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Biography l Interview with Diego Martinez Vignatti Nederlands l Français
 For La Marea, I originally wrote a treatment. There never was a script, but there was a clear cinematographic project. The whole film on paper was contained in 12 pages. There was no chance of getting past a reading comity or a TV channel to get funding. So off we went, with just what we had. The problem is, I don’t believe that cinema has anything to do with writing. Or rather, it does: with a cinematographic form of writing. But I don’t believe there is such a strong connection between a scenario and a film. A scenario is words on paper, cinema is image and sound… There are worlds between the two. I adhere to a cinema genre closer to sensation than to narration in the literary sense of the term. From a production point of view, it is extremely tough nowadays to build a film that doesn’t have a solid scenario at the base, meaning a thick book describing in detail every dialog and every character. Scripts submitted to reading comities these days are often comparable to literary novels. I find this horrifying. But if you can’t express yourself in any other way, what do you do? You make films like La Marea, to the tune of 40 000 euros. It’s extremely difficult but one has to stay lucid: these are the times in which we live, this is the current cinematographic period.
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The film was a day-to-day construction, guided by my gut feeling alone. I made it as if it were to be the last film I was ever to make. I told myself that never again in my life would I enjoy such freedom, So I forced myself to forget all preconceived ideas, all preconceived concept I may have had in my head and to follow only my gut feeling, my intuition. That’s how I shot the film, in a secondary state, with barely a thought in mind. Of course the structure, the backbone of the film had been thought out beforehand, particularly as it contains some tricky camera movements and some long travelling sequences. But the rest was improvisation. I made all my decisions on the spot, in the moment, purely in relation to a particular place, a particular day, a particular time, a particular light. The film thus evolved organically, and for this reason, shooting chronologically was vital. It was tough, painful at times, we got up at 5 o’clock every the morning to get the best light, and finished at 9 o’clock in the evening. It was hard. Had I not been fully supported by my producer and by my small crew, I’m not sure I would have managed.
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It meant a lot to me to work with an actress as fantastic as Eugenia Ramirez Miori. She is incredibly generous, and has the profound intelligence to grasp instantly the notion of character building throughout the film. She avoided performance, which would have led to something grotesque by the end of the film. She prepared for her part in specific ways, how to chop wood, how to cut fish… I’m very Bresson-inspired when it comes to directing actors, I don’t like pathos, I don’t like conspicuous, I want a comedian to be herself, and above all, for her to exist and to feel profoundly. When I shoot, I talk a lot. The sequence in which dream and reality merge for the first time is a very long sequence. It was not timed in any way, but it felt choreographed. I gave it the tempo; time is not a fact, it’s a sensation. Whilst I’m shooting, I can feel whether it’s too long or too short, and it’s in that moment only that I can react. This is the very existence of the film.
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I realise I have been subconsciously influenced by ‘L’Ile Nue’, directed by Kaneto Shindô (1961). It’s a black and white film with almost no dialog about a family living on an island. A friend pointed this out to me, he said there was something almost Japanese in the form of the film, in its purity of style. On reflection this doesn’t surprise me. There is another Japanese artist, a photographer named Shoji Ueda, who also has a deep impact on me. He took black and white pictures of people at sea, some of which bear a lot of resemblance with certain shots in La Marea.
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The film touches on many things, most prominently the impossibility to mourn. Some wounds will never heal. In its formal sense, La Marea is about the relation of Man and Space. Objectively, the landscapes are magnificent, as is Azul. She exudes a strength that draws the viewer’s empathy to her. It’s true that Nature turns it back on her and vice-versa. It certainly isn’t a romantic film, it’s rather the opposite. Seeking refuge at the far corner of a desert beach doesn’t mean regaining one’s mental balance. You can’t simply forget. Mourning is carried inside. Fleeing urban life doesn’t’ t necessarily imply finding peace of heart. Instead bringing peace, this luxuriant nature to which Azul escapes ends up trapping her in her own solitude. And you can’ t replace one life with another. In her madness, Azul decides to replace her lost child with another. It just doesn’t work. La Marea is not a film noir, but it is mercilessly lucid.
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At the start of the film, Azul is portrayed as a relatively wealthy woman with a settled, peaceful life, a nice apartment, a car, a dashing young husband and a son. A normal, comfortable middle class family. I wanted to take this woman back to the basics. What do we all possess, first and foremost? We possess a body and we have needs: eat, drink, keep warm, sleep. Nothing else. So I wanted to confront Azul to the fundamentals and see how she would react, how she would manage. It was essential to me that her first gestures then become inscribed in a pattern, a time frame, as they gradually become the content of her days. The one point at which she emerges from this autism is when she finds the dog. It’s wounded and instead of killing it off, Azul decides to save it. She is suddenly sensitive to something other than her own pain.
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When I imagined at first the end of the film, Azul was to commit suicide, it was very clear. This isn’t so clear anymore. Or at any rate, as she moves into the sea to die, she turns around and the picture freezes on her. It’s meaningful to me that she turns. Did somebody call her? Who, what, why? What will she do? Will she stop? I meant to leave this ambiguity at the end. The function of cinema is not to give answers but to ask questions. Rossellini said that cinema was about revelation and discovery. I think cinema should be closer to this definition, rather than to a narrative system in which answers to the anxiety of the people is always provided. It is up to the film to ask the questions, and up to the viewer to come up with a personal synthesis. I do not feel respected as a spectator when the film caters for absolutely everything, tells me what to think, what to believe. Quite on the contrary, it needs to give the freedom to interpret as I wish. That’s what I tried to do in La Marea.
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I’m influenced quite beyond my control by the whole Argentinean trend of fantastic literature (particularly Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares). And of course, I am a great admirer of Hugo Santiago, who is one of my favourite cinematographers. I think that there is not one reality but different levels of reality, and for this reason what goes on in Azul’s mind, and on a deeper level in her subconscious, blends together with the viewer’s own perceptions, thus creating another level within one same sequence. It is a process I have used a few times in order to avoid creating any breaks between the dreams, the nightmares, and reality, particularly as the film is almost entirely seen from Azul’s point of view. For some moments I want to be in her head alone, as if she was both the character and the narrator of her own fate. This is why at some points there is no difference between dream and reality, and that both blend together. What interests me the most is the inner workings of this woman, to get to know her, however complex she may be. Antonioni once said, and this fantasy I share with him, that if he could, he would place the camera inside his characters.
Interview conducted by Nicolas Azalbert on December 29th, 2006.
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