The buzz of a bond

Teresita Sanchez and Bastian Escobar as Olga and Cristian, who Fernando Eimbcke describes as 'a little Ulysses' Photo: © Kinotitlán

At first glance Fernando Eimbcke’s delightful and frequently forthright Flies, seems as though it will be a character study of the curmudgeonly Olga (Teresita Sanchez, who previously proved memorable in support in The Chambermaid and in the lead of Dos Estaciones). But having given the measure of her solo existence – with hints of a previous life – in a spotless apartment where she plays computer sudoku in between hunting down the occasional fly, Eimbcke, writing with Vanesa Garnica, introduce energetic nine-year-old Cristian (Bastian Escobar) and his father (Hugo Ramírez). Olga doesn’t know about Cristian when she rents a room to his dad, who is in town because his wife is going through cancer treatment at the nearby hospital. When she does discover he’s sneaked in a kid, a nicely worked relationship begins to build as the pair bond over a space invaders style game named Cosmic Invaders Pro. The film is shot in black and white which suits the melancholic emotional scaffolding which lies beneath the humour.

Premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, we sat down with the director to talk about some of the film’s structure and themes.

Speaking about the unusual switch in perspectives from Olga to Cristian, he says: “We wrote and we shot the arrival of Christian with his mother and father and it was on the first cut. Then I was very lucky to have the support of Mariana Rodriguez, who edited my previous films. It was impossible for her to participate in this because she was doing a documentary as a director. She saw it and then Michell Franco, the producer of the film, he saw it. Both of them at the same time, in different places, told me, ‘What about if you take out the arrival of the family?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, let's try it’.I took it out and it worked amazingly well.

Fernando Eimbcke at Berlinale press conference. 'Our main idea with this film was to adapt to what reality gave us' Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

“That’s the kind of thing that happened in the editing room. That's why I love editing so much.”

There’s a distinctly retro feel to the action, not just because of the monochrome palette but in terms of the analogue games. Cosmic Defenders Pro is joined by phone Snake and Olga’s sudoku, which she plays on an ageing computer.

“I’m not very romantic about that. I love digital in all its forms, I love to listen to music on digital. But objects are really important in our lives. The Dardennes Brothers used to say, “Film loves objects” because they are a symbol of something.

“With the video games, I think there’s something very romantic about the LED lights in eight-bit programs – just on and off, on and off. Lights or lack of light. So that was very, very beautiful.

“The black and white worked perfectly. I didn’t realise that until a few weeks ago when we were doing post-production. We were doing some fixing on the match so they sent me the original material and it was in colour. I was like, ‘Oh my God if I did this film on colour it wouldn’t make sense because I have orange and blue and white – and in black and white it’s just light or no light. The real world and the fantasy world melt perfectly with black and white.”

Surprisingly, Eimbcke says, “I never play video games. I don't like it. I don't know why.”

But he says it’s important to dig deep into the world of the character.

“It was like an obsession for this little boy. And that helped us to create something that the little boy would find as a safe place because where there's fantasy, there's a safe place. “I adapted myself and I had to learn a lot. I wanted to use the Space Invaders and then it was impossible because we didn't have the rights and it was very expensive. So then the legal department proposed names and one of those names was Cosmic Defenders Pro. I was like, ‘Okay, Cosmic… Janice Joplin, Cosmic Blues. Defenders… it's not about invaders, it's about Defenders so that made complete sense and that helped us to go into the script and change a lot of things. And then the Pro was like a joke. That changed everything in the script and with this story we were really open to changing things.”

Eimbcke also gives a lot of credit to his cinematographer María Secco – whose CV includes The Golden Dream – who he says is happy to adapt to improvisation.

Olga (Teresita Sanchez) and Bastian (Cristian Escobar) in Flies Photo: © Kinotitlán

“She’s very respectful in terms of the acting,” he adds. “She would never say, ‘Okay, stop this thing because I need the light’, or, ‘Please go into your point’. She will adopt herself. I work with just the camera on a tripod. The first day, I was like ‘Maria, please don't move’. And then after a few days, I was like, ‘Okay, please move it’. So she was recomposing and I trusted her.”

A lot of the film is also dependent on good sound design, from the flies that annoy Olga to the sound of Cristian’s ball thudding on a wall and, of course, the digital beeps of Cosmic Defender Pro.

“Salvador Reyes, the editor, and I worked deeply on the editing and on the sound design. I think they are the same. Some people think that once you finish the film, you go into the sound design, and it will be like a different process. For us, it's the same process.

“So we thought about all the pieces, sound elements that will be on the sound design, and then Javier Umpierrez took that and he enhanced that. We thought the sound design should be important in romantic terms never in stylistic terms and that was the same with the music.We worked with a version of Space Invaders and then the legal department told us, ‘We don't have the money to pay for that’. So I went with Camilo Lara, a Mexican musician who did amazing films, like Coco and he’s produced Manu Chao and many other important artists in Latin America and Europe. I was really ashamed to ask him for a soundalike. I think that soundalikes are horrible. For commercials they are Okay, so I have this song from, I don't know, the Chemical Brothers and I want to do a commercial for milk or something like that. But for a film, no.

“So I approached Camilo and I told him, ‘Okay? Let's build a score and let's try to create emotion with this Cosmic Defenders theme. He decided to make all the music eight-bit. So that was very organic.”

He says they also modified the sound to match the mood, so that it felt as though they were using textures that related to the video game.

Throughout the process, the director says: “Our main idea with this film was to adapt to what reality gave us.”

Hugo Ramírez and Bastian Escobar who play father and son in Flies Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

That strategy came into its own in one crucial scene involving Cristian’s attempts to get into the hospital where his mum is being treated and which strictly forbids kids from entering. We see him sitting alongside the security guards at one point, making a necklace out of paperclips.

Eimbcke says he and his co-writer wanted there to be a bonding scene but even as they went onto the set the issue of how to make it happen “was not solved”.

“It was written, but it didn't work,” he adds. “So, it was like, ‘What should I do?’ And then I found Bastian. Of course, if you are a kid and you give them clips, they will do something. So he started to do that and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the answer’.

He says Bastian is like “a little Ulysses" and that, in general, they adapted to what Bastian was doing. It also helped that Bastian knew the actor playing his father beforehand. That came about because he was helping the casting director with the camerawork as they hunted for the actor to play Cristian. When Eimbcke learned he “was a very good friend of Bastian”, he recalls: “I said, ‘He’s the one, because Bastian will feel secure on the set. He’s a professional actor and he did an amazing job.”