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 Banner by Wes Vance |
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Nacho Cerda has turned a fascination of a fear of dying into some of the most visually stunning horror films of the past twenty years. His two short films on which he is most known for, AFTERMATH and GENESIS, both deal with the obsession of life after death in radically different ways, and in both not a word was to be heard, making these films universal in nature. The Spanish born filmmaker followed up both films with his feature film debut in THE ABANDONED, a film about a woman confronting her past in a haunted house that was voted the best film of last year's AFTER DARK HORRORFEST'S EIGHT FILMS TO DIE FOR. In this rare in depth interview, Cerda discusses in depth making THE ABANDONED, as well as the process behind his trilogy of short films dealing with death, and what horror means to him.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: What prompted your interest in filmmaking, particularly within the horror genre? NACHO CERDA: That’s an interesting question. To tell you the truth, when I was six years old, my uncle took me to see a movie that became very special to me and it’s probably a standard for a lot of people of my generation which was JAWS. I was six at the time and my uncle took me to sneak me in because the film was forbidden for people under thirteen. I remember very vividly one scene when Richard Dreyfuss was diving into this shipwreck at the night, and there’s this severed head coming out of the sunken ship, and I was so scared at the time that I jumped out of my seat and I grabbed onto the person who sat next to me that wasn’t my uncle. He was about to slap me in the face but when he realized I was a child and saw my uncle and he let me go because he was more scared than I was. Back then we didn’t have video or a way to watch a film unless you paid for a ticket again. Of course I couldn’t do that being a six year old. I was stuck with that image, that impression, and that experience was so powerful that I honed into it when I was 12 in 1982 when I saw a really bad bootleg copy. I saw JAWS again and when that happened I realized that the emotions were still intact. Not only that but the ability to play those emotions and share them with everybody around you. I realized back then that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I guess horror was a genre that I was exposed when I was very little so I guess that’s where I get my interest. I am a bit of a hypochondriac so I kind of like themes about death and what we are actually doing on this planet. CC: Was it just JAWS or were there any other films in your youth that inspired you as well? NC: Oh no, of course that was very early on and I started watching other films on video when my parents bought a VCR. I started watching David Cronenberg films, John Carpenter films, THE THING was one of the movies that I went crazy about. It was not so much the gore of the film but it was a movie about identity and it was something that I always liked going back to the idea of who we are and what we are doing here. I thought this showed in a very clever way, I think John Carpenter did a very good job, it’s a masterpiece for me. Just a few films that over the course of the years that have struck an impression and have confirmed the idea that I wanted to do that type of film. CC: What is the definition of horror to you? NC: I think it’s actually fear and what is fear? Fear is I think the unknown for me, and things that don’t have answers. I think that sometimes horror films come up with answers that are better left alone. The definition of horror is for me is you don’t know where you’re going or what’s behind there and don’t quite understand because there are things in life that are beyond understanding and you can take those things in a very horrifying perspective or you could also confront those things and try to get an explanation. Sometimes you just go into circles trying to find it and that can be horrifying too. I think for me horror in general is that feeling of death itself. How can you understand the act of dying, the act of life itself, and that’s quite intriguing. CC: The subject of death was the topic of your short film AFTERMATH. What I particularly love about AFTERMATH was conveying a powerful message without the use of dialogue. How did you come up with AFTERMATH and how was dealing with the reaction of the subject matter within the film? NC: This movie, the concept of the film came to me when I was in Los Angeles and I experienced the big earthquake that happened in 1994. It was a wake up call for me in that I could die at any moment. You could be alive and something of that nature could happen and you’re gone. That natural fear of death we all have and I like to exercise to life my work. Of course it took the shape of autopsies, what happens to your body after you die. That was the first thought that came to mind and I wanted to do a movie about manipulation, port mortem manipulation and necrophilia came to mind right away. I started writing the script in February of 1994 and I wanted to do this properly. I really didn’t want to do an exploitation film at all. I wanted to convey that message of fear for death. I went through some research that I did with a doctor who showed me a few autopsies. I was present at the time watching people getting cut open. It was such a powerful, traumatic experience, because it made me realize that behind those eyes, the cadavers’ eyes was a life before, and I didn’t really understand what happened, what made it change. Right there I saw the approach that I wanted to have with AFTERMATH. I wanted to tell the story from the dead people point of view. Most of the shots and the visuals are purposely shot with living doctors all covered with masks so you can’t identify them and they have no identity so it’s more about the dead who are coming back to life in a way, you can see how they are suffering through that. This was what I wanted to do and when the film was first released people thought that it was too graphic, maybe over the top and some people couldn’t get through the first screening. The subtext wasn’t so much about what you saw but how I presented it. That was my clinical approach which is what I wanted to do and that’s exactly what I felt when I was in that morgue watching the autopsies myself. Everything was so soulless that I had to make people aware of it. This is something we say in Spain that if you suffer for something and share it with everyone else, it lessens the pain in a way. That’s why I wanted to share that shocking experience with people. The reaction was interesting. I had people walking out of the theater, heavily offended. I was not making a point about necrophilia. I was not embracing any sort of deviance at all. It was a movie about what happens after you die. If you go back to the idea I told you before, some people just live in denial and cannot overcome fear because in order to do that you have to become fear to conquer it and that’s what I wanted to do with AFTERMATH. I went “Here’s the deal, watch it, think about it, and then you might be reborn.” That’s a reaction and of course the film is 13 years old now and people have a chance to look back at it and watch it with a new perspective, and I guess that happens with quite a few films and I can see beyond what my first viewing was, and that’s interesting to see how it mutates in a way. CC: With your next short film GENESIS, you steered a little away from the graphic nature of death and dealt with the sense of loss. What was the inspiration behind GENESIS and did you prepare it differently than you did with AFTERMATH? NC: I always work in a way where I don’t really jump on to the next thing just on principle. I need to find some sort of emotional bond in everything I do and that doesn’t happen very often. GENESIS came as a part of this trilogy that I wanted to finish. The first chapter was THE AWAKENING, a short film about death from a spiritual point of view. AFTERMATH was more of the physical decay, and I wanted to do the third chapter from more of a perspective of people who are losing someone else and how that sense of loss becomes an obsession and therefore becomes self destructive so in a way everything comes full circle. I researched for two years before writing the script and I thought I was going to tell the story from this little girl’s perspective that loses her grandfather but I thought it was such a naïve perspective that I just disposed of it and I did come up with a few ideas. Among them was this artist who creates the perfect statue. His art has become an obsession for him to recreate a loved one and I thought that was the perfect canvas of what I wanted to do. To tell you the truth, I didn’t realize that it was the third chapter in the trilogy until I was finished with the script. When I finished I thought “Wait a minute, this was really what I was looking for, this third chapter of people dying every day out of an obsession for love.” That was how it was created. My approach as opposed to AFTERMATH was I didn’t want this to be so graphic. It didn’t need to. It was more about love and that feeling. If you take a close look at both films, the theme within AFTERMATH is very dirty and deviant in a way, but the look was very clinical and my approach was very clear as opposed to GENESIS which is very dirty because of the environment the artist lived in is totally destroyed almost, it’s rotting. The theme was about loss and that is the clearest feeling we can have, so that’s why I approached it opposite from AFTERMATH because the conflict between good and evil is very ambiguous. That’s why they were close in this way. A new life is born, I think that every time that happens, something has to die, that’s the rule of nature. CC: With that I’d like to reflect on THE ABANDONED. What was it about THE ABANDONED that made you want to make it your first feature film? NC: THE ABANDONED was a script that I had read from Karim Hussain. Karim is a friend of mine, a Canadian filmmaker himself. He wrote the script in 1999 and he just gave it to me for feedback. I loved the doppelganger concept and the Russian setting. I had never seen a horror film set at a Russian landscape and I thought that was quite interesting. At the time he was going to direct the film and couldn’t get financing. He shelved the project and went to do something different. A few years later I was looking to do a project and remembered that script so I called Karim and asked if we could do it together and he was totally thrilled about it and we wrote it and brought it a little closer to my sensibilites. The film, being a haunted house film as it is, it is also more about identity again. If you look at GENESIS, it’s a story about the past coming back to haunt you and ultimately destroys you which is exactly what happens in THE ABANDONED. In this case the woman lives in denial, lives in this burrowed life being a film producer, a filmmaker in general trying to create life by living in fantasy by not coping up to who she is in reality. She’s too obsessed with her daughter becoming independent in having a life of her own and there’s a statement in the film where she expresses that to her brother Nikolai in that she bared a child because she was afraid of death and afraid of living alone. It’s kind of true sometimes I think we need to leave an imprint, something behind to make sense of everything. Some people just have children. It might be a little harsh but that’s how I perceive life in general. You need to find a meaning. This for her becomes a major endeavor in her life because in her mind “I’ve come this far trying to forget my past in a way but it comes back to me and I can’t deny that anymore. My daughter’s losing me and I need to find a reason why I’m here, who I am, and where I’m coming from” which is something we all do at one point in our lives. She goes back to Russia and the haunted house element is not a regular haunted house story. Some people may be confused about it because it’s not a narrative film and it was never meant to be. It was a film about you and how you go in circles until you finally accept your destiny, and then you die. There’s a lot of scenes in this film that give you clues about that. The film starts one way and ends the exact same way. I always believe my films are not straight horror, they are more horror dramas. CC: There are a lot of films that are called dramas that really can fit into the horror genre. NC: Exactly. You watch for instance a David Cronenberg film like THE FLY. THE FLY is a very dramatic love story, an amazing love story. Not only that it’s a horror story about something that grows inside of you that you don’t know. You can take that metaphorically or you can take it literally, it could be another horror story. In the end it’s more about “What am I doing here, who am I?” There’s a line in the film that I like very much that said “I was a fly who dreamt of being a man and now the dream is over.” That’s amazing. CC: Where do you see horror today and where do you see it going within the next five years? NC: There’s a big conflict between what the studios are asking for and what filmmakers want to do. Sometimes filmmakers are too prone to basically go along with what the commercial or studio expectations are which are very ambiguous because you never know what’s going to work. Look at SE7EN, the David Fincher film, the most brutal thing you’ve ever seen and it becomes successful so I believe in sticking to your guns. That’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life. I’m only on 38 but I’m planning on keeping honest with myself and trying to tell stories from my heart. I think that horror these days are a little clichéd in a way that they want to put in one element that’s already worked and exploit that to the very limit for no other reason than to make money. I think that we’ve been overflowed with horror films that are not so interesting and they have no new perspective. Yes, the content is important, don’t get me wrong. But it’s important the perspective you take on it. It’s your eye, the director’s eye. I think that’s what we’re lacking these days sometimes is more of the same. Same structure, you can almost tell what shot is going to come next, and I just don’t like that. When I see a film like A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE for instance, it’s not a horror film but I can see that these guys are going back to simplicity in a way. Today what is scary is going against the rules. What is going against the rules, what are people afraid these days, it will be simplicity. You take a movie like FUNNY GAMES which is scary as hell. No music, long shots that hold on a little too long. You think it’s going to cut, it doesn’t. You think the camera’s going to move, it doesn’t. You see a murder being done twenty feet away, that becomes scary. That perspective is interesting. The series of films like SAW might work commercially, but for me they don’t add anything new to the genre and that’s a very dangerous ground. I saw a glimpse of a change in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT which I quite enjoyed. CC: I am looking forward to the remake of FUNNY GAMES. NC: That’s interesting that it’s being remade. CC: I don’t think the original was a film that was heavily exposed in this country, so to see it done primarily for American audiences especially with an identifiable actress like Naomi Watts being subjected to all this, I think it’s going to unnerve some people. NC: Have you seen the original? CC: Yes I have. NC: That’s what I find scary and I’m sure he did it shot by shot hopefully not like what Gus Van Sant did with PSYCHO. CC: This is the same filmmaker remaking his own film. This isn’t somebody trying to emulate someone else’s vision. NC: By the way, I heard the studio was very scared with the result (laughs). I wonder why. CC: What advice do you have for any aspiring filmmakers in terms of preparing a film? NC: Be true to yourself and never give up. Most important, just look inside of you and be honest with yourself and share that with everyone else. CC: What is next for Nacho Cerda? NC: There are a few things I am working on. I am in Los Angeles meeting with some studios and we’ll see what comes next. I’m not sure what will be green lit first but whatever that is as always I want to become emotional with the audience. I want to have some sort of feedback with them. I always want to walk out of a theater and have a true hardcore experience. For me it’s entertainment yes, but to me I get entertained being scared to death. CC: I leave the last word to you. NC: Just live your live and make the best out of it. CC: Thank you very much for taking the time for this, it is greatly appreciated. NC: My pleasure.
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