On October 11, 2012, The Impossible arrived on the Spanish billboard, the second feature film by Barcelona director Juan Antonio Bayona, who had already achieved enormous success with his debut feature El orfanato, a horror film starring Belén Rueda in 2007. With a stellar cast headed by Naomi Watts and Ewan Mcgregor and the debut of a very young Tom Holland who would succeed years later as the superhero Spider-Man, Bayona transferred to the big screen an exciting true story of survival shot in English.
The one starring the Spanish doctor María Belón and her family during a Christmas vacation in Thailand in 2004, when they had to face a devastating tsunami that separated them and left some 230,000 dead in Southeast Asia.
The Impossible swept the box office with a record collection of more than 42 million euros and exceeded 150 million dollars internationally. He won five Goya awards out of the fourteen for which he was nominated, including best director, and added six statuettes at the Gaudí. The British Watts, in addition, was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the film, this Saturday, March 4, the Aribau Cinema in Barcelona will host a special screening of The Impossible at 9:00 p.m. with the presence of Bayona and the testimony of María Belón. Both will participate in a colloquium at the end of the projection. "The film meant a huge step after making The Orphanage. I had a very bad time filming it because I had to show that I could do it, to the whole world and to myself", said the director in an interview this morning with Jordi Basté in RAC1.
He chose the title from the book The Snow Society, the film he has just shot about the tragedy in the Andes in 1972. Belón, who has assured that his family "is fine", comments that almost 20 years after the tragedy "Fortunately I have a very vivid memory in the very beautiful part and silent in the traumatic part. I remember everything as if it were today," he said. And he proudly says that his son Lucas now works as an intensive care doctor in Bristol. The appointment in the Aribau theaters means for Bayona a "reunion of many people who made the film and will talk 10 years later about how we made it. I haven't seen it for a long time, I think it was seven years ago when María and I saw it together By television".
Bayona recalled that the project came from the producer Belén Atienza after hearing the story that Belón shared with Gemma Nierga on the radio. "While he was explaining the story to me, I told him that it would be my next film. We convinced María, because she didn't want to do it." Belón did not want to write the book that many people proposed to her with her story, but when "the crazy ones" appeared -Atienza and Bayona- she spent a long time fully explaining her experience in a tea shop and when she finished "I saw Bayona's emotion in his eyes".
This is how the story began, which the director took to the Cannes festival film market under the names of Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. They obtained 24 million in financing up to the final 35 that the film cost, with production by Telecinco Cinema. "It's very difficult to separate art from film, because film is a very expensive medium and we needed names like Watts and McGregor," he adds. "I'm still in contact with them. We created as a family during filming." María has recalled the moment of seeing the film when it was not yet finished. "I was crying for 45 minutes." "And we waiting outside!" Bayona continued immediately.
On the choice of Tom Holland, he has admitted that it was difficult to choose him for the role of Lucas because he had four "very good" candidates. "I saw that he had a lot of wood, he is noble, charismatic, he reminds me of Tom Hanks and I think he can have a career parallel to what he has done. He is a great actor." And he wanted to highlight his work as a drug addict in Cherry, by the Russo brothers. "He was Oscar".
Also present during the talk was Jordi Juan, director of La Vanguardia, who asked the director of A monster comes to see me about the future of cinema in theaters. "I am quite optimistic because when you read about the history of cinema, the cinema had a very big crisis in the 60s when television appeared, another very big one in the 80s with the arrival of video, and now with the platforms. But people always returns to the cinema because there is no experience that can be compared to seeing a movie in a movie theater".
As an example, he has referred to tomorrow's event. "It is not the same to see The Impossible at home than to see it with a thousand people on the big screen. Although many people say that cinema is expensive, it cannot be measured with money, it is an experience. We have not yet seen a film that has obtained a classic status that has not been released in the cinema. Theatrical theater is key to the success of a film. It is not a battle of cinema against platforms. And when you see where the cinema market is you see very positive signs. The people want to go to the cinema", he concluded.
