Oscar Winner Alejandro Amenábar on Miguel de Cervantes Film and His World War III Fears

Oscar-winning auteur Alejandro Amenábar (The Others, While at War, The Sea Inside) is really worried about World War III.

The Spanish-Chilean filmmaker and composer first made a name for himself with horror thriller Thesis (1996), which won seven Goya Awards in Spain. His psychological thriller Open Your Eyes (1997) was remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz, who also featured in the original. The writer-director’s English-language debut, ghost story The Others (2001), starring Nicole Kidman, became a global hit.

As if that weren’t enough, his 2004 drama The Sea Inside, starring Javier Bardem, won the best international feature, which was then known as the best foreign-language film Oscar.

Currently, the filmmaker is attending the 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival where he was celebrated with a tribute during Thursday’s opening ceremony and was invited to share his thoughts and insights during a masterclass on Friday. The fest is also featuring a retrospective of his works.

Just before his masterclass, Amenábar talked to The Hollywood Reporter via Zoom about the fragile state of the world, Elon Musk’s controversial “gesture,” his foray into TV with the miniseries La Fortuna, whose cast includes Stanley Tucci, voting for Karla Sofía Gascón for the best actress Oscar and his upcoming movie The Captive, about legendary Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes.

Do you have any core topic or key message that you will focus on sharing during your Luxembourg City Film Festival masterclass later today?

For me, it’s weird. I was in a talk or presentation two weeks ago about fears and monsters in the movies. And I said that for me, it was difficult to talk about it right now, considering everything that’s going on in the world. Obviously, as a creator, when you make movies, you take ideas from many places. And somehow what is happening right now in the world, and what’s happening in Europe, makes you think that anything we say about movies is not pertinent. We should be talking about the political situation. But my movies sometimes are political, so I’m sure there will be some of that in the talk today.

I recently re-watched your film Agora [Amenábar’s 2009 historical drama starring Rachel Weisz as Hypathia, a mathematician, philosopher and astronomer in 4th-century Egypt] and at some point it felt as if you had foreseen the culture wars and the political conflicts of today…

Yeah, unfortunately, I had that feeling then — the movie was released in 2009 — about a change in the cycle and another era starting, not necessarily for the better. I had that a few years before Trump even got to power for the first time. I really feel right now it’s true, it’s happening. We are seeing it. And we are seeing people who are very important people in this world raising their hands for the Nazis’ gesture. So that makes me think that, unfortunately, that change has happened.

I’m curious about a very different change, one in your work. You made your first series with La Fortuna. How was that experience and did you always want to make a TV project?

I have to say that I’m a lazy viewer of series. I consider myself a movie animal. What I really like to watch is movies, sometimes I even re-watch movies from the past. But for me, it’s difficult to get engaged in a series, particularly if it’s a series that [runs] for several seasons. So what I enjoy the most as a viewer and as a creator is movies.

Having said that, this story is [based on] a comic book. I read the comic book, which is inspired by a true story that started in Spain, and I really liked it and wanted to adapt it. It was also the first time that I adapted some material that wasn’t originally coming from me. And the moment my co-writer, Alejandro Hernández and I started to work on it as a movie, we realized it was going to be a very long movie. We decided it would be a miniseries, first we thought of four episodes, but then it worked better with six episodes.

And I remember that I thought when looking back at Agora that maybe it would have fit better as a miniseries, because I could have developed many things that I learned by researching in that movie.

I decided, why not, we could try a TV series production. And the [streaming] platform, which was Movistar+ in Spain, was very happy with the series, because, as you know, platforms nowadays prefer to produce series rather than movies. So we were all happy.

In terms of the differences, the main thing is the amount of work. Basically, it was my longest shooting period ever. It took almost half a year. But I have to say that I really enjoyed it, and I felt I had the freedom that I’m used to having.

Does it make a difference to you whether people watch your films or your series on a big or small screen?

You can watch and tell stories in many ways. Actually, when I was a child, I didn’t go to the movies that often. My parents lived on the outskirts, and there wasn’t a cinema there. So I mainly watched movies on television. I think that’s a perfect way to watch movies. The truth is that when I started to watch movies in theaters, it’s not only about the dimension of the screen and the sound quality. It is the experience of watching the movie together, that collective experience, almost similar to a mass experience. I really enjoy that, and I cannot help going to theaters, but I’m open to [different things].

When I did the series La Fortuna, I knew that it would be shown on a [streaming] platform. What I’m a little troubled about with platforms is that I wouldn’t want them to become like big production companies from Hollywood. For a creator like me, coming from Europe, I always try to preserve my independence and not to deliver something that I wouldn’t be proud of. So, I would like to think that platforms are not only going to look for profits. That is important, of course, but they should also encourage creativity and new talent and fresh ideas. I’m really very scared when people talk about algorithms and the idea that something that is not human is deciding what people should see.

You have worked with big Hollywood talent. Did you ever feel like you really “went Hollywood,” so to speak?

The truth is that I never went to Hollywood. Of course, I got in contact with very powerful, impressive and talented people from Hollywood, like Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. But The Others was a movie shot entirely in Spain and one in which I tried to, again, preserve all my creative freedom. I like the interaction. A movie is a collaborative piece. Everyone has something to say, and I really like that — trying to improve your story with new ideas from other people. But for me, there is something that determines the freedom in making a movie, and that has to do with final cut. The moment you don’t have final cut, I think, as a creator, you are in trouble.

I want to ask you about The Captive, starring Julio Peña (Berlin, Through My Window). How far along is your work on it and what can you share about it and your interest in Miguel de Cervantes?

The film is almost finished. I’m giving it the last touches, and it will be released in Spain in October.

It’s a story that I’ve been researching for a few years now. It’s really interesting to see, considering he is our biggest writer ever, how little we know about him, even in Spain. Obviously, we all study his work like Don Quixote when we are young and at school, but we don’t know much about him.

When I started researching this particular period of his life, I found it perfect for me. It’s a story about freedom — physical freedom, because he was imprisoned in Algiers, Algeria for five years. He tried to escape from prison four times. So it’s almost like a Count of Monte Cristo story. But it’s also about the freedom of ideas, because of his interaction with a world — which was the enemy in those times — the Muslim world. He really got in contact with it and saw himself interacting with those people. I think that’s what contributed to making his work really more humane and complex and sophisticated.

Anything else you would like to share?

I think we can finish with what I said at the beginning of this interview. The other day, some journalists approached me to talk about fear in movies. I said: Look, for me, the biggest fear is World War III, which I feel is nearer than ever. They were kind of shocked, but then they asked me the next question, which had to do with Karla Sofía Gascón and Emilia Pérez, and that was the headline in the news. There was nothing about World War III, which made me think how crazy this world can get.

It’s like in the movie Don’t Look Up. Yes, you can tell people, in this case, a bunch of journalists, that there is a meteorite coming, and that’s what is really troubling me. But if the news is focusing on some other little thing that seems more interesting for the Internet, for instance, they will ask you about that.

Now I am in the tricky position to wonder what you said about Karla Sofía Gascón but being unsure how best to ask you...

I can tell you what I said. I think sometimes we are slaves to our own words, and social media contributes to that. Actually, that’s one of the reasons why I always try to be away from it. I think that’s what happened in the case of Karla Sofía Gascón. But having said that, I really loved Emilia Pérez. It was my favorite film of the year. I voted for it for the Oscars, and I voted for her.