Juan Antonio Bayona always has several projects running through his head at the same time. If he has recently released the first two chapters he has directed of the Lord of the Rings series for Amazon Prime Video and is preparing the final details of his new film, The Snow Society, which will be seen on Netflix in 2023 after ten years working on it, the Spanish filmmaker is also immersed in the development of a new challenge, the adaptation of Blood and fire, one of the great books by Sevillian journalist and writer Manuel Chaves Nogales and considered by numerous specialists as the best that has been written in our country about the tragic days of the Spanish Civil War.
This was announced by the director of titles such as The Orphanage, The Impossible or A Monster Comes to See Me at the end of his conversation with the journalists Gerardo Sánchez and Charo Ramos, within the framework of the Essential Voices cycle of the Seville Festival, where he shared with the public his way of working, his beginnings in the film industry and his references.
Bayona has indicated that he is currently working with Agustín Díaz Yanes on the script that will adapt the book by Chaves Nogales, a project he has been working on for "several years" and that makes him "very excited" since his father, originally from the town of Osuna, is from Seville, as was the great journalist and writer who died in exile in London in 1946.
He has revealed that he was interested in A Blood and Fire "especially the humanistic vision" that Chaves Nogales captured in the stories that make up the book, today converted into a true classic of 20th-century Spanish literature after several decades of neglect. The director has traveled to the Andalusian capital several times to get in touch with the writer's family and got to personally meet his daughter Pilar, who died in 2021 at the age of 101.
Before a dedicated audience, made up mostly of young people, Bayona assured that "I have been a movie buff since I was little and I am very excited to be here". He has recalled that since he shot his first film, The Orphanage, 14 years have passed until he has not shot again in Spanish with The Snow Society, based on the homonymous book by Pablo Vierci about the 16 survivors of the plane that crashed on a glacier in the Andes half a century ago.
He says that he feels very fortunate to have grown up in Barcelona and be able to have access "to a very wide culture". "My mother is from Jaén and my father from Osuna, both emigrants in Catalonia, on the outskirts of Barcelona." He emphasizes that he feels European and in his childhood he wanted to be Superman: "I spent the day throwing myself on the sofa with a towel as if it were a cape."
From his love for the seventh art, which he inherited from his father, a painter of cinema murals, he remembers watching television cycles dedicated to Hitchcock, Truffaut or Kurosawa. "I enjoyed them equally, they were auteur films, and they were accessible films. Every week you discovered things and the figure of the film director was very present in my head."
He does not remember when he made the decision to dedicate himself to the entertainment industry - "the vocation was always there" - and was able to study at the prestigious ESCAC, where he took his first steps shooting video clips for musical groups such as Camela or OBK. “It was a school for me. I've always been fascinated by Spielberg and Polanski, directors who pretty much tackle a different genre in every movie they make. So I saw in the video clips an opportunity to make my own little movies”.
Bayona acknowledges that during the shooting of The Impossible, which was especially hard, "I constantly had to prove that I could make the film", since it was his first film in English, it had a gigantic production and it had Hollywood stars. Happy to be lucky enough to be with one foot in Hollywood and the other in Spain, she has referred to the importance of following intuition in his career. "The story that I tell in The Impossible moved me a lot at a certain point, and making the film was for me a way of trying to find out why I felt such great emotion. I am convinced that when you connect with what is deepest in you, with something that you really feel, you also connect with the public”, maintains this director who perfectly combines narrative virtuosity with emotion in his works.
"For me, cinema is inseparable from the notion of wonder," he says. “Fantasy is not about special effects, but about something inside, something very ingrained. Many times a monster and even a tsunami, in a movie, are just mcguffins. What interests me about cinema are extraordinary stories for ordinary people”.
