons of Solitude, though it’s a documentary, is similar to what I did before. I never speak with my actors prior to shooting—and in this film, I almost never spoke with the bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey. It feels normal for me to assume the risk of this kind of method because I’ve been doing it for a long time.

NOTEBOOK: Considering that you’re always looking in your actors for something raw and unfiltered, I guess you found the ideal actor in the bull—as crazy at that sounds?

SERRA: Yes. For instance, you can’t know before the shoot when the bull will become interesting—the bull is at first, I don’t know, like an object, it is part of the show, but when it suddenly looks into the camera it becomes like a mirror. And it’s not something you can predict ahead of time, abstractly. You need to see it and recognize the value in the complexity of the real image, otherwise [the film] will be very schematic, revolving around one idea instead of many ideas.

Vollständiges Interview auf mubi.com