Interview: Director Carlos Marques-Marcet on 10.000Km

 "I think we have to think of cinema as the 'art' of audiovisual communication..."

While watching 10.000Km, the debut feature from the Spanish director/editor Carlos Marques-Marcet, I didn't want it to end. On the surface it is a vivid portrait of a long distance relationship but the subtext of this relationship is a deep, complex look at the current state of art, communication, beauty, emotion, surveillance- basically all of humanity- and it somehow managed to also be completely entertaining (!). I wanted the film to keep showing me its world. Because of this, I immediately tracked down the director to, selfishly, keep the film going! After reading over the non-native English speaker's answers to the questions, that I fittingly sent him via e-mail, I noticed that he used a lot of imagery from other directors (Rossellini, Ozu, Fellini) to characterize his own feelings and reflections on his world. 10.000Km is truly continuing a tradition of not exactly narrative storytelling but of a form of cinematic Freudian anthropology that the directors he mentions also deal in, filtering their worlds through a collective lens almost like a form of emotional documentary or metaphysical self portraiture, giving way to nuanced interpretations from the director, the audience, and even the real world that all are referencing...and isn't that what art is anyway? The purest form of personal expression.

Q. It isn’t often I see a film and actually consider the beauty of the acting. These two actors, Natalia Tena as Alex and David Verdaguer as Sergi, were able to carry the entire film with such elegance. How were you able to get these performances? I noticed the actors had writing credits, how much of a hand did they have in creating their characters? Or was it improvised? It all felt too controlled to be improvised? Really stunning!

A: Thanks, I really owe a lot to Natalia and David they totally invested themselves in the project. I guess at the end that’s what directing is all about, just creating the conditions so the actors can jump into the void without fear because they trust you. I wish I could say I had invented some kind of technique, but I didn’t, I just made my own version of what’s been done.

We rehearsed for ten days and half of those days we spent letting the actors figure out by themselves who these people are and an understanding of their relationship. I sometimes find very ridiculous when people write “backstories” of the characters and give them to the actors, it makes me think of 8 ½, the actress who follows Mastroianni to tell her “the clue” of her character. But it was essential for this movie to create the reality of a couple that had been together for seven years, we needed to be very specific.

On one side we worked a lot about their physicality. I think the sense of touch accumulates memories that are very specific and unique for each couple. We danced a lot and I came up with different exercises so they could investigate their physical relationship. We worked from the outside to try to find the inside. We also improvised keys scenes that allowed us to understand how they ended up in the situation that they are in: when and why did they decide to have a kid? When and how did they move together? How did they become a couple? etc. Then we also rehearsed some key scenes of the script, we would read it out loud and see what was working, what we didn’t need and what was missing. We would rewrite on the spot and we would improvise moments as a way to discover what was happening in the scenes. Even if I wrote the scene myself, as a director I like to approach the material without preconceived notions, I try to discover what the scenes are about with the actors. We would record these improvisations and at night we would listen to the recordings with my co-writer, Clara Roquet, and introduced the lines of dialogue that we liked.

Lots of the best humor in the movie comes actually from Nat and David during the rehearsal, that’s why I gave them credit. A few of them come from improvisations we would do on set when we saw that something wasn’t working, although we most of the time followed the script pretty close. Actually the few things that were improvised on set are the ones that look the least improvised, moments I would have never dared to write because they would sound too written, like the moment when he makes up a little rhyme on the kitchen scene.

We also shot lots of takes, very few shots, but we repeated them a lot until something unexpected happened. I always need to get surprised about what I’m shooting.

Q: The opening shot of 10.000Km is a long, heavy one, the most “real” action of the whole film, the most time the two characters are together. It has little to no cuts and establishes the audience in a position of voyeurism that was analogous to the couple’s long distance internet relationship. In the beginning of the film I felt like I was peering in on these strangers but as it progressed I felt more engulfed in their digital exchanges, visually and emotionally. How do you think the relationship between film & audience is changing because of the digital revolution? We have become so accustomed now to staring at screens, do we feel closer to the characters? Or is it a false/dangerous closeness, more like what the relationship in 10.000Km becomes?

A: I don’t think just by the fact of spending lots of time in front of screen we get closer to characters in movies. I feel our relationship with screens has changed in the sense that now they are totally an integrated part of our everyday life. I feel that ideas that had been conceptualized by film theorist could nowadays totally be applied to the way we live, like the off-screen space or the mise-en-scene. More than changing our relationship between film and audience, screens have changed our relationship with space and time, the here-and-now seems to mean something different now. The opposition is not so much fake/true, or even real/virtual (what we think by the word “reality” is also a symbolic construction), but the pair here/there.

Q: I read this really great article awhile ago about the way the internet is physically manifest in films, the difficultly of trying to make concrete this invisible thing so the film is not just a person typing at a computer. How did you develop the strong visual character of the internet in your film? For example, the video-chat glitches…did you make glitches? Or were they real? Your depiction of internet communication was so thoughtful and I was wondering how it came to be.

A: It was one of the biggest concerns, but also one of the most exciting challenges. My feeling is that internet is more a concept than a “thing” and as we all know, cameras capture things, not concepts. You can film screens, you can film websites, you can film interactions, you can film the technology that makes the internet possible, but you can’t film the internet. For me internet is all about “what-is-not-there.” As I said before, it is all about technology allowing us to be “there” and not “here.” 

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