June 2019
Miguel Coyula

BIO

GUEST:
MIGUEL COYULA

HOST:
LYNN CRUZ

Bio:

Miguel Coyula
(Havana, 1977)

Miguel Coyula is known for working completely independently. Since the beginning of his career, he has been the screenwriter, photographer, editor, special effects director and sound designer for his films. His films have been characterized by misfit protagonists, brutal criticism of capitalism, religion, conservative morality, and betrayal of the original socialist ideals of the Cuban revolution.


PROGRAMMING:

Friday, June 28 at 8pm


Cucarachas Rojas (2003) / 82’ / Digital

Saturday, June 29 at 8pm

Memorias del Desarollo (2010) / 112’ / Digital HD


Sunday, June 30 at 8pm

Corazón Beta

INTERVIEW

Miguel Coyula was the first director to whom the INSTAR Cine Independiente-Cine Pendiente (Independent Film–Pending Film) Showcase was dedicated. As he is my colleague, and he wasn’t among the three critics I had convened, he accepted our proposal to come. He is the only director that I didn’t interview, because it seemed ridiculous to me. So I will summarize the events of the last weekend of May 2019, at Tejadillo 214, between Aguacate and Compostela Streets in Old Havana, during the presentations of Cucarachas Rojas [Red Cockroaches] (2003), Memorias del desarrollo [Memories of Development] (2010), and Corazón azul (beta) [Blue Heart] (2019). This interview will appear in three parts, which correspond, in this case, to each of the films screened. This first part features the audience’s questions about Cucarachas rojas, answered by Coyula. (Visual artists Lester Álvarez, Camila Lobón, Julio Llópiz-Casal, and literature student Juliana Rabelo were among the audience.)

Did you write the script for this film during the year-long filming?

No, in fact this has been the only film where I wrote the script and then I started shooting in chronological order, because in my other films I’ve been constantly improvising on the fly, but this has been the closest to a traditional production in the sense that the three stages of production—writing the script, filming, and editing—were linear. In my other movies, sometimes I’m editing, I come up with a scene, I write it down and I shoot again. In that sense it was quite traditional. Also, since I thought I was going to be in New York for just one year, I said: “Well, I won't be able to go back.” Everything had to be done in a rush, there was no time to edit and continue filming. The film was made with 2,000 dollars, it was the budget I had to film. Neither the actors nor I charged, of course. We did it to prove that we could make a feature film. It was our first, the protagonists included. The first experience for me working and editing in digital format, because previously I had filmed with a VHS camera and I had to edit on the camera, that is, I had to shoot the entire film chronologically and, in this case, I was able to start thinking about a montage. In fact, that’s what I like most about the movie, the editing, and I think that’s why, because it was my first long experience with digital.

How was it to work with the actors? Regardless of the fact that you speak English, what is it like directing an actor who speaks another language?

At the time I had an acting scholarship at the Lee Strasberg Institute. It was very easy for me, in fact in the same academy they gave classes on how to perfect English pronunciation. The actors were people my age, we were all between 21 and 23 years old when we started and there was an affinity, that is, we were working for the love of art, so they gave a lot of themselves, because later that’s much more difficult to maintain. In New York, almost everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 wants to be an actor, but after the machinery takes hold of them and they realize they can’t make a living, well, it gets harder, but that’s one stage where everyone wants to do something. English was not a barrier for me, although the movie, the story was so weird that sometimes I had to spend time explaining. The sex scene, for example, was complicated, because Adam Plotch, the protagonist, is an Orthodox Jew; technically he couldn’t kiss a woman unless it was his wife and he hadn’t married yet, so it was complicated. In that sense, that was also the most difficult scene for the actress.

You also studied at the EICTV in San Antonio de los Baños. Was that before or after?

It was right after I graduated from San Antonio, when they gave me the scholarship, and what I wanted above all in this film was to try during a scene to not repeat the same shot, a principle that comes from literature. I’m very influenced by comics and anime: every time you have a panel in the comic or manga, that panel expresses an idea, and when you cut to another frame, it has to express a different idea. It’s the same as a sentence in literature, for example: after a full stop, your next sentence has to convey a different idea. It’s also a way to increase the tension regarding the editing of the film, because it bothers me when this ping pong begins in the conversations, shot against shot, and it was something I wanted to avoid. So I chose a montage as close to this type of animation, especially anime, as I mentioned before, because it was what I wanted to explore.

In the film you not only deal with issues of genetic experimentation, it seems to me that you also suggest something through food. You speak not only of experimentation with human beings, but of genetic manipulation on many other levels. Was this a topic of conversation in the United States at the time?

Yes, there were already films like Gattaca. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the whole subject of genetic engineering was very popular, but the idea of the film was to raise more questions than answers. In other words, there are many clues in the film for things that would develop later in Corazón azul, and some were even unanswered. The idea was to constantly create false expectations in the narration so that you didn’t know what ground you were walking on. For me it’s very important in cinema to create the feeling of discomfort. There’s a constant oppression. Sure, that was my first movie and there are a lot of things I don’t like, of course, but I do appreciate trying to create a different atmosphere. I’ve always been an enemy of realism. Realism doesn’t interest me at all.

Is opening many topics and leaving them to the viewer also a tactic?

For me, Cucarachas Rojas is a film that above all plays with the elements of melodrama. Science fiction is more like an element to create these atmospheres, rather than explaining them. I mean, I’m more interested in fiction than in science in that sense.

And this setting, New York, could also be anywhere. I have the sense that the idea is more about megalopolises?

Yes, taking advantage of the fact that I was in New York, I said to myself, well, this is a story that has to take place in a first world country; when I returned to Cuba, I wouldn't be able to do it. So I decided to make a story that can be told here.

Since then, have you done all the post-production work on your films yourself?

In this case, for the little creature that comes out of the tooth, some friends from Cuba, Fernando Morlans and José Manuel Cruz, helped me, but I did the rest of the special effects. It was my first time with a feature film, because I had done it in my short. I don’t know how to use 3D, what I do is two-dimensional animation, which is something that also comes from anime, from moving layers. But it was the first time I did color correction, it was my first intense experience with digital, with Final Cut 3.

As for the title, although it is Cucarachas rojas [Red Cockroaches], the cockroach is not the main focus.

Well, many people see the title and, of course, what they think is that it is a film about communism, because I’m Cuban. But cockroaches have always fascinated me because they’re animals that can even survive nuclear disasters and people despise them, a bit like protagonists who provoke disgust and repulsion. But I’m also interested in it being open to interpretation.

What camera did you use to film?

A Canon GL-1 on Mini DV.

And what lighting did you use?

I bought it in Chinatown in New York, it was very cheap, it cost 10 dollars, it’s practically a basin with a light bulb. Actually, I still have it. I’m still using it, even in Corazón azul, sometimes to bounce light.

And you weren’t interested in making something Cuban in New York?

No, because I arrived in New York without really knowing anyone. So I said, “Well, I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I’m completely disconnected from Cuba and I’m going to do something here that has nothing to do with Cuba.”

But is there a nod to Cuba in the title, perhaps unconsciously?

I really didn’t think about that. I’ve always been drawn to primary colors—blue, red—I really didn’t think about politics at all with this movie, beyond the fact that of course I’ve always been interested in misfit characters, and that in itself is a political position. The incest itself makes the characters stand out from the crowd, so I also really wanted to tell the story because of that. One way or another, for political reasons or for whatever reason, the characters in my films are always people who don’t fit in.

Your trilogy will include Cucarachas rojas [Red Cockroaches], Corazón azul [Blue Heart], and what is the third?

The third is in the form of a novel, it’s called Mar rojo, mal azul [Red Sea, Bad Blue], I don’t know when I’ll be able to make that one. It’s not a trilogy with a continuous narrative, but the character of Nick, played by Jeff Pucillo, Adam’s friend who starts working on DNA21, is an important character in Corazón azul.

And was the film shown in Cuba?

The film opened in New York, there was a review in Variety, and it began to circulate in festivals outside of Cuba. It won several awards at microcinema film festivals, that was the time when everyone was making films with Mini DV, and there was an explosion of home movies with virtually no budget. A year later it was shown at the Muestra Jóvenes Realizadores [Young Filmmakers Showcase], in 2004. But no, interestingly, wait, I just remembered something, actually the first time the film was shown was in Cuba, at the Almacén de la Imagen in Camagüey, in October 2003, before going anywhere else outside of Cuba. A little later it was screened in New York, but that was really the premiere.

And Memorias del desarrollo [Memories of Development] is not connected at all to that trilogy?

No, not at all. I was thinking of continuing with Corazón azul, which at that time was called Camino azul, and I had already written the first version of the script, which has undergone I don’t know how many mutations since then, but then I got to know Edmundo Desnoes and I concentrated on the world of Memorias del desarrollo, and left the other project on pause until I finished Memorias and got to work. What I don’t like about Cucarachas rojas is that the narrative is too linear. After making Memorias I realized that there were other ways of telling stories that were not so tied to linearity, although the film is strange for other reasons. But yes, the fragmented storytelling caught my attention much more after making this film, and I discarded that more traditional way of telling. Actually, my short films before Cucarachas were also fragmented, especially El tenedor plástico [The Plastic Fork].

Did the film receive any criticism here?

Yes, reviews were written, by Frank Padrón, by Dean Luis Reyes, and won the Special Jury Prize at the Festival that year, 2004. But well, just like with all my films in Cuba, it wasn’t released properly in theaters in Cuba, there were just some scattered screenings. On the other hand, it’s my only film that had commercial distribution in the United States, though it interests me the least of the movies I’ve made. It also coincided with the last DVD boom—that is, it came out at Tower Records, which was the largest DVD store at that time, it was distributed. And it’s on Netflix too, by disc—it's not streaming, but it’s still on Netflix. It’s interesting how Memorias has no distribution and yet this one does, perhaps because it’s a more universal story, but it gives you the idea that what really matters outside of Cuba is that there’s not too strong an anchor in the Cuban context, really your work ceases to exist in terms of traditional international market possibilities because it has been shown at universities, at festivals and museums around the world. But traditional distribution, I repeat, is much more difficult this way, through film that is critical of Cuban reality.

I don’t want to be critical of your film, but you’ve made others. Making independent films is tied to each filmmaker identifying their own style, and in your case it seems that you have everything going against you: budget, being in a foreign country, doing almost everything yourself.

In that sense, it was crazy, because in Memorias I worked with a producer, David Leitner, so we were two people. In Corazón azul, now with Lynn Cruz, but here I was completely alone, although, of course, it was my first film and I had so much energy, which then starts to dissipate, because it is difficult to face something like that and continue with the same energy level after twenty years. As I never knew any other way of working—I had even done my shorts in the same way—I faced that naturally, there was no other way, otherwise the film was not going to be made. I’ve never really applied for funding—I don’t know how to put what investors want to see on a spreadsheet. In short, I’m a person of action. I go out to film because I need to feel that the film is progressing every day; for me, this is fundamental.

Could it be said that your system is practically the denial that cinema is an industry, or that movies must be made solely in an industrial way or with much greater resources?

Yes, it was my first experience with artificial lights, so there are things that I wasn’t satisfied with. Each film has been an apprenticeship for me in terms of perfecting techniques. In this film there are many things in the imagery that I don’t like anymore, but well, I had to take that first plunge in order to later improve some things in the next films. This working method arises out of necessity.

So, taking on everything on your own involves taking a big risk?

Yes—you don’t ask yourself, you just start with that energy and it gets going. The important thing is that I show the scenes to the actors; I go in chronological order, and that also keeps them interested in the project. When you’re not paying—or when you pay very little, as is the case now in Cuba, simply because life is cheaper than in New York—it’s also difficult to demand from others the same discipline that one imposes on oneself, it’s hard. In that production in New York, we didn’t even have money to pay for the actors’ lunches, everyone paid for themself. In that sense it was quite extreme.

And have they continued acting?

The only one who kept acting is Jeff Pucillo, who plays Nick; he worked on other movies, and now he plays the same character in Corazón. The others ended up doing other things. Jeff also worked on Memorias del desarrollo. But the rest stopped acting around age 30. There’s a terrible machinery there. What the industry expects, physically, for example, is brutal. Talia, the actress, used to say: “In Los Angeles I won't be able to fit in,” because she didn’t like her nose. I remember telling her that her nose was what made her unique, that’s a virtue, but that’s society, and especially the film industry, where protagonists have to have a face that looks like it came out of a doll factory. For me that’s terrible, I mean, really for independent cinema one should look for bodies and personalities with inner worlds that are not the more traditional, let’s say, more made-for-TV faces; but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

Regarding distribution, now that you’re in Cuba, how do you manage?

Yes, that’s another problem, we talked about how to make the film, but there’s that other problem: where do you send it. Fortunately we’re able to hold this event here; outside of Cuba my films can be screened at festivals, yes, but here [in Cuba], after having made the documentary Nadie in 2017, I can no longer show my films, even in isolation, as it used to be, in a movie theater. For that reason, yes, these spaces arise, luckily.

What do you look for in your films in terms of content?

The type of film that interests me is uncomfortable film. It makes no sense to make an independent movie (in the sense of financing it out of pocket) that’s complacent or adheres to narrative formulas, closer to the industry. That is, the purpose is that it be independent in content and form, that’s the meaning of independent cinema for me.

Excuse this question, I don’t want to divert attention, but I would like to know your opinion regarding the new decree-law that they say will finally authorize independent production in Cuba, which at the same time is dependent on the ICAIC.

The most disturbing thing for me is that it says that all this new production must be done under the principles of the Revolution. Besides that they give you a permit, I see it as completely incompatible with being independent. How could you be independent if they’re creating a permit for you? I’ve never asked permission to film, neither in Cuba nor outside Cuba, but of course I have the advantage of having a small team. What I do is study the places, the locations, in order to do everything as quickly as possible. For me to do what I want to do, the best thing is to stay under the radar, because the truth is that bureaucracy is like that everywhere. In New York you also can request permission several days in advance, and pay, but for movies like mine, that will never be blockbusters, it doesn’t make sense.

I wanted to ask you about how you do everything so differently, when you’re in front of other audiences—how do you see that they perceive your films, or rather, your practice? I imagine that for your colleagues you’re also a very strange case, considering how traditional audiovisual production is organized?

Well, a colleague recently told Lynn that I take a long time and that it’s too much work for people. The truth is, and I was going to mention this, in Cucarachas rojas, the moment with the police cars was real, they were chasing someone and so I filmed them. I started to think that a great way to deal with a low budget is to take advantage of [real] accidents. In fact, in Memorias del desarrollo I did it much more. After you watch it, I’ll show you the shots, before and after the digital manipulation, and the situations that I built a scene upon because I saw something with dramaturgical possibilities, and then I built the scene from that, which here I did occasionally but I was more limited by the script. And as for what they think, I don’t know what they think, I don’t have many contacts, almost all my colleagues in the media have distanced themselves after the censorship. We’re pretty isolated, well, Sheyla Pool is here, but I really don’t know.

Lily, the protagonist, can be associated more with French film. Were you interested in this approach because of influences from international cinema?

Yes, European cinema in general. I really like Godard’s films, Bertolucci too, who filmed in France. Italian cinema also has interested me a lot, especially Antonioni because of his handling of imagery. I always seek a depth and intensity in the look, it’s an aesthetic that I saw in Japanese cartoons, a largely feminine aesthetic of anime, it’s something that I look for when I cast actresses, even looks that may not correspond to a heroine, but rather to a villain: long faces and pronounced noses have always caught my attention. For example, in Cucarachas rojas, when I was in Japan with the film, the Japanese fell in love with Talia. They were fascinated by her, also because long noses are less common there, but I think it goes beyond that, and it was a tremendous confirmation that I was in sync, in terms of the atmosphere and aesthetic that I wanted to convey. Since that was a major influence, it was incredible to be able to see it in Japan, a country that had influenced me so much culturally, through animation, in childhood and adolescence. The femme fatale is also a character who hides her feelings, and that makes her more interesting, because often she doesn’t say what she’s thinking. It must be deciphered or interpreted through her actions, in a collateral way, rather than directly.

You’ve made me believe they did something bad to us. I wanted to ask you, how did you achieve that ambience?

I had to change the color of the buildings, because everything is very chaotic here and when you’re dealing with a genre like science fiction you have to create a certain atmosphere and then it becomes very complex. In fact, I have here a video of the visual effects before and after the manipulation, how the locations were transformed. I’m going to show them to you to give you an idea of how we did it.

There are several parallel stories, there is the science fiction story, and that of the political-social process in Cuba. Perhaps a subject like this would be attractive to a public that loves science fiction.

I’m interested in mixing genres. There are indeed elements of horror. There is also the documentary element. For me, the hybridity of the narration is very important, but I never really think about the audience. Rather I try to make what I would like to watch as a spectator and, of course, I think that if it rings true for me, it will find an audience, albeit modest. In other words, it’s about that, about doing what you can’t do in a traditional industry. Of course it is tremendously complicated when seeking funding. Either you go down the path of Hollywood-type commercial science fiction or more likely to European grants that finance Latin American cinema. There, science fiction and genre don’t easily fit. You have to make a social, observational cinema.

Did you film Fidel Castro’s funeral?

Yes, the obituary has a part that was filmed at Fidel’s funeral. In fact, we were filming a scene at the time that Fidel died. Some kids were in the streets around midnight shouting: “Fidel is dead!” And we had to stop filming Corazón azul and I said, “Let’s go film the funeral.” Later I used the footage in Nadie. In fact, it’s interesting because Fidel’s death was in the original script, but I had written that script in 2004 and was waiting for it to happen so I could film it. And, well, it happened.

In almost all of your films you use archival material.

In Memorias del desarrollo the archival material, that is, the documentary part, is built from real archives. In this one everything was created specifically for the movie—Japanese anime, newscasts, and commercials.

Did you do the anime yourself?

I even drew them by hand and scanned them, so that traces of the aesthetics of the seventies and eighties were visible. And then we recorded the voices with amateur Japanese actors—Yutaka Sato, Yuko Fong, Yuko Mita, and Sumito Toeda.

(The lights in the room go out and Miguel points out the visual effects while he describes the process in each frame.)

This is the Riomar building as it used to be. I had to erase the wall on the left and the other building, the Sierra Maestra, to make it look more isolated, and the rubble in the foreground was filmed in Cojímar. In Cojímar I liked the structures that I later added to the Riomar building. Here I put the buzzards that were there but weren't flying at that specific moment. On this facade of the Riomar I put a faded Fidel that I found in the textile factory in Ariguanabo. After I filmed the actor looking out the window, I realized that the building is U-shaped and it occurred to me the next day to film him passing behind and through an ellipsis to create the illusion that he turned around within the same image. This is the staircase just as it was, then on another floor I found this window. I used it to reframe the window and cut off the character’s head to create more tension as he climbs up.

In this frame I moved it a little more to the left and to the right in what would be the city of Havana. In its place I put the Ciudad Electronuclear [Electronuclear City] of Cienfuegos. I shot this (some hanging strips) at home against a black background and used it in this empty frame. I placed the strips in the foreground and added a piece of wood with nails. And I had to take out the cars parked at the store across the street. This is the hallway as it was, then on another floor I found this (a rusty can) that I liked and also this (a stone hanging from a piece of wire). And this is a double exposure here, I took the left angle from the beginning, where the actors appear and then with a double exposure I was able to match the light from the outside so that it wouldn’t look washed out. Here the pink building on the left looked awful to me so I had to delete it and change the background view. This is a very old technique: you leave the camera without moving it and then you have two halves that you film interchangeably and then you put them together. Of course, we were never going to be able to get the dean’s office because it was part of ISA [Arts Institute], so what we did was look for this apartment in Romañach, which is in Miramar and has the same bricks as ISA. So to create the illusion that it was the same space, I added the view from the window at ISA. And here I removed all the plants and added a view of San Miguel del Padrón. And here, well, I changed the color of the grass. Anyway, all these shots had to be manipulated because we didn’t have physical control of the locations, so we finished the art direction digitally.

(We turned on the lights. Miguel and I went to the front. I began to narrate how in one of the scenes where Miguel showed the special effects, a highway appears that was filmed in Matanzas. To go to Cienfuegos we joined up with Carlos Quintela who was filming La obra del siglo [The Work of the Century]. We made the trip together. We wanted to enter the electronuclear plant. Miguel begins speaking again.)

That was the original plan, but at that time there were problems because the guards were taking the metal parts from the plant and it was impossible for us to access. We had another problem. Tomás (Héctor Noas) had a beard and he had to shave it for Tras la huella. The building scene was shot for three days with him, but then the shooting and editing took four months. Since there were only two of us, Lynn had to dress up as Hector. She put on several pairs of pants to make her legs look thicker.

(He continued explaining that in all the detail shots of the boots, Héctor Noas’s legs are mine. During those three days we prioritized the close-ups of Héctor’s face so that when he left we could take mine. I did my close-ups alone, later in post-production Miguel added Héctor’s back. All of this gives you an idea of how it works and why it took so long.)

(Audience questions follow.)

The film is very complex, it has very subtle elements that you have to think about very calmly, because of the characters and the plot and everything that is happening to them. Did you want to do more with the character of David’s father?

He was the protagonist, he was the journalist who discovered that his son, the character played by Carlos Gronlier, who besides being an actor is a student of visual arts, had been part of the experiment. He was a “normal” character. But many things happened during the shooting, actors left the project for various reasons, often logical in such a long process. That was a blow at first, but in the long run it turned out to be good for the film because it meant that the dramaturgy became more complex, to the point that we would film a scene and then we didn’t even know what would come next. It was unexpected even for me as a creator. I try to feel the same freedom in film as writers do. An idea occurs to me and I write it down, in this case on camera.

And what happened to Héctor Noas? I saw that you launched a crowdfunding to raise 2,000 dollars, which he was asking for in order to authorize you to use his image in the film.

Look, at the time I already told everything that happened. I can tell you that there was a lot of solidarity from people through the crowdfunding. Having to ask for money is very difficult for me, because the ones who usually end up helping you are friends, but I think it worked because after so many years shooting the film, with the independent press covering the process, people knew that we really didn’t have that amount of money.

Did new characters also emerge because of that?

Yes, many. For example, the character played by Mariana Alom, Fernando’s daughter, really came about by accident. I needed Fernando to have an daughter without arms to allegorically refer to mutations, but that character only watched television and gradually grew up. Almost everything was filmed in chronological order, but the idea was that the dramaturgy would evolve from that chemistry. Unlike Memorias del desarrollo, which is a subjective narrative of a single character, here the challenge was to make it collective and for the world that surrounds those characters, the environment, to also become important.

Why do I feel that there is a supradiegetic narrator controlling everything?

Yes, there is. In fact, there are several narrative layers. The character of the critic (Aramís Delgado), for example, was another one that changed. He was only going to present the film, but as the actors began to leave, his presence increased.

Did you also work on the music and the sound effects?

Yes, the sound design and some of the electronic music are mine. But there’s music from Porno para Ricardo. I also worked with Dika Chartoff, a Bosnian composer who designed some of the music for Memorias del desarrollo. There’s a track by Iván Lejardi, and one by Sinfonity, a Spanish band that plays classical music with electric guitars.

Are there any non-professional actors among the cast?

In addition to the professional actors we called depending on what we needed, Lynn’s parents, my mother, my cousins, colleagues, friends, and also people we found on the streets or even a nurse (Nadia Matos) who assisted us during a family event. We also found actors in some of the places where we were filming. María Cruz, Lynn’s mother, was very dedicated, maybe because she always wanted to be an actress.

Very often you have a tendency to pause the camera and I like that. I was thinking that this movie is definitely going to raise a lot of eyebrows.

The problem with political films, such as what happened to me with Nadie when it was shown in Miami, for example, is that people don’t go to debate but rather to reinforce some idea that they already had. Regarding the spaces, the houses, the good thing they have are the textures. Hershey’s, for example, is 100 years old and coincidentally had the same colors as the film. And we were lucky to meet Armando Blanco and Valentina Boutros. Armando became an actor in the film, besides letting us film at his house.

How did it go with Aramís Delgado?

Aramís is an incredible actor, people sometimes don’t call him because they only see him on television and they think he’s limited, but Aramís is very malleable. He can repeat the same thing several times (I like repetition) and there’s always something different. Also, he likes to improvise; there are some actors who can’t improvise.

I really liked Fernando Pérez’s performance, especially in the scene where he talks with Héctor Noas, it’s very convincing.

I didn’t have to do much with Fernando. I must say that he worked for free for the film, he didn’t want to be paid, he said that it was his way of supporting the film. I gave him the scenes randomly, I told him what they were about and he perfected them.

And the woman who says, “I’m not going to Oriente [eastern Cuba] anymore”—is she an actress?

She’s the nurse we met during a family event. She said that she did amateur theater, and we asked her if she wanted to be in the film and she said yes.

Who are the actors who play the State Security agents?

Félix Beaton, Jorge Rivera, Ángel Sojo, Alejandro Bosh, and Reinier Hernández.

Why did you choose the power of telekinesis for your character? Was that intentional?

It has to do with the movies I saw in childhood and adolescence. For me it’s the power of faith. Beyond a realistic or scientific explanation, it has to do with that. That’s why the film doesn’t try to explain, scientifically, why these things happen.

I’d like to make a comment about the anarchy of the characters. All intense feelings create fundamentalism both for and against. They take away your personal voice. The same Cubans who are pro-Trump, which is a phenomenon both inside and outside of Cuba, but in the end it is still a response to the anti-Castro. Monsters have been created in this reality because one says to oneself, do you really not care about social justice? Why do you reject the Revolution so much? Where is your head? But all these reactions occur because of segregation. Perhaps for the sole fact of denying what they instilled in you and taught you. And because you also continue to see that there is no plan, that as much as you say that there is a Revolution, this does not hold. So my question is: Are you afraid that they will consider you almost a representative of what you put out there, in addition to being the actor who brings it to life?

When I’m making a film I try to look for contradictions and things that have a more visceral effect. What happens with Corazón azul, perhaps more than in Memorias del desarrollo, is that this is an action movie, where the sensory has a greater weight. That visceral force is what I was interested in showing, beyond how it can be interpreted. The rest depends on the others.

What I like the most about these characters is that you can get to see the human being behind that conflict that they have as a product of their pasts, but in reality they have something that they didn’t ask for and in the end, it’s about how make use of this as a way to rebel against what happened to them, but without abandoning the search for themselves. You can see that, you can feel that conflict. They don’t just come to you as monsters that are causing damage. From the beginning one realizes how they can inadvertently cause harm. They have this power that maybe they don’t know how to control. So I wanted to know...

How did you handle that? What is your position regarding that power that eventually they can control and they do so with the intent to cause damage?

The idea was to narrate how changes begin to manifest in them during puberty, and through the character of David, to imagine what happened to others who are older than him. As David is the youngest, in the scene where he accidentally gets upset with the girl (Gabriela Ramos) he is simply discovering himself. It’s the moment when he discovers his true power. There’s also an allusion to what happened to his mother (Eder Rodríguez) that is never fully explained.

I like the idea of love as a driver of change. Love as a way of identifying with the other. In this case what I mean is that when there are more than two people it is difficult for them to share a common goal and then everything begins to crumble. I don’t think that in the end they will finish that search. It’s like in adolescence when you go through a stage of rebellion and then you find a certain maturity. I see more of a transformation.

I think the character who did come of age is Elena (Lynn Cruz), that’s why she goes looking for her mother. Because for her the journey is the other way around.

What worries me the most about this generation of manipulated people is that they are not capable of love. Were you interested in exploring this part as well?

Well, it’s like one of the American scientists (Theodore Boloukos) says in the film, referring to the creator of DNA 21: “It’s ironic that someone who is capable of manipulating human genes is so dehumanized.” There is an autism, an emptiness that remains after the intensity. They are the humans of the future.

The process is almost science fiction. What comes after Corazón azul?

I haven’t the slightest idea. Perhaps I’ll go back to some synopses that I wrote a long time ago. But right now I have no idea, because this is taking up all my time—editing, doing the effects, because in the end you have to do the work of several people by yourself.

-You can also access the interview HERE