We’re not going to kill each other with guns, it might be Peter’s friends who swapped the English countryside for a small and damp Valencia seaside town. Moreover, in this situation, Peter dies and his friends—played by Ingrid García-Jonsson, Elena Martín, Joe Manjón, Lorena López, and Carlos Troya—reunite to face the duel they’ve been avoiding until then. Maria Ripoll (Barcelona, 1964) directed Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez and Antonio Escámez’s co-adaptation of the play, which won Max for Revelation Writer in 2016.
Filmed in Valencian and Spanish, Quartell, between Sagunt and Almenara beach, was screened at the Malaga Festival, and we Won’t Kill Each Other With Pistols, which opened on Friday. «I liked it very much because everyone said that here you can only shoot something like this – Ripoll explains in a phone call. This is a movie that absorbs a lot of post-industrial Valencia mixed with the orchard, a landscape that reflects the mood of the characters very well».
Warmth, sweat, close-up, music… The beginning sounds like a Spaghetti Western.
It is a film about the reunion of five friends who have not seen each other for a long time and have an unfinished business. They talk as if they were musketeers and challenge each other. The mourning they feel for the person who was not there is resolved in duels between them. The idea of the West came to me thanks to these duels.
What’s unique about Valencia is to put “everything in the air” into the beat of the Orxata Sound System after such a tense day.
Yes, this is very real from Valencia. It was written in the script that there would be a party with a village orchestra, but we were on full restraint during the filming and it would be difficult. Someone introduced me to the Orxata Sound System’s songs and they seemed ideal for the generation and to represent a very special era.
Is it difficult to shoot a play like Victor wrote to the cinema?
When the story is good and the game works very well, it’s not that hard. We managed to get the story out on the street, we took the scenery to describe the desolation of the characters, we showed the house and above all we held a festival where everyone wanted to dance and unwind. It was Miguel and Antonio’s first script and it made me laugh because I was the one defending the original work, they wanted to change everything, they put in other characters… We tried to preserve the game even though it remained a very cinematographic film. .
This is clearly a generational story. Can you describe someone who is not in their nostalgic and decadent thirties?
I think so too. I’m older and I felt identified with because all generations had a history, a post, some friends and nostalgia for all this. We all have a festival, a town and a town we want to return to someday.
Are some of these characters as selfish as they seem?
More than selfish, it is the generation of unfulfilled dreams. They had a career, they went abroad, they came back, they were promised so much and in the end they may not have had as much as their parents did. These unfulfilled dreams and the ‘so this’ they say in the movie is what defines that generation.
“Looks like we were going to eat the earth and ate a mound,” says one of them.
This sentence. The cave is that big. Until now, there has always been growth from generation to generation, cultural and economic growth. . We have to somehow make do with what we have and protect what we have.
We have friendship, but five friends have a hard time rediscovering it.
First of all, this is a movie that talks about communication, about the unspoken. If you don’t convey good grief and don’t trust your friends, there’s nothing you can do. At the end of the movie there is a sentence that I think sums it up very well: «anem juntes perquè juntes es pensa millor».
His second film shot in Valencia. Will it be the third?
Maybe yes. Now I’m premiering a series on Netflix with Jean Reno and Aura Garrido, and we’re starting to make a fatter series that could run perfectly in Valencia. I really like to shoot the Valencia Region because there are places you won’t find anywhere else.
Was casting the landscapes as costly as casting the interpreters?
We were looking for that post-industrial Sagunt mixed with orchards because these are landscapes that take us so well to the desolation of the characters. Despite being very cinematographic, Valencia’s locations are unknown. For example, there is no beach in the entire Mediterranean that offers such a private view as those of Sagunt or Almenara.
An off-topic Valencia.
Yes, and that’s why we chose them because that’s how the characters are. And because I always like to look at places that are not usually seen.