Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba join forces again after the success of Chico
Trueba has been obsessed with his figure since he discovered it in 2005 and has followed him relentlessly, despite the fact that in both the film and the comic he has been transformed into Jeff, "a handsome American journalist , we couldn't cast as the protagonist a film director who looks here and there", says Mariscal. Trueba has obtained exceptional testimonies of the legends of Brazilian music and of people who had never spoken, such as Malena, the woman with whom Tenório lived a love affair, or like Carmen, his widow, who had to face the disappearance and knowing that he was not alone when he disappeared. A Tenório that stands as a metaphor for the triumph of music and also for the horror of the coups d'état in Latin America during Operation Condor. Just after returning from presenting the film at the Telluride festival, in Colorado, on Friday they presented the graphic novel in Madrid.
They seem like an unlikely couple, what brings them together?
Marshal: An obvious friendship, even if you fight while you work, because you have to fight.
Trueba: That, now, he gave you to say it, but I don't remember having a fight with Xavi. Once, at the beginning of Chico
He says it was long to make Chico
Trueba: Yes, but not this one. First I thought of a documentary, then I thought better of a book. And it was in the middle of Chico
Marshal: I really like Fernando's argument. And animation is a wonderful system for telling stories, we have a language, we like synthesis. And the drawing creates a much stronger complicity with the viewer. Because you have to say: "Come on, I believe it, I'll play and I'll get into it".
Trueba: The believability pact you have in a fictional film with actors is: "I will believe that Robert De Niro is Charlie Parker", and then you always say "how good is Charlie Parker De Niro", or "no I believed it because it is too white”, but you never see Parker, there is a problem of credibility. I didn't go see James Ivory's Picasso movie with one of my favorite actors, Anthony Hopkins, because I can't accept anyone being Picasso, how can anyone be Picasso? In animation there is a different pact and it has a superiority over the biopic with actors.
Marshal: When you see Dizzy Gillespie play trumpet on Chico
Trueba: The alley, which was legendary in Rio de Janeiro and where all that music was born, had died, it no longer existed. It was nice to draw it, to give it life, to see the atmosphere, not to set up a set.
Marshal: I don't like the word claim, but hey, you, it's fine, the animation is not "it's Christmas, let's go to the cinema with the children". It's a language, and in Telluride they didn't call it an animated film, but a Trueba film.
Trueba: The one who introduced us to all the sessions was Peter Sellars, the opera director. She cried to all of them. Then he hugged us with emotion, he was very tender.
Why does Tenório become an obsession, for the disappearance, as a symbol of an era?
Trueba: It combines what is musical, which attracts me a lot, and the mystery and absurdity of death. You try to explain it to yourself. And, in the process, the character falls in love. When in the final scene Jeff says "I feel like he's a friend I'll never be able to have a beer with and talk about music with", that's what I feel. There came a time when I had the feeling that I knew him and that I had to make the film that served him best.
Mariscal: It's just that there is a very big loophole with his case. No one told Carmen "you are a widow". They all left him dead, haunted by the dictatorships. And it wasn't a well-known Vinícius de Moraes. The musicians knew him. Caetano Veloso had to do a project with him. Fernando discovers it on a record, Embalo. It's very good, and he wants to know more. where is it
Did he become a researcher?
Trueba: Yes, of course I was.
Mariscal: He was the first to talk to Carmen, and to Malena, who approached to ask what happened to her husband.
Trueba: No one had ever asked them. It's incredible.
Marshal: No policemen, no wafers.
Trueba: There was no investigation.
Mariscal: I stop Tenório, who was a police officer...
Trueba: Poor man. The father and mother die when ten years have passed since the disappearance and they are told that he will not return. They collapse. It left me desolate, at many moments tears came to my eyes. But I haven't loaded the film, I've taken out amazing stuff because it would have been black. We explain the life of a musician and we didn't want his death to take away everything, but his life and what he was a part of. The film is more than bossa nova, it is the Brazilian music of an era. Samba, jazz, bossa nova, instrumental music, in Brazil there is no divorce between classical music and popular music. They do it themselves. And that freaks me out a lot.
But they did want to include the Condor operation of the South American dictatorships.
Trueba: To understand what was happening, what was Latin America, it was necessary.
Mariscal: In the USA it has affected them a lot and all the critics of the film say: "It was us, at that time our government..."
Trueba: I don't make films to give messages, but, like good books, they make you experience more things. That the young guys of today who don't know that time in South America or what the bossa nova was, come away with something.
Mariscal: Looking forward to buying records and knowing that we have evolved. Those from Vox don't go around the streets grabbing and torturing people. Compared to Videla, Trump is a brat. "The disappeared are neither alive nor dead, they are missing", he said.
Trueba: When I was young, my father and many fathers told us "don't enter politics" to protect us. Tenório's story shows that if you don't get involved in politics, you're not protected either. As long as there is violence, fascism, nobody is. We are all threatened. They picked up a musician who was going to get a sandwich.
