Interview With Nacho Vigalondo

“To rid myself of ambitions related to prestige or box office success, I tend to imagine that each film could be my final message to the world.”

Ever since he dazzled us with his early short films and Los cronocrímenes, Nacho Vigalondo has continued to surprise us with a career that straddles cinema, television, and music videos. In all of them, he has infused his personality and wit, as well as his penchant for blending genre with comedy. His latest work, Daniela Forever, is an innovative exploration of grief and lucid dreams. We talked to him about some of the thematic and formal aspects of the film — By Andreu Marves

Where did the idea behind the premise of Daniela Forever come from?

It all begins with my experience with grief and the depressive period that follows it, when you wish you could escape your life and go somewhere else. Thinking about that, I arrived at the concept of lucid dreams. Since I have ADHD and I’m not disciplined enough to achieve lucid dreaming, it seems like something out of science fiction to me. From that personal impossibility, I thought: Can you imagine taking a pill and getting that opportunity?

What were your influences when creating the dreamlike landscape of the film?

Typically, dreams in cinema allow for an escape into abstraction, into rapture. The premise of Daniela Forever eliminates that possibility: the pill that Nicolas, the protagonist, takes essentially paves over the dream world, as if he were trying to turn it into a parking lot. That prevents me from drawing on the visual heritage of David Lynch or Luis Buñuel, as well as The Matrix or Inception, to name a few examples. In that sense, the only direct influences I can cite are Charlie Kaufman, for his mental landscapes, and Philip K. Dick, for his combination of science fiction and existential horror.

The story takes place between reality and the dream world, but each has a distinct aesthetic. How did you establish their identities?

The action happens between these two worlds, but in the same settings: an apartment, a bar, a rooftop... Since I didn’t want to constantly clarify which reality we were in at any given moment, I had to find two radically different visual styles that would make them easily distinguishable. In the case of the dreams, within the story, Nicolas sleeps to return to a kind of normality or tranquility, so it felt right for the visual style to be what audiences typically associate with contemporary fantasy films. It’s the most conventionally beautiful part, the one we, as filmmakers, feel most comfortable shooting—we know what angles and lenses to use, things like that.

And the real world?

While writing the script, I thought that a simple but effective way to distinguish reality from dreams was to shoot it in black and white. The problem is that I’m not the Coen brothers or Alfonso Cuarón, so there was no way they’d let me shoot in black and white. Looking for other solutions, we ended up deciding to film with a classic Betacam camera, the same one I used to make my first short films in the 90s. When we got permission, our eyes lit up.

That’s a risky decision.

Yes, I think it’s an even more radical choice than black and white. The Betacam aesthetic completely sidesteps the debate between digital and celluloid values. Plus, we didn’t have many references to draw from. The thing is, I tend to imagine that each film could be my last, to rid myself of ambitions related to prestige or box office success, and dedicate myself to the film as if it were my final message to the world. So, reconnecting with the camera I used in university felt very fitting. Now, unlike back then, I can appreciate the rawness of that camera. It takes time to truly appreciate that kind of imagery.

This film revisits a recurring theme in your work: fantasies of control. Do you think your films reflect on the role of directing?

When a story is asking you to bring it to life, it speaks from depths that don’t necessarily reveal its true motivations. It’s not a conscious effort on my part to explore these themes. That said, I understand that simply being a filmmaker and reaching a certain level of responsibility leads you to question what it means to have that power, whether it’s legitimate to have it, and what implications it might carry. I did realize during the development of the project that I had created a portrait of malice—but an everyday kind of malice, the kind we can all take part in. That is definitely present in the film.

Your portrayal of Madrid in this film is something new for you.

Until now, I’ve always been a filmmaker of interiors, but here I felt more comfortable letting the space breathe, capturing the urban landscape in all its complexity and visual richness. I think in more ways than one, Daniela Forever is my most Spanish film, in the way it flows and lets the characters move through the city. It has more references to my immediate life than to the fantasy of filmmaking. It feels like a portrait of a particular time in my life.

[Interview excerpt from the Festival Daily on October 8 & 9, 2024]

[Listen to the Daniela Forever Press Conference]