Though it has been well over a year since we sat down with the director of The Club, Pablo Larrain (during the Berlin Film Festival 2015) – given the film is only now being granted it’s much deserved UK theatrical release, we can finally share the experience we had with the hugely talented Chilean filmmaker with our readers.
Below Larrain discusses the context surrounding this harrowing narrative, the back stories he created to the characters and why he decided to be so verbally explicit with this endeavour. He also speaks about his thoughts on the recent wave of Chilean movies, and we ask him about this Scarface remake he’s been linked to…
You’ve said that the church does not respect civil justice – did you want to take the justice to the church with this movie?
No, we don’t do that. We’re not here to tell people what to think or what to do, we just want to express an emotion, a concept. It’s a movie, we’re just trying to dig in to it and see if we can understand what’s going on. I believe that the church do not believe in civil justice, they believe the members should be judged in front of the eyes of God – and that triggers a lot of questions and is very interesting to me. Therefore you’re facing people who think that they’re different from all of us, and that’s interesting. The reasons for that are that they have their own legal system, and also because in the last 50 years the structure of the church has changed. What are their fears? If ever the main fear has been that your members or people that follow the church go to hell, that’s the worst possible scenario. But now the real fear and the one that creates panic in the church are you guys, the media. The media really scares them.
It’s an institution that is not really worried about sacred things, but more of what people think about them. I guess the PR guy from the Vatican is more important than the Pope is now. Communication these days is so important, with social network, and they need to control that and it’s why they have this house situation, because if you have a bishop or an important priest who has a problem, there will be a scandal and there’s nothing you can do – but if you have a small parish somewhere in the country, in a small village of five thousand people, and the priest there does something, whatever that is, it’s not proper – so before he commits his scandal, they will grab him and send him to these houses.
Do you get a lot of these houses in Chile?
In the world, there are a lot of these houses. In Chile there are at least a thousand priests living in these houses. What happens is that since everything is over-sexualised, it’s a genital issue – it’s what triggers more attention, to the paedophiles and the sexual abuse. That’s what you think all of them are, but most of the people are in there for mental illness. People who have lost their faith, priests that have doubts – a lot of reasons a priest could be sent to these houses, so we wanted to explore that, and the man reasons why they put a priest away.
But it’s all kept as a very secret thing and of course its material that is interesting and it could have a very strong use – but we’re not journalists. We’re not denouncing anyone or saying things or pointing the finger, that’s your job. But we don’t do that, we’re just captured by subjects and try and handle them and put them in a way that is as dangerous as possible, as subversive as possible and then we wait for the reaction of the audience, that’s how it works.
Would you say this is an angry film?
What I try to do is portray the characters, to grab them and create a world for each one of them, and no matter what they’ve done or what you think about them, I try to love them, to have a lot of compassion for them. My perspective, the point of view on the film, is through the eyes of compassion, I’m not judging them or trying to understand them, I’m just trying to be as close as humanly possible. When you do that you see they’re fragile and they look like real people, especially when they are separated. But when they get together that’s where the real trouble is and when it gets dangerous.
It’s interesting, especially in this process because we did something we’ve never done before. We didn’t give the script to the actors, they didn’t know, we just told them a little bit of the story and would give them the scenes every day before the shoot, so they never controlled the other characters or even the characters they were playing. I’m not saying this is the only way to make movies, but it’s another way to do it, and it’s fresh and real. The first take doesn’t ever work, the second is weird, the third is stupid, but the fourth starts to make sense and then in the fifth you find something. It all happens in front of the camera. You capture it, and when you’ve got it, you know you’ve stolen it. We worked like that and we didn’t know how we were going to finish the movie, so we shot three endings and then when we started editing, after editing the first scenes, I realised what the ending had to be. But we had that lack of direction when working, the movie was made in that way, it was very special.
We wrote it in two weeks and then shot it in two and a half – all in a row. I’ve always, like everybody else, worked for ages on a script, but in this case I had no idea. I edited it in my house and when it was over I showed it to my brother and a couple other guys, we sent it to Berlin, we got in, and then when we came here with our suitcases, it was surreal, we had no idea what the reaction would be.
You didn’t tell us what all of the priests had done to find themselves in this house – but did you create those back stories yourself? Do you know why?
No we know a little bit more than you [laughs]. But just to give it sense. You don’t wanna tell everything. Not even the actors knew, you want to do something that looks real and fresh. But you also want to have a little lack of control on what is going on, but I had to know in order to know who they are, what they are.
You begin with a quote from Genesis – why did you decide to put this in the movie?
It’s crazy because I hate it when people put quotes in their movies, but that’s how life is – you always do things you think is wrong. It’s an important quote because it says, “God saw that the light was good – and he separated the light from the darkness”. Then we cut to this priest training a dog, so whatever your behaviour is in life, you will be judged and then sent to hell, purgatory or heaven. That’s a very simple, silly way to put it – so then we see a guy doing a circle and we realise those things are not separated, they are together, in a circle – of light and darkness. You cannot understand the light without the darkness, so it was necessary to put that quote.
It felt like they were in a limbo, like a twilight.
Yeah, well if you mix black with white you get grey.
Verbally this film is very explicit at times, the dialogue can be detailed and graphic about the sex acts with children. Why did you feel it necessary to go into such obscene detail?
It’s a long story, but in short I did a theatre piece once and it did very well, in fact now it’s coming to Europe. It’s a monologue. It’s about similar subjects and for that we did our research and interviewed people that were abused for many, many years. People from orphanages, and they were abused from different people. Now when you talk to them, and they’re adults like us, they tell you of their experiences as though they’re describing a salad. “There’s lettuce, and there’s tomato..” with no problem, no afraid of anything, they’d tell you exactly what happened very graphically. Without shame, or anything that he may consider a weird thing to say.
We could not believe he was almost positive about it, and I thought it was amazing that the damage they created on him was so deep that when he’s an adult he approaches the subject in a way I’ve never seen before – so we used that and decided to do it in this way, to say it, as many times as you have to and as detailed as you want. This is what happened – and now you’ve got to listen to it. If you’re coming here to watch this movie, you are going to listen to this, because this is what happens and this is how it is. Not just telling you there was abuse, but how they did it, how many times, and use the proper words. Maybe that’s the anger you were talking about. Not being polite or politically correct with a subject that isn’t either.
How do you explain the recent wave of Chilean films? There were nine showing in Berlin when this place, two of which were in competition… Nasty Baby, out in the UK soon, is another of course, which you produced.
Yeah it’s great, so fantastic. It’s hard to explain though, but I guess it’s a generation that is walking more than talking, a generation helping each other. Last night all of the Chilean directors had dinner together and we were like a bunch of kids, friends since forever. We help each other and that helps a lot. We’re very free from what happened in our country, the problems that we had in terms of freedom – and now we’re just doing what we want, and it’s fascinating to see what’s going on. It’s historical, we never had such an amount of movies in one great festival at the same time, it’s fantastic and I am so proud to be a part of this generation. I’m glad it’s working and I’m glad people are talking about our movies because they respect us. Not because we’re nice or weird or whatever, we earn it in the cinema with the lights out – that’s where we earn it, not when we talk.
Nasty Baby director Sebastian Silva has very much adapted to American culture now and is making movies there – can the same be said for yourself? Is this Scarface remake something you’re still involved in?
It’s something I can’t talk about [laughs].
The Club is released on March 25th. You can read our review here.
