NO Director Pablo Larrain
By Gary Murray
Director Pablo Larrain seems comfortable with his sudden fame. The film-maker has been working in his native Chile for years. His latest directing effort is No and it has surpassed his other finished products. It had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The drama mixes archival footage with new film footage to tell the story of the path to get rid of leader Pinochet.
The story is of the historic vote to keep Pinochet as leader of Chile. It was a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ vote that would change the country forever. Told from the vantage of an advertising executive, the film is based on a short play that Larrain said had never been preformed before. “What is interesting on the play is that the point of view was through the eyes of an ad executive. So it was quite interesting because this story was possible to be picked up by a lot of point of views.”
“The possible perspective of the ad guy was so interesting and dangerous and sharp,” said Larrain. “We thought it was great and we used it. It was the starting point and we did research.”
The production team took four years to get the script exactly right. “We had to talk with a lot of people, the people who actually did the campaign,” he said. “We had this huge amount of information which was looking like a mountain. We were like ‘How do we start this?’ We had thousands of pages of interviews and a lot of tapes of old camera footage.”
Both sides used the media to manipulate their message. Pablo said, “I remember that it was very shocking to see that on TV.” The people of Chile had lived with ‘Yes’ propaganda. The director said, “We had for so many years so we were so used to those images and logic. Then these guys show up with this super fresh thing, it was emotional and unforgettable.”
The two groups waged a media war to convince the people to vote for their side. “I remember a feeling that was expressed on those campaigns,” said Pablo. “So it is something that never really ends. I don’t know exactly when I remember those days because it was something that is re-remembered.”
He grew up in a ‘Yes’ family and he was a ‘No’ proponent. “I grew up with this sensation that there was something there. So when we started working on this, the curiosity of how they made the campaign was a very big issue for us. We were wondering how they did it. Which tools did they use? And why did they not decide to attack Pinochet?” The proponents for the ‘No’ campaign didn’t attack the dictator while trying to make their point.
Pablo Larrain admitted that his family was proud of him but more on an emotional level than a philosophical one. “A lot of people didn’t know what was happening and when we got back to democracy, a lot of information came out and a lot of people changed their mind.”
His father was a politician from the right wing of the movement, very much in favor of Pinochet. “It has been something that I have been working on for so many years and you can understand that in my country, the son of a politician is doing these kinds of movies. It is very interesting for the press. I have been asking and answering all these questions for years. It is interesting, my family is very diverse and we live very well with different opinions.”
He tried to justify the different political views in his family. “I would say that,” he explained, “that I don’t know why there are so many cross-over families. In my own family, my parents are from the right wing and both of my grandfathers–one was a socialist and the other was from the left. I would say that a lot of people stay quiet while the dictatorship was in power because it wasn’t a good idea to express it. It wasn’t as open as it is now.”
He saw the drama of the situation in democratically confronting the dictator. “There is the fact that most people know how Pinochet got into power but I don’t think many people know how he got out. So, I knew the story was quite new for a lot of people and I knew also that dictators don’t leave through the democratic process. It is not a part of logic. They stay until there is a coup or a shootout or they die and leave their brothers to take over.”
He considers the day of the vote a second independence day for his country. He said, “What was fascinating for me was Pinochet created the tools to put him out without an audience. He creates his own poison. That part was unusual and pretty unknown. Everything was there. The challenge was to have the courage and the guts to get the story and tell it and to make a movie. It was a huge matter for us.”
“We also have this enormous amount of pain that divides us,” he said on confronting his country’s past. “Whenever you knock on that door through a movie or a documentary, everybody will have their eyes open and the tension comes. That is why you decide to make a movie about the subject especially when it is a movie with dark humor elements. You are going to laugh at certain sensibilities and a certain way of understanding. You will be pushing the red button all the time. You do it because our work is to express ourselves in a way that somebody else will find that is meaningful. You can, I think, build a movie or any art form concerning so many things that are around you because it would be impossible to create anything.”
The film stars Gael Garcia Bernal, the acting sensation who broke out in Y Tu Mama Tambien. The Mexican actor had to play a Chilean, a language with much different form of Spanish. “Gael has this wonderful talent for accents,” said the director of his star. “I thought he was going to use a coach because our accent is very special and every time somebody talks like us it sounds funny and basically stupid. He did it very well. I was really shocked by how well he did it. He just naturalized it and it matters not in the way he talks so it was never a problem at all.”
“He played a Chilean,” said Pablo of Gael. “It is not a neutral CNN guy and that is why it is so hard especially for an actor but he talked like us. And it was very shocking and you would say cut and he would go back to his Mexican accent. He would just listen to us and when we were rehearsing he would keep his Mexican accent. He was unbelievable and even in Mexico they were shocked.”
The film was under a lot of scrutiny during the making of the work, both in terms of content and cast. Many of the people who were on the ‘yes;’ side were actually in the movie. Some of the participants on the screen were playing themselves, just 25 years older. “We were dealing with real stuff but we decided to just do it at one point. Let’s do it no matter what,” he said of casting the participants.
Pablo considered it important to show Pinochet in the correct light. “I think,” he said, “we never got justice so the wound would always be open. Pinochet died free, he never stepped into a courtroom. He died with multiple bank accounts most of them here in the United States. Most of the people who tortured and killed others in the country are still free and walking the streets and nobody knows who they are. That is very sad and that pain is still dividing us in a very strong way. It is accepted that it happened 25 years ago but it is open and there is so many to be told.”
The film uses both archival footage and new footage to build the story. By his own admission, Larrain said that the film is about 1/3 archival footage. When planning the film, he knew that using so much old footage combined with the new footage would not blend if he didn’t use the right cameras. He tried different formats, just to see if they would blend together. “We brought in these two cameras from 1983 and it was awesome how it merged. It was really amazing the fact that we were able to build an image that it would merge to a point to where the audience wouldn’t know what they were looking at. It was much more interesting than shooting all this that was different from the camera footage.”
By using these old cameras, Pablo got just the look he wanted. “We shot it in the same format and what happened is the archival footage became fiction and our materials, the fiction became documentary. That merging became amazing. I don’t know if you realized that is was straight from us but most people think we shot a lot of things that were done by them. It makes us a very good piece on the one side and on the other side it just creates this illusion that you are in the story.”
Some of the criticisms of the film have been on the way it looks. “I know it is considered horrible and ugly for a lot of people,” said the director but he sees the visual logic. “My opinion is completely different. I think there is a lot of beauty there and there is a way of understanding the video culture that is fascinating to me and we have to admit we were quite insecure because of the reaction of distributors and TV channels that would buy the movie.”
He finished his thought by saying. “I don’t think those things affect the movie if the movie is strong enough, it would just help. Maybe if the movie didn’t work, then it would be horrible. Every thing would be in a bad position. Since it does work, it helps to make it more interesting.”
It was not smooth sailing using cameras that were decades old. There were problems with camera heat and light sources. They had to manipulate the image with in camera lights. In 90% of the shots there is a bulb in the frame, so there are lamps bothering the tube camera so they would react in an unexpected way. “In the regular shots,” said the director, “it would look really ugly, very sort of old video without any texture that was interesting. So you would have to provoke the camera in order to achieve that.” They used four cameras and all of them would work differently depending on the light conditions. “So we were testing with two,” said Pablo, “I would operate one and the DP would direct two. It was so special how they would react. They were always heating up and they would shut off without no explanation.”
To keep the feel of a documentary, the production didn’t use any marks on the floor or a pre-planned focus puller. “I discovered when I was shooting that it was so fresh because you have to follow everybody and the frame is never that precise. In the headphones, we would listen to the actors and we would just follow the scene. There are complete scenes where we would just shoot one shot and it created this sort of reality that is not stated.”
Doing a film with such basic techniques became a challenge for the entire crew. “We discovered that that from the first two days of shooting, we had to re-shoot them because we really didn’t know how to shoot the movie. It was so hard to understand the logic of the camera and how to do it. On the third day of shooting, we went ‘Oh, this is how it is’ and I realized that I had to re-shoot and everybody agreed. We understood how this movie was to be made. It was part of the process and I enjoyed it because the movies are not only what you end up doing. You live five years doing the film so I tried to enjoy that too.”
Pablo Larrain does not have any firm plans on his next cinematic step. “It is very hard to work on something while you are working on a project. I have a few things but it is very hard to feel really comfortable. I need to be in complete quietness and it is not easy. Working with press, I can’t do two things that are that important. I have a few things moving on since awhile but I don’t know exactly what I am going to do until I finish this process. The film has not been released here. It has not been released in Europe, where I’m going now. There is a whole tour, marketing. Once it is over, we will know what is next.”
