Juan Antonio Bayona (Barcelona, 1975) attended the Sitges Festival for the first time when he was 16 years old. There he presented his first horror film El orfanato in 2007, which caused a sensation around the world and made known that young man who had previously worked directing music videos for Camela and OBK.
After other successes such as The Impossible, A Monster Comes to See Me or his "American adventure" with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and directing some episodes of the series Penny Dreadful and The Lord of the Rings, the director arrives at the film competition fantastic to present his new work, The Snow Society, chosen to represent Spain at the Oscars, and to collect the Màquina del Temps Award tonight in the Auditori of the Melià hotel. "The Sitges festival is very special because the distance between the stage and the stalls is very blurred and it is easy to see directors that you admire in the stalls watching films. I feel a little like the day I presented my first film in which I saw many directors receive a Time Machine and now it's me. It seems very strange to me on the one hand and on the other it makes me very excited," said Bayona in a press conference for which there were many people standing in line
In The Snow Society, which addresses the aerial tragedy in the Andes of 1972, in which the 16 survivors of a Uruguayan rugby team had to eat human flesh from the rest of the deceased to survive in extreme situations, the director comments that he fled about the topic of cannibalism because "that was not what struck me when I read Pablo Vierci's book" on which the film is based. "Unlike Viven, which was written a year after the tragedy, Vierci's was written 40 years later and there is the trace of time that has passed. And there is something philosophical, spiritual and psychological about the book that impacts me. "And how big this story is. The approach we had in filming was almost like filming a documentary and the intention was always not to sugarcoat the story."
The director says that "everything was shot" and it was important that "the actors went through everything" and then in editing everything found the right shape. "What had to do with the most graphic stuff took you out of the movie," adds Bayona. "Over 72 days they were able to get used to making something shocking into something anecdotal. It is impossible for two hours of film to make that become something routine. So we always chose to respect the privacy of the deceased and not get into the graphic" . Although the survivors, young people between 17 and 25 years old, were very religious, Bayona emphasizes that he was interested in showing a more spiritual reading of the events, especially in the situation in which they return. "The world receives them as heroes, with that figure of miracle very present, and they came from eating the bodies of their friends and spending 72 days in subzero temperatures and living in misery."
The director explains that he wanted to film the plane crash without seeking spectacle, opting for "the immersive experience" to "be there with them", surrounded by white mountains and without knowing what was happening. He also chose to look for something physical and real, with the impact of the crash, where everything flies through the air. And he remembers a phrase that one of the survivors said: "We learned the hard way."
When he met with the survivors he had the feeling that they wanted the film to be made even more than he did and he believes that one of the reasons may be that in this version "the dead are also given a voice."
In the pass for the families of the survivors and those who died in the incident, Bayona cites the process of immersion, empathy and the fact of finding the truth as bases for "many people after 50 years to understand each other. In some way, now that has been balanced." "They had access to get on that plane, live what they lived and understand what they went through to be able to accept it." For this reason, he maintains that that first pass was "a moment of healing, almost therapeutic." And he emphasizes that "I have always defended fantastic cinema as a truer way of telling reality."
The Snow Society will be released in theaters in December and on January 4 it will be available on Netflix, the platform that financed this project that has been in the works for more than a decade. "I have never done anything thinking about the small screen, even when I have worked for the small screen. From the beginning the film had cinematographic exploitation on the table, it is something that was never questioned," explains the director, for whom It was essential that this play be filmed "in Spanish and with local and unknown actors due to its social and cultural context and because it had already been told in English" with ¡Viven! (Frank Marshall, 1993).
It is a medium-budget film "and the market we live in today does not allow medium-budget films to be shot in Hollywood in Spanish," he laments. Bayona hoped to find financing for the project and have it filmed for conventional exhibition windows, but those windows did not allow it "because the public does not go to see films in Spanish in theaters. These films cannot be financed and it is a shame, but 10 years later it was Netflix that allowed it to be done."
Sandra Hermida, co-producer of the film, recalled that the casting process was very long, done during a pandemic and practically online. And Bayona has referred to the cohesion, to that bond that was created between those kids from the beginning, since they were together for 20 days isolated in a hotel in quarantine. "Then, add the two months of rehearsal and more than a hundred days of filming."
