In December 2019, Oliver Laxe (Paris, 43 years old) met Pedro Almodóvar in El País’s writing, when along with Alejandro Amenábar and Jose Mari Goenaga sat down to chat about cinema before the Goya. That day Laxe and Almodóvar, that each one had seen the movie of the other, connected. Laxe arrived at the Spanish cinema awards Or what burns, His third length, a jury prize of the section a certain look of the French contest (the filmmaker has always released his films in the different sections that make up Cannes).
That day in the country there was chemistry. And he has lasted so far: this Thursday Laxe reaches the top of Cannes, to the official competition, with Serving, The drama of a father (Sergi López) who, accompanied by his little son, seeks in the universe of the Raves to his daughter twenty. Next to a handful of raveros That misplaced and common man crosses Moroccan mountains and the Sahara desert in a film, which premieres in Spain on June 6, which honors both adventure films and the cinema of the seventies. And the large weight of production has fallen to Movistar and the desire, the company of the Almodóvar brothers. “Pedro Almodóvar has a vocation of service, to produce other filmmakers, which made me feel part of his family,” starts in a talk on the roof of a luxury hotel in Cannes a few hours after his gala.
Ask. How did you explain to El Dese and Movistar at the beginning of your project?
Answer. Well, I wanted to make a movie that stirred the viewer, to remove it, scratch inside. Invite the viewer to a trip that was also physical, with its adventures, entertaining. That he had his show. Like those films that we like from the American cinema of the seventies. It was a cinema created at a time very similar to the current one, in a convulsive world with a lot of polarization, wars and dictatorships. Suddenly those films appear that sometimes you don’t understand what they are going. Apocalypse Now, What is it about? EITHER Road paved in two directions either Easy Rider? But they show the energy of that time and a convulsive society. I have tried that Serveât Connect with this time, with the fears and dreams of our generation. We live an echo of the end of the world, a smell of twilight that joins with the desire to arise a new world.
P. How does the idea of guiding it to the Raves And the Father and his Son’s journey?
R. When I lived in a palm tree in Morocco, I saw the trucks of the Raves And I already thought they were very powerful images. One night, preparing Mimosas (His second film, 2016), I started listening Beats And it turns out that they were riding a Rave In my same palm. Thus, truck references came out of the script as if it were a comedy of crazy cars And that imaginary entered. It’s a whole world, because Raves They are not only music and party, but there is also the trip, the idea of getting out of the system. I mediate a lot about death, that has configured my psychology, and I decided to include it in history. May the public enjoy this ceremony, which is hard, yes, but also redemptive and necessary. That the viewer had an experience of death that would allow him to feel his life with more intensity. I do not see death as an end, but as the door to something more transcendent. At the same time, as a filmmaker, I look more mature, knowing better what I want to tell and how I want to tell him.
P. His images and music impact the viewer, and play with terror and western.
R. Well, I’m nothing sadistic, I don’t feel like making the viewer suffer. I am not a Lars von Trier. The genre interests me as an entertainment tool. As a filmmaker I have a vocation for service, I trust the transformative capacity of cinema. In our society, we have accustomed to not look inside us because we do not want to face our fragility, our wounds. We are permanently creating an idealized image of ourselves, and we identify with it. Well, life is not like that: it comes, it hits you and says: “Look.” And I think there will be more and more curves in this world. It will be hard and you have to prepare to know who we are.
P. In Serveât You never know what is going to happen.
R. That is, I like movies that are transformed. Poetry lives the same challenge, because it travels with language until the end of that language. I hope through the story of Serving, Through the narrative, moments of aesthetic abduction, drunkenness, ecstasy, of what we like so much in the cinema are reached. My cinema also has that sensory synesthetic side where the image operates in a way that is not just the rational. The human has many levels of perception and a movie theater confirms it to us. We left those transformed films.
P. What attracted him to culture Rave?
R. I am very interested in its radical coherence, without concessions until the end. This is a very risky movie. And I have not measured the result; I think that links me a little. The inhabitants of culture Rave They show a will to transcend. Sometimes not in the best way, with drugs, true. But praise those human beings who seek to connect, who come together in Neotribalism with adherence to tradition. And that is healthy. Ah, and I really like his praise to ugliness they have. They do not hide the wounds and it seems to me of great maturity. All human beings are a bit broken, a little injured; They know and teach it. And in this creative process I have lived more with my deficiencies, with my own wounds. Serveât He speaks of imperfect, mutilated human beings, of new families that are created in the yearning to transcend. Let’s assume our imperfections. Our main fear is to fool ourselves and we are in a time where it is very easy to deceive. I identify myself with his gesture of desertion of society. And I am in Cannes (points out the beach), in the middle of the system. I assume it. But in me there is something wild, angry, rabid, careless, radical. And when I say radical I mean the term with its etymological meaning of the root. A radical person is someone who gives their essence, who is assumed without confusion, without fears.
P. You have worked with other creators of similar thought. As when he did theater with Angelica Liddell.
R. I am of reckless psychology. In the end my waterloo will get (smile). But it is that I grow up, and that’s why I throw myself. Look, even if they had not taken Serveât In Cannes, although it does not work at the box office, I know that I would have made the movie because it is part of my growth. We inhabit a world in which we all calculate our steps. I first do not fool me. However, I try to be free, go to the end, tighten the limits. In my faith there is a mixture of love and madness. Pasolini said that what the spectator most enjoy the author is the freedom of the author. And in my ability I try to talk a little with those teachers who changed the world.
P. For the first time he has worked with a professional actor, Sergi López, who also has a curious record: he has been with 10 films in Cannes, and all in the competition.
R. I have always collaborated with actors without experience. I like to call them like this because in the professional they are all professionals. There is something that I really like actors without experience and it is their fragility, their vulnerability, that we have all human beings. You put them in a camera and something very pure, very crystalline. I move that. Although, of course, an experienced actor gets things that I cannot conceive with others. In addition, Sergi is special. There are interpreters, and I like them a lot, they are very technical. An example is Daniel Day-Lewis. Great, a character works, nail it and it’s very moving. Sergi of course has technique; Although at the same time he is always he is himself. Sergi has no ego, and to embody this character a bit mundane, anonymous, a father of apparent balanced life, has been perfect. It is supernatural. Above he has worked with the actors without experience and with me in total cooperation. The complicity between them behind the camera is brutal, and has been a gentleman at the service of the movie.
P. How about your cultural and social project in Galicia?
R. I am very happy. I was not aware when I started what I was going to live in my family’s house in Os Ancares (Lugo). Thanks to Or what burns I was able to buy it and restore it. Then the association arrived and we have been carrying out training and rural development workshops for five years. We have an office of attraction of new settlers, there are new houses, new neighbors, young people with entrepreneurship projects … balances me.
P. Do you have new film projects?
R. For the first time, no, and I’m not in a hurry. I want to feel Serveât Connect with the public. I have become accustomed to making plans and life threw them. It costs me five or six years to produce each film, so if I have to delay the next one, there will be no problem. It is important to help young filmmakers, and at the time it is difficult to lift the projects. It is important that things cost, and that you can be wrong, grow little by little. Now too many very homogeneous raw operas are made, which almost seem designed by the artificial intelligence of the industry … I am sorry for how these new, genuine looks, end up crushed by the system. My advice to the new filmmakers? Let them be lost, to self -style, to throw themselves into the abyss.
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