Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel is the director of A Landscaped Area Too Quiet for Me.
This is your first feature film as a director. What drew you to this project for your first dive into feature-length filmmaking? Can you talk us through the journey you and this project underwent, in order to arrive at the film that will premiere at Doclisboa?
This project came to me as an unexpected surprise that brought together several desires, my grandmother’s desire to tell her and mine to want to be with her more. At the beginning, more than 5 years ago, I didn’t think about making a film, I just helped to order my grandmother’s words in a possible memoir, but the encounters with her made me feel that I had to film what I saw and felt towards her, what I heard, my grandfather and their lives (also the time and the house). From there an adventure arose that mixed this starting point and my filmic modes, more coming from fiction.
While talking to my grandmother in Madrid, my other grandmother, who lived in a very small village, more than 500 km away, was losing her memory and her reason, suddenly I found myself in a complementary and enormously interesting world: memory and (dis)memory, and that was the film I wanted to tell. That project is still alive under the title: MADRIDLASVEGAS (Las Vegas is the name of my other grandmother’s village), somehow this film that you can see in Doclisboa is the first part of that broader project. When we reviewed the material of this first recording we realized that it was a film in itself and we decided to put it together. At the beginning it was not clear what it was, only the appearance of Marta Velasco, the film editor, made it all make sense and come to life.
Your film is a very carefully considered and crafted work, interested equally in offering an intimate character study and record of the memories and reality of its protagonist, as well as the creative formal and artistic possibilities that exist in constructing something other – a piece of cinema – out of them. Can you talk us through your negotiation of this space, and these dual responsibilities, in the film?
The film tries to be faithful to the intimacy we find with the characters, the filming and the shared time and space, as well as to my way of seeing cinema. When we started I didn’t know how to film, I limited myself to interviewing, but then I let myself be carried away by my impulses and decided to have fun, to try, to investigate, and I began to use staging, repetitions and all those resources that brought me closer to what I felt and knew deeply (the house, my grandparents, the memory…) than to what I saw in mere reality. I realized that the responsibility was to be faithful to what I felt more than to what I saw, that made me feel free and enjoy, and I’m sure that saved and created the film.
You’ve described yourself as interested in the idea of ‘f(r)icción’ – a hybrid word of your own creation linking ‘fiction’ with ‘friction’. How did this idea inform your thinking and choices in the construction of this film? And how does it frame your wider relationship to cinema?
I had never thought about cinema from a documentary point of view. Although I had not yet managed to shoot a feature film, I had always thought of cinema from fiction, something that without being fully conscious constrained me to previous premises such as scripts that I don’t like. By trying to film reality I felt free to experiment and mix both ways. When we put a camera in front of the first breakfast I immediately noticed that the friction caused by filming led us to a more interesting filmic space, and that, which at first I rejected, was what attracted me the most and pulled me. The film began to build on those frictions, filming, the friction between the crew and my grandparents, the spatial limitations of the corridors, the age of the characters, all those limits and “frictions” enriched the film and completely opened my way of approaching cinema. Working and improvising from reality with elements born from the mise-en-scene gave me the freedom I had always wanted and, at the same time, offered me a creative space much closer to improvisation and the use of the natural resources at hand, something much closer to my way of feeling life and cinema. Shooting this film I have not only learned to finally create a feature film, but I have also discovered how I like to do it. Albert Serra said a few days ago that filming like this is for lazy people, and maybe he’s right, I’m a happy lazy person with this method. I prefer to be free working with reality than locked in the premises of what I wrote one day on a piece of paper, I find it more interesting to take advantage of the light coming through the window than the ingenious words of a written scene.
