Time Bends

TIME BENDS

Programming a film festival involves a kind of critical cooperation that in most cases has to supercede private likes and dislikes. If unanimosity isn't possible, we should have come pretty close to it when we decided on most of the festival's films.

One of the happy bonuses of taking part in this part of the film festival, though, is the opportunity to advocate for something you really love. And I love Timecrimes. When I reviewed it in the magazine Death Ray, I gave it a 250 word encomium and graded it with four stars out of five. Looking back, that feels very stingy. Five is more like it.

Everyone who likes giallo, Italian crime films, and fiddly time travel conundrums should take a look at this film, which is showing at Chapel Arts tonight at 9.30pm (late is the best time for a film like this). It is smart and grisly at the same time, managing to be both one of the best slashers of the decade and one of its best time travel movies. I chatted to director Nacho Vigalondo about the film earlier in the year (he was wandering around central Madrid with a mobile, I was sat in Bath on a landline), and we tried to get through the interview without spoiling the plot. We just about succeeded. Enjoy – and if you haven't got time for the whole transcript, skip ahead to the final question. You won't believe what Vigalondo is planning next.



Us
Hi there Nacho. Your film Timecrimes blends elements of the thriller into the science fiction genre. Are you a fan of both?

Vigalondo
I love it. But if you're a filmmaker in Spain and you want to make genre, you're sort of fighting against the elements. Being a film director is close to being a politician if you want to get your film made…

Us
There's not been very much SF in Spanish cinema, but you've proved a reliable source of horror in recent years…

Vigalondo
You mean films like The Orphanage and [•REC]? The fact is that all these filmmakers are the same age, more or less. Now we're able to make these kinds of films, but when we were teengers there were few examples of genre in Spanish film. It was a matter of faith. We have filmmakers like Álex de la Iglesia, a great genre filmmaker, but the truth is we don't have a tradition of science fiction films in Spain. Timecrimes has SF roots, but it also comes from giallo horror films and classic crime stories. When the idea came to me, I said to myself, 'This movie is going to be a hardcore science fiction story but it's going to look like a slasher film.' It became very exciting for me.

Us
Was the Timecrimes story an original idea?

Vigalondo
It's my own idea but I have to recognise this idea comes from my readings of science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick, Stanis?aw Lem and Robert Heinlein. I love stories that somehow push the reader to the edge. I wanted to make a movie that really sells this kind of story.

Us
The multiple loops in the film reminded us of Heinlein's stories 'By His Bootstraps' and 'All You Zombies', where the ontological paradox is taken to its logical extreme…

Vigalondo
'All You Zombies' is an amazing story. I read it when I was younger and I was completely blown away. The heart of that story the structure, and I had the idea of making a movie that is at its most spectacular in the structure itself. I wanted to put all my effort into making a perfect loop. You can watch the movie again and again and there are a lot of hidden features. When we made the Spanish DVD, we re-edited the movie again, so you can watch the movie from a chronological point of view, in real time. It becomes a crazier film. It's more absurd. I love it.

Us
Surely it was a nightmare to script?

Vigalondo
When you want to change an aspect of a story, you just change it. But in Timecrimes, if I wanted to change something it not only affected the things that came later, but also the scenes before. It was crazy.

Us
How long did it take?

Vigalondo
I didn't write it in a professional way. It was something I did for myself. It took years, but it was my little secret in the night. It wasn't a case of going into a café for two months to write a script. It took years.

Us
Karra Elejalde was very impressive in the lead role. We confess he's not well known at all in the UK…

Vigalondo
Elejalde is well known in Spain for making comedy. But in the '90s he made a bunch of films in which he was a psycho killer, for example The Dead Mother in 1993. I wanted to give him the opportunity to go back to his roots and becoming a psycho killer again. He's able to be a clown and a killer at the same time. He can be really funny and at the same time frightening.

Us
We only see a few hours of his character's life, but he seems to transform himself physically. It's a great performance.

Vigalondo
In three or four hours his world is going to change; he's going to see the world from a whole new perspective; he's going to become another kind of person. I wanted to reflect that in his look. I have the character crashing against the floor, having a lot of injuries, a lot of blood loss. There's dirt all over his coat and his face. I wanted to show him become a monster.

Us
You cast yourself in the film, as the keeper of the time machine. Why?

Vigalondo
I work as an actor here in Spain. I appear in commecials and feature films and I appear in some of my short films. We thought it would be really funny if the guy that is trying to direct the action inside the movie is the guy who is trying to direct the movie itself. When you're making a movie you seem to be the master and at the same time you're the first victim. That's what happenes to the doctor. He seems to be pulling the strings but at the end we discover that he's not pulling anything. He's just the victim of a movie.

Us
One of the smartest things about the movie is how it plays with the rules of the genre – Héctor thinks he's making all these decisions, but he's actually beholden to the rules of pulp fiction.

Vigalondo
We are all aware of the conventions of genre: the naked girl, the killer, the hero, the victim, the man behind the curtain. I love how the conventions that this character builds for himself fit with the conventions of the classic thriller. I love how it begins with some kind of sexual fantasy. I remember all those films from the '70s where people are naked in the forest. In Timecrimes we disccover that fantasy is real, but that he's making a fanatsy for himself. And if we try to follow the loop there's no beginning, there's no point zero when everything starts.

Us
The English language remake is in development – how do you feel about that?

Vigalondo
If I were this old filmmaker with 10 or 20 films behind me and a long career, I don't know how I would feel. But this is my first film. I'm still a geek, for me it's awesome having this surprising opportunity. Timothy J. Sexton is writing it and Steve Zaillian is involved. I think they are awesome people, and I'm a young filmmaker who's really lucky becuase I can have a breakfast with Steve Zaillian. I hope this gives me the opportunity to make films in LA.

Us
What's next for you?

Vigalaondo
I'm still writing. I'm developing a movie here in Spain. I also have a movie that is going to be developed in LA. This industry is really, really slow. If these projects aren't prepared for filming this year, I have a science fiction script ready to be filmed with almost no budget. It will be really cheap. I shot Timecrimes in 2006, so I'm desperate to shoot something again. I'm prepared to make a low budget film.

Us
Tell us about your 'car ramp' science fiction movie…

Vigalondo
I don't know when it's going to become real. I've written a new draft, and an American company has it. They're trying to attach people to the main roles so I don't know yet. It's about about a guy who is trying to jump on to a UFO with the ramp. Do you know Field of Dreams? This movie is also about faith, but in this case this guy is building a big ramp because he made this mathematical equation using UFO sightings from the beginning of the century. He knows where and when this UFO is going to appear, so he'll have it ready and he's going to jump on to the UFO. But I cannot tell you what happens at the end!

(Thanks are extended to blackfishpublishing.com, where this interview was first published.)