Daniel Sánchez Arévalo is over 50 and the time in which he debuted scripting ‘Farmacia de Guardia’ is already far behind him. He is one of the most consecrated directors of our country thanks to films that have defined several generations, such as ‘Cousins’, ‘Azuloscurocasinegro’ or ‘Seventeen’.
Now, The man from Madrid repeats with Netflix in the production of his first original series, ‘Las de la Última Row’, the story of five girls who live one last adventure before one of them has to start chemo. Now, Dani welcomes us to talk about the change of registration, pending debts with the female universeTwitter and the aversion to criticism.
ok this is a series
Espinof: After a long time making movies, and without telling me “This is a movie divided into episodes”, why a series?
Daniel Sanchez Arevalo: I had this story written down for about ten years, and I imagined a movie, but I never finished shaping it. Until one day I realized that what I wanted to tell and the level to which I wanted to delve into the lives of these five girls, I couldn’t find a feature film.
So I said “Okay, this is a series”. In addition, the mechanism that it proposes, in which each day a piece of paper is drawn that challenges them to new things, seemed perfect to me and gave me the structure of the six chapters. Five girls, a piece of paper per day and the sixth to collect everything sown.
E: And why this series?
DSA: The short answer is because one day I told my girl and her face lit up and she said “You have to do this, I want to see this series”. For me it was a great engine and motivation. In addition, Verónica Fernández, from Netflix, shortly after called me and told me “Dani, we want to produce a series for you, the one you want, the one you have in mind.” I stayed with her, I told her how ‘The Last Row’ started and she told me “Don’t tell me any more, I already want to see this series”. And it has been wonderful because they have given me brutal creative freedom.
E: That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, it’s your second collaboration with Netflix and you look very comfortable.
DSA: It’s just that I feel very privileged: the film and series departments have nothing to do with each other, they don’t communicate, each one makes their own decisions. And in both cases I have had amazing creative freedom. In ‘Seventeen’ they understood that a small film like this was not necessarily cheap, and if they wanted to shoot it in Cantabria for eight weeks on location, that would take time to shoot and some expenses. And here exactly the same thing happened.
From the beginning I was sending the scripts and they told me “Dani, we don’t want to give you grades because your universe is so yours and so particular… We really like what you do and how you do it, so we don’t want to tell you things that maybe they end up making the scripts worse.” But then I make my ideal casting of these five girls that I wanted you to believe as a group of lifelong friends and away from five postcard women, so to speak, a group of real women… I present it and they buy it. I thought they were going to ask me for a better-known face for the general public, but no.
The whole process has been like this, obviously in editing they have given me notes but telling me “You value it, Dani, and then you make the final decision”. So, of course, how wonderful.
The person who says “Ñiñiñí”
E: Until now your films (‘Seventeen’, ‘Gordos’, ‘Cousins’) are films in which you write mostly men, why suddenly write this group of women without a co-writer? Have you been afraid of not getting the tone?
DSA: I felt that I had a kind of pending debt with the female universe, that I had settled it a little with ‘Alice’s Island’, my novel, whose protagonist is female and is told in the first person, but in the audiovisual universe I followed her having. She really wanted to immerse herself in this universe and in the end she has been not only one woman but five.
What if I have been afraid in the process? A lot, and above all respect, because my greatest ambition was to create a series that if you didn’t know who was behind it, you would believe that it was a woman. That was also the maximum ambition of my novel, and from there that respect is born for doing it well, for creating a group of real women, that you believe them, with whom you empathize, with whom you identify and who represent a diverse group. . It made me get out of my comfort zone a lot (which doesn’t come naturally to me) but at the same time it was an incredible and wonderful trip, and in which I received, believe me, a lot of help.
Sara, my girl, let me dive in that kind of private plot of land with her group of friends and she let me steal things and constantly have advice. I have had a psychologist who is an expert in gender who has been reading all the scripts, all the versions, and she would tell me any word or anything that did not sound entirely correct to her. And when the actresses joined, she told them “Girls, you have to help me to finish configuring, to finish off the characters. I don’t want you to do or say anything that doesn’t feel consistent with your characters.” In addition, the technical team were mostly women, and I asked them to please, even if I were the director, not to hesitate to tell me, even if we were shooting, if something was the least bit scratchy for them. I have felt very supported and very sheltered in this sense.
E: In this regard, an obligatory question, I’m sorry: these girls do all kinds of absolutely cancelable things, like stealing from small businesses, which taken out of context can be a very nice clip on Twitter. Are you afraid of that web of Satan?
DSA: I was very active on Twitter and I stopped doing it because I realized that in everything I wrote, anywhere I was caught. Now I put very little things, but I am very active, I read it a lot and watch it a lot… But without writing. Fear? Yes, I’m scared, because I also think that almost all of us have this horrible tendency that even if out of 100 people 99 tell you “That’s great, how I liked it” it’s enough for one to say “Ñiñiñi” to be screwed, you’re left alone with that .
And Twitter is the perfect place for that. In fact, probably when we premiere I’ll try to get away a little bit, I haven’t read reviews for a long time. After ‘Gordos’ I stopped reading them because I suffered a lot. But not the good ones! I don’t read the good ones, nor the bad ones. Things come to me, obviously, but I prefer to try to preserve myself a bit because we suffer a lot and we are very sensitive to any criticism. And I know that as much as I try to do things right and that everything makes sense, somewhere I can fall.
E: You’re doing well, we critics are bad people. In fact, I have a little criticism now: it seemed a shame that you experiment with the format so late, only in the last two episodes, and invent alternative universes only in the last one. I don’t know if it’s to accommodate the viewer to a format and then introduce innovations, because you don’t trust the average viewer or because you wanted to tell a story and gradually bring it to its peak.
DSA: I think it has more to do with each story, with what is told in each chapter. Episode 2 does have that space-time component that is played with a lot and it is true that later I begin to play a lot with the metalanguage and the way of telling things, inventing things that have not happened and that you think have. I also think it’s a cool way to confuse the viewer and make them be a little aware. But it’s not that I didn’t do it at the beginning for fear that the story wouldn’t be understood, but because it didn’t come naturally to me.
Maybe I too, as I write, as there are very long periods and many chapters, I feel the need to play and look for other ways of narrating so as not to get bored myself as a writer. It is that you just made this reflection and I had not realized it!
Be local to reach the international
E: I would like to talk a little about the importance of indie music in history, like Rigoberta Bandini or Joe Crepúsculo, and how it serves as the driving force of history itself in a slightly anachronistic way, because in clubs they don’t play La La Love You As much as we like it. How does this musical magical realism work in the story?
DSA: What was clear to me was that I wanted to try not to have an original soundtrack, but I didn’t know if I was going to be able to because there were very emotional parts and I thought “Here I’m going to need something to help me and support me”. But I tried to do this exercise from the beginning: right from the shoot I thought of Juan Ibáñez, who was my musical adviser, to whom I told that there were five girls on a trip, they have to listen to music, they are going to go to discos, and I want them to the songs that they sing and dance, they sing and dance, that they are really listening to it instead of making the decision in post-production, which is always rarer.
And I have been very lucky because this guy is the bomb and he has taken me on wings: he made me an amazing playlist and then we have had a constant dialogue throughout the preparation of the shoot. I have enjoyed it very much and I have been very proud that, indeed, for the first time in my life, I have managed not to use original compositions. And I have nothing against them! I adore them and love them, I spend the day listening to soundtracks, but I think that’s what was good for this story.
E: Do you plan to repeat it in a series format or once you have tried it, like Woody Allen, do you not plan to return?
DSA: Now I don’t want to, I want to make a movie, I feel like going back to that. The shooting has been very hard, it’s 16 weeks, I’m the only director and the only writer… Post-production also suffers a lot, because you have to spend four or five months in all the processes, and they accumulate because it’s a huge volume of work and a lot of material. It has been an incredible and wonderful experience that I am sure I will repeat, but right now what I want is to return to 100 minutes.
E: One of the best scenes in the series has to do with French toast. No matter how modern we think we are, in the end the folksiest and coolest things are the ones that reach us the most, what is the balance you reach between the cool and the modern?
DSA: I really like the town, the people, the traditions. I’ve always been a kid who didn’t have friends where I went to spend the summer, I was with my grandparents all day, which was what I liked the most in the world. I love that kind of winks and things that have to do with the very local, I think it needs to be exploited more. We tend to focus on the universal and I always say that to go far you have to start with what is close. And the greatest example we have is Almodóvar, you cannot be more local and at the same time more international.
E: To finish, if your friends played the game of papers, would you fulfill all of them to the letter? And which one would you put?
DSA: I wouldn’t strictly comply with all of them… Well, maybe yes. Under these circumstances, yes. It would cost me a lot, but I would do it. For me the most complicated would be telling the truth, it is the one with which I identify the most because I feel that we are a society that lives entangled in lies, from very absurd micro-lies such as “How are you?”-“Good” when the same you’re screwed to things that are deeper that have to do with yourself, your needs, your desires and things that you have entrenched and that you don’t assume.
The six episodes of ‘The ones in the last row’ They premiere on the 23rd on Netflix.