When Quentin Tarantino said that Big Bad Wolves was his favorite movie of 2013, the film by Israelis Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado became a cult film. A decade later, the Uruguayan director Gustavo Hernández Ibáñez has directed Lobo Feroz, a Spanish remake with a luxury cast: Javier Gutiérrez, Adriana Ugarte, Rubén Ochandiano, Juana Acosta, Fernando Tejero, Luna Fulgencio...
A serial killer kills girls in the cruelest way. A policeman with unorthodox methods played by Javier Gutiérrez believes he has found the criminal. He is also on the trail of an ex-convict (Adriana Ugarte) whose daughter, whom he gave up for adoption, is one of the victims. Both hold the alleged criminal (Rubén Ochandiano) in a basement. She seeks revenge. He tries to exact justice by his own hand.
"Our characters in Big Bad Wolf present disturbed mental states," Ugarte and Ochandiano agree in a joint interview with La Vanguardia to present the film that hit Spanish screens last Friday. Both are risky roles. Especially for Ugarte, known for her interpretations of Victoria in La señora or Sira in El tiempo entre costuras.
"I said yes to this role because it was a very difficult character. I did very meticulous rehearsal work with Elvira Mínguez as a coach. The starting point consisted of moving away from the model of submitting actresses to the ideal of beauty and looking for the opposite" , explains Ugarte. Ochandiano did not think twice because "I was a big fan of the original film before the Tarantinian phenomenon and when I saw it for the first time I thought that the role of the alleged psychopath was ideal for me."
When the actor read that Hernández was preparing a remake, he wrote "to say that he wanted that role," he recalls. They gave it to him and it was not easy: "Because the character is full of edges. More than in the original film. The biggest difficulty consisted in understanding who that guy is and calibrating what information it was convenient to give so that the viewer would think at times that he was guilty and in others that he was innocent. In addition, you had to look for the nuances, because the man remains tied to a chair for almost the entire film and that is very complex".
And if Rubén was a fan of the original Israeli film, Adriana decided "not to see it, because of the danger and threat it poses." "In these cases, I mean staying on the sidelines, being alien to the actors who played before to achieve a safe distance, to be able to work from scratch," explains the actress to whom the character came through her representative: "I read the script and I couldn't stop, when I finished it I called my manager and said 'do you want me to do it?' For me it meant a change, a new path, which was what I wanted at this point in my career."
A career that, like Ochandiano's, has passed between film and television and that he will continue along these paths, because "I like to combine, I have no prejudices with television, which when I started was discredited. I was advised against doing The lady, but for me she was a great character and a great opportunity," recalls Ugarte.
Rubén thinks something similar, because he feels that he has done "less TV than I would like." "Now, Spanish cinema is in a very good moment, but TV has pushed and with the platforms the masks have fallen. To sell a product, the public has to want to go see it and television makes you more accessible", concludes the actor.
