From the personal and professional relationship of the creative duo created by Isaki Lacuesta and owned by Isa Campo a luxury cinematographic harvest is out: the ‘next volume’ or two golden shells, ‘Double digit’ and ‘Between two waters’. But the film couple was born years before the ‘One Year, One Night’ competition at the 2022 Berlinale: they’ve known each other since they were 14 and took their first steps into the audio-visual world at 15. a video about the fall of the berlin wall with some friends.
“We can think of this as our first documentary,” the couple jokes. The movie ‘One year, one night’, about the attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris on October 21, is being screened in cinemas.. A few days ago, on Tuesday the 19th, they presented their city at the Truffaut in Girona as part of the program of the Temporada Alta festival.
Between that first video and productions like ‘One year, one night’ or ‘series’blackoutPremiering at the end of September and making Campo’s directorial debut, he explains that many projects go through a shared trajectory that develops “very naturally and haphazardly”, with Iñaki being the person responsible for the artistic name. Lacuesta be Isaki.
“Working together was so progressive, because I did not plan to devote myself to cinema. He was very clear about it, but I studied Engineering and Philosophy,” he explains.
Attractive initially came with occasional collaborations during the documentation phase and during the filming of movies like ‘Cravan vs Cravan’ or ‘The Legend of Time’, but “When he’s completely hooked on the movies,” Campo explains, it was with “The Next Skin.”.
first scenario
At first, Lacuesta asked him for help because he wasn’t directly involved so there was a bit more perspective to the shoot, but when they started designing that movie, Campo’s involvement went a step further: there was a key female character Lacuesta wanted. a female screenwriter and it was obvious to him.
“I had never written, but we found ourselves writing and sharing a ladder and I really connected there.Says Campo, who is co-director of this film, which was not shot in more than a decade with Àlex Monner, Emma Suárez and Sergi López.
It took so long to do this that many other projects preceded it, such as ‘The Condemned’, where Isa Campo was already fully involved in the script and directing the actors. “I’m a weird screenwriter because I was always on set to work with the actors, rewriting what was necessary.…I rehearsed a lot with the actors on ‘The Condemned’ and the rewriting was intense, I really liked shooting there and we haven’t stopped since,” explains Campo, listing his involvement in films like ‘The Endless Night’, ‘Double Steps’ or the same ‘One year, ‘one night’, the sequences shot at a children’s center were his thing.
The way they work, they elaborate, it’s not systematic, there is no specific method. But a third screenwriter, who was present at the time of writing, says Fran Araújo, who turns the duet into a trio on equal terms, “totally synchronized so it’s not noticeable that the scripts were written by three different people.” Area.
“Collaborating with Fran had to be something very punctual, we included that while preparing ‘The next volume’ because we had been working there for so long that we lost a lot of perspective. We learned a lot from each other and it’s so good for us to be three now, we’ve moved on. good for the number of projects, because we have a lot of things going on at different stages. Many must fall for a project to come out.Summarizes the director and screenwriter who has developed a series for Movistar + and is on the agenda together with Lacuesta for the director’s next film and another television production.
So, the three of them summarize together and absorb the project well before they start writing, but then each movie is different and goes their own way. “It depends on the project and the time, sometimes there is someone pulling the car, others are contributing, and in other cases, we distribute the arrays depending on how you like to write them“, Girona continues.
an invisible business
Although they have filmed together for a long time – for example ‘The Condemned’ since 2009, it has not yet been shot. until recently, the work of Isa Campo began to become visible.A change attributed to a number of factors, both of which include greater social sensitivity, greater recognition of the screenwriters, and the emergence of solo projects such as the acclaimed script of the movie ‘Maixabel’, co-written with director Icíar Bollaín, with whom a new production is already preparing.
“We co-directed the ‘next volume’, co-authored exhibitions, signed alphabetically with Field before Lacuesta, and… they only talked about me in the media”, says LacuestaHe added that it was a ‘painful situation’.
“You live with too many resignations. When I was just a writer, I thought it was because the script work was a lot more invisible, but it was so cheeky when co-directing the next volume. I didn’t face any problems with the technical team, the producers or anyone, we always worked as an equal and on the other hand there were no media or some awards”, explains the director and screenwriter.
“There were awards just quoted from him, he didn’t even know if he should go out and get it.. Or because he couldn’t take care of me, the interviewers called me ‘Lacuesta’s wife’ instead of introducing me as the director of the film,” she says.
They realized that with ‘between two waters’ the situation had changed, which gave them a public presence they didn’t have before, and it was the ‘final leap’.maixabel‘, because the screenplay work became widely known and Isa Campo’s name began to sound unrelated to Isaki Lacuesta’s.
“I noticed a big jump and now they are asking me to write a lot of things.“, says Campo, who debuted as a director with an episode from the show.blackout‘, here Lacuesta directs another division. “It’s a step I’ve taken for a long time,” explains the producer, who shot his first feature film as a solo director during the cover-writing phase.
“It’s a project that’s about to start writing, which I hope to do next year, because we have a lot going on,” says Campo, who wanted to work on the script with the same system they’ve been using so far. “For us, I don’t need the dynamic of three works and the authorship of one person, because we’re so used to teamwork in film and everything you can add is so rich,” says Campo.
“There is a misconception about authorship.it’s nice that all the ideas belong to one person and that the cinema is really the sum of the ideas of many people and that all these shared ideas look like you”, states Isaki Lacuesta.
Both say they know each other “completely” in all their movies. and that they often fail to distinguish what contributes to one or the other: “This is going well, because the link is what makes everything work”.
“‘One Year, One Night’ is one of our most empathetic films”
‘one year one night‘ After its premiere in Berlin in February, it arrives on the billboard on October 21st and passes through festivals such as San Sebastián. The film reconstructs the psychological consequences of the few survivors of the attack in the room. Bataclan From Paris: it begins minutes after the terrorists entered the Eagles of Death Metal concert on the night of November 13, 2015, and follows its evolution over the course of a year.
For Lacuesta, The biggest difference between this production and its previous films is “on a budget scale”because he has the budget for all of his previous films, which has given him the opportunity to “talk to a part of his dream that he hadn’t been able to do before.” “Each project is made with the budget it needs, but on this project we were able to do sequences that were impossible with previous budgets, like populating the Bataclan with people or filming the evacuation with firefighters and ambulances,” he says.
The reception of the film, they explain, “exciting”. “It works very well in transitions and has a lot of emotion because it directly challenges the public,” says Isa Campo.
As an example, Lacuesta cites the projection in Amsterdam a few days ago, “which is very exciting because there was someone who survived the Brussels attacks and felt very identical”. “It’s one of the most empathetic and emotional of our films, but we came out in October. it’s full of very good titles and it’s going to be hard to find a place” reassures the director about his commercial prospects.
Regarding the resonance that auteur cinema has had lately with films like Carla Simón’s ‘Alcarràs’ or Albert Serra’s ‘Pacifiction’, both said, “There’s been so much power and diversity over the years, there’s so much cinema out of here. been seen outside, in major museums, festivals and theatres,” but this year it’s seen more than ever because these are auteur films with a larger commercial profession and a larger budget than is usually allocated to them.
“Recognizing that a movie with non-professional actors can have an impact is progress for me. It was harder to understand the public, the buyers before… to come here, many people have a previous job.‘, sums up Lacuesta, an installation of the Temporada Alta festival short film La voz latente (First act) at the Municipal Theater of Girona these days.
Source: Informacion
