Paco Plaza (Valencia, 1973) is a regular at the Sitges Festival, which he has been attending for 32 years. Up to this point he has made four films since he became known with The Second Name (2002). And this Thursday he had the honor of opening the 56th edition of the contest dedicated to fantastic and horror cinema with Sister Death, a prequel to the successful Verónica (2017), based on the real case of a young woman who, in the early nineties , after playing the Ouija board, stated that an evil presence was harassing her.
With a script written alongside Jorge Guerricaechevarría and starring Aria Bedmar, Almudena Amor and Maru Valdivieso, Plaza is in charge of narrating the origins of one of the nuns who appeared in the film, Sister Death played by Consuelo Trujillo and who with her rolling eyes caused chills. The action takes place in post-war Spain, in an old convent converted into a girls' school where a young woman named Narcisa arrives to work as a teacher and who has strange supernatural powers.
The young woman will soon realize that a spirit is trying to get her attention, and at the same time she must discover the terrible secret that the walls of the old convent keep. "We had the opportunity to meet again with a character that we loved. In Verónica, our favorite character was Sister Death, a blind nun who smokes compulsively and in some way we felt indebted to her. Like we had told very little about her and she had much more to give us. After the impact of Verónica, interest arose on the part of Netflix to make a film that had a type of connection with that universe. With those two factors, someone who wanted to make it and someone who wanted to pay for it, It was all shot," says the director in conversation with La Vanguardia.
The film was filmed practically inside the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo de Cotalba, located in the municipality of Alfauir (Valencia), with a very female cast. "Apart from great actresses, many like Maru or Almu are my best friends." For the director of The Grandmother, Sister Narcisa is "a girl who has a fantasy that resonates throughout an entire town and the people there go along with it. In the film, in a moment of crisis, she begins to doubt herself. Is it true or not what she says she saw or if they were just a girl's fantasies. This is inspired by some real statements made by one of the girls from Garabandal who saw the Virgin in Cantabria. This woman said that she did not know if It was something they invented when they were little, but a circus was set up around it...and that had a big impact on me. To think that a girl has been singled out her whole life because she has seen the Virgin when she was six or seven years old... "I saw Baltasar one night, you know?" he explains, laughing.
Plaza assures that the figure of the nun has always fascinated him since he was a child. "I find them very sexy. They are women who enclose themselves in a mystery and voluntarily don't let you see who they are. They have a calling to be an enigma. And I think that mystery always generates interest and morbidity. We are all more interested in what we don't know than in what we don't know. "What we know. We are all a little bit The Old Woman with the Curtain, by José Mota. We are often more into gossip than knowledge."
The nuns in her new film, premiering on Netflix on October 27, wear the habit, "a combination of different congregations," of white, a color that was "very important for blending the nuns with the white walls, like salamanders that you don't see and they merge with the walls of the convent", in addition to highlighting the importance of the light of the Mediterranean and enveloping it in a daytime terror. "I believe that the most tremendous things, contrary to what classical iconography suggests, happen in the light of day. And as a filmmaker it seemed like a challenge to me to try to make such a luminous horror film. We always tend to play with shadows, with the that you don't see to generate that tension, and here I opted for the opposite. I liked the challenge of making a film in which it is not suggested but shown."
After filming so many horror stories, have you ever seen anything paranormal? "Many times. In the cell opposite where Narcisa was there was a ghost that we all noticed and with whom we lived and he was one of the team. As Aria said, he was 'very friendly'. We never noticed hostility, on the contrary. We felt that he "We had gotten out of boredom because no one came before and suddenly so many people. We served as a distraction. We did a good job and he behaved very well. He threw chairs... we almost signed him up on the team of the company that made us." , he says between laughs.
Plaza says that he is very disconnected from the topic of Artificial Intelligence, "I wish there was more natural intelligence," he points out, and in the face of new projects he will continue "with more terror. It is what I like the most as a spectator and what I enjoy filming the most." , he concludes.
