Congratulations on your Oscar nomination. What is your opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the U.S.?
Thank you. It gives me much respect. In the foreign film category were awarded Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut… There are many people of great pedigree. The most valuable thing is that the movie is going to be better known and more people will want to go see it.
I think that like any institution dedicated to choose things that are better than others, [in the Academy] they must assume arbitrary criteria regarding who is better than another. It becomes questionable and contradictory, and produces all kinds of emotions.
Sometimes they do not support a film that I consider most valuable from the cinematographic standpoint, but they do support the film they consider most important. They do something that is not done in many parts of the world, ultimately support the industry.
Why did you choose a publicist as the central figure in your film—instead of a politician, for example?
Indeed, this could have been taken from the point of view of the politicians, military, Pinochet, the Chilean people whop spent many years working to fight against a fierce dictatorship.
But we thought the publicist had a more ideologically subversive perspective. Because the publicist is using the tools taught by the dictatorship itself. And that carries an interesting paradox.
Pinochet imposed an economic model, a social model during the dictatorship, that is capitalism. And capitalism brought about marketing and advertising. And with those same tools it was defeated.
The No campaign, having recovered democracy through a logic that has to do with marketing, functions as an allegory of what happened in Chile after.
Nowadays Chile is a country where people who have money are 8 or 10. Where the state is very small, companies are very large, to decently educate someone is very expensive, public education is very bad, public health is so so and to have good quality health care is very expensive.
My country has been transformed into a small ‘mall’ and maybe that was the first gesture of the ‘mall’ coming — precisely that democracy was recovered through advertising and marketing.
This is your third installment of the dictatorship in Chile. What is your next project?
It could be anything. The truth is that I do not have it clear. It will not have to do with the recent past of Chile. Not because I think the topic is exhausted or because I’m not interested. Honestly I’m tired and I want to try other things.
What is the current scene of filmmakers in Chile?
There are many films and filmmakers. It is a great moment of Chilean cinema in the world. You send the DVD of a film to a festival and the programmer sees it is coming from Chile and they watch it right away. If you look at the most important festivals— Locarno, Rotterdam, Cannes, Venice … —in the last three years the Chilean cinema has been in almost all. Marialy Rivas and Andrés Wood won awards for best screenplay and film at Sundance last year. And now we are going to Berlin, to the official competition, with a film produced by our company Fábula, “Gloria” by Sebastián Lelio.
I am proud to be part of this generation. There are people doing martial arts movies, very observational films are perhaps more difficult for an audience, comedies for a more open audience, a more political cinema like ours, rural cinema like Alejandro Fernández Almendras’, poetic cinema lilke Jose Luis Torres Leiva’s, a road movie film like “ Thursday through Sunday” by Dominga Sotomayor, or Marialy Rivas who is making from her point of view as a woman.
Anyway, it’s wonderful. There is a new generation and it is very powerful. We need to conquer the Chilean public now, which lately has been quite elusive.
Can you talk to us about the film production company Féabula?
My brother, Juan De Dios Larrain, is the executive producer and manager of the company. We started together in Fábula.
We made the first movie and we did not have the results we expected. After that we added more directors and started working with
Sebastian Silva, produced his first film [“La vida me mata”] and then did “Tony Manero”.
Hence we have been producing four or five films by other directors annually. It has grown and we have been learning to make films.
To read EL Tecolote’s review of “No” follow the link: https://eltecolote.org/content/2013/01/riveting-portrayal-of-chile-1988-campaign-to-oust-dictator/