David Trueba on the Beatles, Jose Rizal, and the Spanish-Filipino film connection

MANILA, Philippines - The cinema has always provided a convenient escape, where you can get lost in the lives of heroes and heels, conflicts and concord, romance and tragedy, glamour or grit. Making movies, however, can be a lifelong quest.

Madrid-born director, screenwriter and novelist David Trueba was recently in town to formally mark the opening of the 13th Pelicula Spanish Film Festival, the annual showcase of the finest films from the Iberian Peninsula. With eight landmark movies under his belt, including two that have been shortlisted for the Oscars, Trueba could very well be the gilded filmmaker in character, replete with a larger-than-life sense of self. Yet, catching up with him in the lobby of the New World Hotel in just his crewneck, jeans, and flashing an amiable smile, you realize that maybe not all cinematic geniuses are egoists.       

“One of the reasons why I accepted the invitation for the festival is that the Philippines is a place that is very important in Spanish history and our relation, but, at the same time, very badly known by the succeeding generation,” Trueba said while sipping a calamansi juice. “We don’t know much about it. We don’t have a real image apart from political news or natural calamities. That’s what attracted me to coming to the Philippines, to try to get a first impression of the country. I think it has an incredible richness in cultural things and natural things and I was very curious to see it personally.”

Having been caught in Manila traffic earlier on during a visit to the walled city of Intramuros, Trueba had plenty of time to reflect on the Philippines’ lengthy imperial heritage. “I feel very related to people like Jose Rizal, what he was asking for, and the dignity for the Filipino people and its own government,” he mused. “For me, it’s a strong visit. Philippines is always related to the last episode of an extended tragedy of losing our power in the world, but at the same time, it has to be the exposition of mistakes that the great countries can make. We have to learn from history and it would be stupid not to do it.”

This arc from past to future is what enriches Trueba’s cinematic storytelling, as well as the sense of irony regarding escapist reality that has been his trademark. His most recent film, Living is Easy With Eyes Closed (Vivir es facil con los ojos cerrados) premiered on the festival’s opening day. Widely acclaimed in Spain, the movie garnered six Premios Goya, the Spanish equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscar, and from watching this movie alone, you can learn a lot about the filmmaker and his process.   

EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

“My parents were very working-class,” Trueba revealed. “They were emigrants in Madrid from a small town in Spain. They couldn’t afford to go to school. We’re a big family of eight, but we have very different interests.”

Having two other filmmaker older brothers, one of whom is the Oscar award-winning Fernando Trueba, David, as the youngest, was never overshadowed. He just had to find his own light. “Our parents were always very concerned about culture, education and the university,” he said. “My mother, the dream of her life after having eight children was to see me entering the university because it meant two things: that she lived to see me in my 20s, and she had seen all her kids come into university. They transmitted to us the pride, the value of education and the effort to bring us in that position. We are the expression of the success of a generation.”

The movie Living is Easy With Eyes Closed is set in the late ’60s, the period in which Trueba was born. It chronicles the life of Antonio, a Beatles-obsessed English teacher who goes on a road trip to Almeria, Spain, just when John Lennon is there to pen the classic Strawberry Fields Forever.    

“When I discovered that he composed that song there, I was very surprised because it is a song that has a lot of different interpretations,” Trueba relates. “He said in some interviews that it is a song about not losing the memories of childhood, that moment when you molded yourself for the future. It’s a very interesting point for a filmmaker or a writer, because at that time he was very successful, but at the same time he was thinking about the past. He was thinking about his childhood from humble Liverpool and how it’s difficult to be an important person when you continue to feel like an orphaned child, as he was. It’s something that appeals to every one of us.”

A PLOT FOR REFORMATION

“I’m a reformist more than a modernist,” Trueba explained. “I’m a person that thinks that the democracy in Spain has to be improved all the time. You can’t sleep on the success. You have to ask for ameliorations in everything: in culture, in education, in the market, and the interchange with other countries. I’m a person who is always trying to push the government and the society to new frontier.”

Trueba also feels very strongly about Hollywood’s hold over global cinema. “Anglo-Saxon culture in the movie business is a very criminal thing. The American (film) industry has owned the space, and all the power, not only in Spain but all over the world. We’re only asking for a window to show our pictures, to see the pictures from other countries and other languages, and this is very important. This is a reform we have to push.”

Yet he knows that in dealing with a megalithic moneymaking machine, you have to be clever enough to beat Hollywood at its own game. Trueba never expected his film to become the sleeper hit it did, but is optimistic about what it might achieve. “One year after it premiered in Spain it’s still being played in some parts, and now it’s opening in a lot of countries,” he said. “And it’s having this excellent reception in the States, where I received the first award in Palm Springs International Film Festival. I was a bit surprised, being the first Spanish movie to win this award. But maybe the story is a circular one, where I return to California to receive an Oscar. That will be something to share in my country. It wouldn’t be a personal success for me, it would be a success of everyone.”

THE ENEMY IS SUCCESS

“I think we live in a time where success is a goal for a lot of people, especially in the entertainment business, culture and the arts. It’s a big mistake, in my opinion,” he says, somewhat ironically for someone anticipating an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. “That moment you receive an award, I always receive it with the confidence to continue doing what you are doing. They give it to you because you are doing things in your own way, so don’t change it.

“Sometimes an award makes you change how you think a little bit. It makes you think you’re a successful director, makes you want to make bigger pictures, in the States or whatever, and that’s a mistake. That is a big responsibility, because you start to represent your country, not only your film or yourself. It is very difficult to be among the final nominees. You have to wait, and be very humble.”

Trueba feels that by expressing yourself in a personal, local way you can arrive at a universal truth. “The Beatles never renounced being the four guys from Liverpool, and that made them universal,” he said. “They never started by thinking that they would be a hit.”

REAL PASSION

The director says that, after making eight largely acclaimed movies, everything still feels fresh and new. “I continue to feel like a young director trying to do his first movie. It always starts with a blank page. You can’t put an award in that blank page. The past is not important.”

He says that his projects always have an audience in mind. “Some filmmakers lose the origin of the cinema, which is always that young boy looking at the screen. All directors come from that. We were audiences before. So we have to work on that direction, to get in connection with these young audiences who are now looking at movies, because they will be the future of our business.”

 Trueba is strongly attracted to normal people and the conflicts they deal with in their normal lives. “There are very big inspirations in real life, and we can make a great picture with that,” he says. “It’s always a commentary on society, human beings, and their conflicts. I’m very close to those affairs, their characters, their stories.”

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed is a movie about how “non-relevant” people can change the lives of others, just by behaving in the right way, being courageous, generous, and doing what they have to do in life.

“‘Living is easy with eyes closed’ is a very ambiguous line,” Trueba says. “It’s an indication of a dream, a childhood you have to come back to when life is full of frustrations and you have to close your eyes to dream again. So that makes life easy. At the same time, John Lennon was a very observant guy. He has very big, open eyes for reality, for society. He was an example of an artist who is always making his life more complicated instead of getting easier every time he gets successful. Every record that came after their success was always more complex.

“In the end life is our territory,” Trueba concludes. “I love art when it makes people discover the pleasures of life, and the possibilities of life. I like it how when a film ends and a person has this optimistic approach, when, okay, you can do it even when life is tough, even when you see all the bad things that can happen to you, all the frustrations, all the injustice. These you have to fight, until the last days.”

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Organized by Instituto Cervantes, the 13th Pelicula Spanish Film Festival will feature David Trueba’s Living is Easy with Eyes Closed in Greenbelt 3 cinema on Oct. 18 at 9:30 p.m. The festival will also feature 18 other acclaimed masterpieces of contemporary Spanish cinema until Oct. 19.