Although the hole It was released in theaters before the arrival of the pandemic, it was these months of confinement at home and the explosion of platforms that made Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s film an almost unprecedented phenomenon. His data remains astronomical. In the list of most-watched films in Netflix history, it continues to occupy fifth place in the top ten non-English-language films with over 82 million views worldwide. A surprise which put the spotlight on a previously unknown director, thanks to the particular universe he had created. The one that was nothing more than a metaphor for inequality and class struggle in the form of an infinite hole where those at the top always have a greater chance of surviving and pitting those at the bottom. down.
The sequel seemed obvious, but despite this, four years passed before the director published, also on Netflix since October 4, hole 2a film with which he continues to ask questions about today’s world thanks to this lifting platform loaded with food. A film whose insertion into the chronology of the universe is revealed at the end, but which also poses a sort of commandments on the rules which prevailed in the previous film and which were already established. In this case it was Milena Smit and Hovic Keuchkerian who discovered them.
What this sequel does have is a bigger budget, and so there’s also more spectacular staging that makes you wonder how certain moments were filmed. Is the hole real? What are the visual effects of what is seen on the screen?… Questions that the filmmaker himself answered by analyzing in depth four scenes from hole 2 and revealing (be careful, with SPOILERS) all its secrets.
The harshness of ‘The Hole’
A question that runs through the entire film is how much of the hole is real and how much is not. Galder Gaztelu Urrutia begins by revealing it. The three levels of the vertical structure were built in Barakaldo, at the Bilbao Exhibition Center, and everything that goes up and down on these levels is a construction with visual effects. The fact that this structure physically existed is key, and it also delineated the order in which the entire film was shot.
Another question that fans of the film usually ask is what’s going on with the platform that goes up and down and conditions all the actions on each level? Well, in the hole Whenever something can be real (and be solved with practical effect), it will be, which is why this platform is “the typical platform that all works in the world use, the simplest that you can find, on which we put our real”. platform with food. Of course, later the lower part was removed and sometimes it was also generated “fully in 3D”. The design of a scene like this has prior work, in fact the director drew all the plants and the choreographies of the actors and actresses, every camera movement, so that an action scene like this seems easy even if it is a choreography in There is also another trick, making sure that the understudies are not noticed.
Zamyatin’s suicide
Physical scenes aren’t always the most difficult, but often the dramatic intensity brings more complexity. This is what happened in what Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia defines as “one of the most difficult, even if there is practically no action”. It was “because of what is transmitted in the scene and because of the intensity with which Hovic interpreted it and with which Milena lives this moment, which marks the end of her partner, with whom she sympathized so much during the first month.
In this scene you can also see the fourth set of the film, the only one that was not built and which is on a pediment in Bilbao. But beyond these details, the filmmaker believes that the key lies in the performance of his main actor. To this must be added several tricks, including those performed by a specialist who “became a bonze and jumped into the grated hole”. The fire is real in almost every moment, and yet one could play a game of guessing which of the burning objects falling through the hole are real and which are digitally created.
The sacrifice of the protagonists
Another “very intense” scene where the choreography of the actors is essential and where, to complicate everything, there is “a lot of dialogue”. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia says filming was logistically simple, but “difficult for those of us who were stuck in this hole for 54 days, this sequence is a good example.” Two entire days of filming were devoted to these minutes of film. If it was hard for everyone, it was even harder for Óscar Jaenada, who plays blindfolded and without “the most important means of expression for an actor, his eyes”. A mix of practical and digital effects resolves the moment when the character shows what is hidden behind his blindfold.
For this reason, “the intensity with which all the actresses and actors arrive” stands out, something that, according to him, is linked to the space itself, to this 9×6 meter square that also affects the team psychologically technical. “After a long time here, you come out a little shaken,” says the filmmaker with resignation, who also explains the tricks of using light as fill and how one of the film’s bloodiest and most violent moments was achieved. . For the curious, a detail, a cameo that no one knows in the shape of a hand…
The green sequence
The director of hole 2 Even the number of each scene is known, what they call “the green sequence” corresponds to the number 81 and the spectator’s sensation coincides with what his creation was. It’s undoubtedly one of the most visually spectacular moments in the film, a less than five-minute scene where Milena Smit moves weightlessly through the middle of a block of people with glowing green light.
In the set, they called this block “human kebab, txorongo or zurullo”, and to recreate this sensation of floating, horizontal U-shaped levels were used, with removable walls and a network of cables that held the actors moving. giving them this effect of flying. “A scene like this needs to be very planned out to know exactly the shots you need. “This sequence was drawn about nine or ten months before filming,” explains the director and admits that at first he did not know how he was going to film this scene, which conceals another of those secrets that we cannot see to the naked eye: a doll that replaces the character of Malik to compensate for the risk of filming with children and not subjecting them to the usual long recording days.
