After fifteen years of experience as an actress, Itsaso Arana, a regular in Jonás Trueba's films (La virgen de august, La reconquista or You have to come and see her) makes the leap into directing feature films with Las chicas están bien, which has also written and co-stars alongside Bárbara Lennie, Irene Escolar and the newcomers Itziar Manero and Helena Ezquerro. The film explores female camaraderie through the coexistence of four actresses and a writer for a week in a country house where they meet to rehearse a play. It was warmly received at the Karlovy Vary festival and at the Atlántida Mallorca Film Fest, where it received a special mention from the Jury. This Friday, August 25, it reached the Spanish billboard.
How did the idea of launching into this project come about?
I always say that it has been a kind of disobedience to my own beliefs of being able or not to direct a movie. The other day I heard Greta Gerwig say 'I started directing because if not now, when?'. You never feel fully prepared, so for me it has been a kind of life challenge that I had to carry out. I had always created collectively, or with a partner, and it was important to do something of my own, that I could fully show my face. The girls are fine is born from several desires at the same time that they make a kind of alchemy so that he gathers the faith to make the movie. But, in large part, because of the desire to work with these friends and actresses that I adore and admire. I really like how they see the world and when they said yes, I felt like I might be able to do it. And it also comes from a personal experience. I come from a family of many women and we attended the death of my father in the family home. We spent a week around his bed and that image of seeing someone you love passing from life to death gives you a different dimension of life and there is also something about that image that I want to tell, fleeing from how scary it may seem to us. at the beginning and connecting more with the life-giving part of those experiences that are transformative.
His character also says that death should be talked about more in schools. what is fertilizer
It is that it is something that we are all going to have to experience in the first person and also with loved ones. I don't know why we live behind the back of something as natural as death!
Did you take advantage of Barbara's pregnancy for the script? How has the text been working?
It has been a very curious mix. When I write the script, Barbara was not yet pregnant. I do some first filmed conversations with each of them about the themes of the film. I had a play written and suddenly I realized that what I wanted was to portray people who cut themselves off from the world facing these art materials and see how that transforms them. Just like that coexistence also when you are going to create something outside. When Barbara tells me that she is pregnant she rewrites it and then when she tells me that she is going to be a girl it seemed like a sign. I thought that the film had to be made in the summer, I found the house and it was something impulsive. I think that if you don't do it from a daring and an impulse, I don't know how it can be done.
Everyone is very sincere talking about intimate things. How did you manage to create that complicity in front of the camera?
It is difficult to portray yourself in the pure present and to make it seem improvised. The film was super written and we had a very clear structure and it was clear that during filming it could be transformed. I think it gave them confidence and sometimes it drove them crazy and they didn't know if they were acting or not. There was a creative dynamic. They are super talented actresses who knew how to surf those waves and do it with pleasure.
Dressing up will have been so much fun...
The whole theme of the time was like going back to childhood and reappropriating all the imagination of the stories and also questioning it. There was something about how much our bodies endure all that imaginary of princes and princesses, but for me it was always a playful element that the actresses take as a game, with humor and irony.
In the film the characters are named after the actresses who play them. What part is fiction and what is reality?
There is a lot of biography, and sometimes I have also written things that perhaps are more mine and I have put them on the lips of others and sometimes I have made small transfers between one and the other. But yes, in essence it was important that each one contribute one of the themes of the film and that they felt that this person was working at that vital moment. Itziar and Helena have a very powerful orphanage experience and I feel that being new actresses they had a wisdom to bring to the film that was matched by the mega baggage that Irene and Bárbara have.
Her character says that you shouldn't be afraid to declare yourself and encourages Irene to do so.
Although I think that at a theoretical level it is very evident and we know that we have to be the masters of our desire, that we should not wait for someone to choose or rescue you, in practice it is still very difficult for us. I am very professed, the truth is, I have always gambled (laughs).
Do you think that this feminine complicity could be translated into a masculine version?
It would be an exercise that I would love to do. There is something about Jane Fonda that I love when she says that when men get together with friends they start to see things, and women when we are with friends we look at each other. I think there is so much deficit of having told and portrayed ourselves that we really want to tell and talk about ourselves and look at each other with curiosity and love. Above all, actresses have been told so many times that there isn't room for everyone... it's a very complicated profession, but we can't believe that story. If there is no room for all of them, it will be necessary to bring the other one closer and make room.
There are more and more actresses like you who are going to the other side of the camera. Why do you think that is due?
It is true that perhaps now there are circumstances where we begin to believe that we can say something to the world and that our voice is valuable. The example of others helps you too.
How has this experience changed you?
It has been exhausting but I am very happy that I dared. I tend to be critical and a perfectionist, and yet, with this adventure I feel satisfied in the sense that I have done it in a free, wild way, with disheveled hair. I have tried to be honest with that impulse and I think that this way of producing urgently has helped me not to have to think about things too much.
