SpoutBlog on spout.com

Chilean director Nicolas Lopez first came to Austin in 2005 for SXSW with his feature film Promedio Rojo in tow. That film was about a fictional comic-book nerd named Roberto Rodriguez who vies for the attention of the hot new girl at school while trying to bolster his self esteem. While Lopez was in town, he convinced producer Elizabeth Avellan (producing partner and ex-wife of the real-life filmmaker Robert Rodriguez) to watch the movie, and she liked it so much that she agreed to have the studio work on the CGI effects for his next feature. That film ended up being Santos, which is another tribute to geekery. It’s about a lowly comic-book nerd who grows up to become a successful comic book artist, and actually finds out that the heroes he’s been creating are real –– and that he has superpowers himself. It’s like Galaxy Quest for the comic-book set. In our full interview with Lopez from Fantastic Fest, learn why he makes his stars gain weight for their roles, why Santos had to be an international co-production, and why he wants to be the Chilean George Lucas.

So, first question, is it any coincidence Salvador looks a little bit like you in the film?

A lot. In my first movie, the main character also looks a little, a lot, like me, and that is because I can’t act. [laughter] So basically because I’m not fucking Woody Allen, I pick up people that look like me in a way, and I fucking mess their look and make them gain weight and use like really stupid glasses, and that’s what makes the trick.

Do people still think that’s you? I think one guy in the Q&A, when he said, “Are you always this sexy, or is it the ‘Santos‘?” I think he thought maybe you were in the…

Yeah, some people get confused. That would happen in America; people don’t think a lot. [laughter] No, I don’t know.

I know. No, no, no, but no, that happens a lot, like even with my first movie with the lead. Because in a way, Santos is like a weird kind of sequel to my first movie. My first movie, Promedio Rojo, was a teen comedy about a guy that wrote comic books of everything that happened in his head and in his life. And this is not actually like a sequel where I maintain the same character, you know, but in a way, it used the same, I’m always talking about the same stuff, you know? And all the characters, yeah, they look a lot like me. I have a gigantic ego.

So, your first film, I didn’t see it a Fantastic Fest. Is it out on DVD now?

Yeah. Well, it was, my first flick played at South by Southwest in ‘05. And the thing is that they, well, what happened was, the typical Hollywood stuff, nobody wanted to release it how it was, and they wanted to cut it, and I said like, “You know what? **** it.” I don’t need now, with this movie, you know, the American market. So I shot Santos and now they will be able to sell the package, like Santos for theatrical release and Promedio Rojo for DVD. Because the movie was a really big hit in Latin America, and it played really well in Europe. And it was like a very small movie; Santos cost less than a million, US$1 million.

You said in the Q and A the actors you used are well known in Spain.

Yeah, really well known.

How did you come to work with them?

Basically because the only way of making this movie was doing a co-production with a bigger country. Chile’s a really small country. You can make a movie for, I don’t know, $300,000, but no more than that if you want to earn some money or make something that is going to work as a business also, because I’m also a producer of all my movies.

So we did this [as a] co-production, and every time that you do a co-production you have to find out a stupid way of justifying all the different accents. So every time that you watch it, and that’s something that you’re never going to get being from here, but when you watch any movie from Argentina, or from Spain, whatever, they always pick people like… It’s like if here they did a movie with people from Australia and from London and from Austin and suddenly everybody has a different accent.

So you have to find a way of justifying that, so what we did with Santos is that we created like a whole separate universe where people talk Japanese and Spanish and French and everything. Why the guys are in Spain? Because the first market of this movie’s not Chile, it’s Spain.

It’s like Pan’s Labyrinth, in a way. It’s like, I’m a Mexican director, like Guillermo del Toro was a Mexican director doing a movie for Spain with a Spanish actor. It’s the same thing. I’m a Chilean director doing a movie for Spain, but the thing is that here, we shot everything in Chile because that was the only way of making this movie for our price, because what I planned to do is that I wanted to replicate what Peter Jackson did with New Zealand. I want to make movies in Chile, and I don’t care if they’re going to be talking in English or in Spanish or in whatever.

But I want to make, I think that we have a chance, now, especially now that there is a lot of like foreign production that they are, like the new James Bond movie was shot in Chile, like a lot of it was shot in Chile. So what I’m planning to do is to make people invest in Chile. That’s what I did with “Santos”, basically.

For those of us who don’t know, who are the Spanish actors that are so well known in the film? All of the leads?

Well, Elsa Pataky, the girl, she’s like a really big star there and she’s also like a sex symbol. And Javier Gutierrez and Guillermo Toledo, those are Salvador and Anthrofly, they are like the Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller of Spain. And Leonardo Sbaraglia, the guy that plays the bad guy, he’s from Argentina. He’s like, he would be like an Adrian Brody, a guy that only does like art movies, and suddenly he said OK to me to make this flick. And it was really weird because he’s a guy that you’re not used to seeing in this kind of a movie. He’s like a guy that always wins all the awards. And those are the guys, basically. And all the other parts are played by people from Chile.

Now, I guess American comics must be popular in Chile, because you talk about Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross.

They are popular everywhere. But they are popular… it’s like, here’s the thing, right now, talking about a geographic place, I think that that doesn’t exist anymore. Now there isn’t any more small countries. What is small, it could be your Internet connection, or it could be like slow, but that’s the thing. Now, I was raised reading comic books from Spain and from all over Europe and from Japan and from here. So, I have a lot of mix of cultures.

So, Santos, in a way, looks a lot like an American superhero movie, but in the same way, it has a lot of Japanese influence, and in the same way, it has like a very Latin influence. And what I like to do is to mix all of that and create something that is going to look, from the outside, like something that you are used to seeing, like a superhero movie, but from the inside, it’s something completely different. That’s what I’m trying to do.

How long ago did you write it, until like right now, here we are, seeing the movie, how long was that?

Actually, the project was really fast at the beginning. I wrote the movie in ‘05, and we were shooting a year after that, in ‘06, and then we spent like a year and a half in postproduction.
With the effects and everything.

Yeah, because the movie has 1,800 special effects shots. And that’s a lot of special effects shots, especially when you can’t solve problems with money. It’s not like, OK, this company’s not working, what can we do? OK, let’s go to another one, let’s pay them more money.

But basically, we created a form of doing the post that was like totally different than what you do here. We had a lot of people, we had like a big company in Spain that were handling all the visual effects, but they were also like hiring other people from other countries. So basically, the movie was done like all over the world, like in India and in Japan and in Chile and Troublemaker.

So it’s truly multicultural.

It’s really multicultural. Yeah, a lot. That’s one thing I really like about the film, that right now we’re living in a time and age where everything is so multicultural.

Yeah. Has Robert Rodriguez seen the movie?

No, he hasn’t seen it. He’s going to see it soon, I think. Yeah, because he’s like in the middle of Shorts, the new movie that he’s doing, and now that I have the print, I think that Troublemaker is going to have the print here, so they’re going to show it to him. But I’m a big fan of his, because in my first movie, Promedio Rojo, the main character was named Roberto Rodriguez.

So I’m a really big fan, and in a way, when I was here with Promedio Rojo, my first movie, in ‘05, they were shooting Sin City and I was turning 22, it was my birthday, and Elizabeth invited me to Troublemaker Studios and they were in the middle of the shooting. And that’s when I watched how they were shooting Sin City with the greenscreen, and that’s how I came up with the idea of, oh, maybe I can do my epic movie the only thing that I need is a greenscreen. What I never thought of at that moment was that I was going to need to fucking fill those green screens with effects.

So, have you already started thinking about what’s next, or are you too busy with Santos right now?

No, I already wrote two new scripts.One of them is for here, it’s a movie that Ventanazul, the Selma Hayek production company, is doing, and I already wrote that. And they are in the middle of showing that script to the studios, but the thing is that all the studios want to see my new movie and, I guess, finish it. So we are going to see what happens in a few weeks.

And I’m also developing a new movie that I want to do in Spanish really fast that is going to be a musical. It’s going to be a musical, and basically it’s the story of a director that spends like fucking eight years trying to develop a sci fi movie.

Sounds familiar, right?

Sounds a little bit familiar, yeah. I don’t have a really big imagination, after all. [laughter]

Yeah, once you’ve done all your comic book and geek movies, what are you going to do?

Yeah, yeah, no, I’m done, I’m done. I’m done with the geeky movies.

Well, I hope not, because this was a lot of fun.

No, no, of course, no, no. I love what is happening right now, that we’re living in a time where there are so many good movies and that they’re treating all the franchises with respect.

And what I really wanted to have happened with that was that I would have loved to fucking direct “Spiderman” or “Batman”, but all the good franchises, they are already taken. So it was like, OK, what can I do? I can fucking adapt a really bad comic book, or create my own mythology. And that was like the main idea of “Santos”, was create a whole mythology and see what happens.