That invoices “don’t lie” is the great maxim that Treasury inspector Sara (Carmen Machi) transmits to one of her colleagues as she is about to retire. But before ending his career, he decides to accept one last big case: proving that a famous Mexican singer lives in Spain and must pay her taxes here. Millions of euros are at stake. It is the beginning of Sky bluethe series in which Diego San José (Vote Juan, Fe de ETA) opens the doors of the tax office to show what life is like for people who, despite the fact that they dedicate themselves to defending an interest common to all citizens, everyone “hates” them.
“They are the few who bring together the left, the right, the rich and the poor. And it’s sad,” he confesses to this newspaper. The screenwriter presented his brilliant fiction at the San Sebastian Festival, before its arrival on Movistar Plus next November. Elena Trapé (Distances, Rapa) He directed all six episodes. “There are a lot of tax references,” he says of the inspiration for his story in Shakira’s fraud.
Treasury inspectors are virtually invisible figures, is that one of the reasons you wanted to talk about them?
They are totally invisible. When we started developing the series two years ago and we talked to tax inspectors, advisers and even a former director of the tax administration, I was struck by the fact that the first thing they said to you was: “How come you’re going to make a series? About us?” I noticed that it made them excited. Treasury inspectors are fundamental to society, they have never played a role in fiction and, when a reference has appeared, it is in jokes where they are the bad guys. As if they were some kind of bogeyman for adults, a bug that scares you when you are older and have an income.
It’s very paradoxical and a little sad, and Sky blue It makes him sad; that these people are one of the few things that unite the left and the right, the rich and the poor: everyone hates them. It is rare that everyone agrees. Being people who have gone through one of the most complicated oppositions to defend what belongs to everyone, they receive a kind of bad reputation, very strange, quite bitter and unfair.
It is sad that Treasury inspectors are one of the few things that bring together the left, the right, the rich and the poor.
Diego San Jose
— Creator of “Celeste”
Why does everyone hate tax inspectors? What does it say about us as a society?
It’s strange. Every time you go to a wedding and sit down with strangers, there’s a moment when they ask you what your name is and what you do. I say I’m a screenwriter and nothing happens, even people find it funny. When I asked them what they did, they said they didn’t tell them they were Treasury inspectors. That with their profile and the function they have in society, they have to hide their work is strange.
I always give an example that seems super illustrative and really poisonous to me. If I go to dinner tomorrow with my friends with a motorcycle that I stole, worth 3,000 euros, and I tell it, I become a very strange guy, a criminal. Some might even say: “Hey, this is not possible. I’m going to call the police to arrest you. You’re crazy.” But if I arrive at a dinner and I say that I defrauded 10,000 euros because I pay VAT, they can ask me how I did it and I can become the cool guy at the dinner, when it would be triple the crime.
Treasury fraud is one of the few crimes that has a good reputation and no crime should have it. There is a contradiction. The series tries to talk about the tax awareness that we have in Spain, which really needs to be improved compared to what exists in other countries whose social services we then admire. And it is not only because they pay taxes, but because they understand that it is the price to pay to live with well-educated people and access public health care that allows them to be healthy.
Why does paying taxes seem to get a bad rap? Is paying taxes patriotic?
Yes, people who can afford private school and a private doctor may think that taxes do not bring them any benefit, but paying them is not only important to you. It is in all of our interests to be surrounded by healthy people who do not lack resources. As a society, we will be happier if we have guarantees of health and public education. And I am not talking about roads, sports centers, etc.
We don’t have to ask ourselves what we get for our taxes, but rather whether it’s worth living in this country. You could go somewhere else where you’d pay less, but nobody wants to live in tax havens where there’s no security unless it’s private. We live in a place that’s very good and it’s worth helping to keep it that good.
In his social media profile, after citing the projects he has worked on, Eight Basque surnames has Vote Juanindicates that it is “classified”. In Celeste however, there is not much comedy. How did you choose the tone to tell this story?
I consider myself confined to comedy, I am almost an activist, as if they had put me in their union. It is a genre that I love and I have a kind of DNA in which I not only do comedy because I admire it, but on a personal level, I only know how to tell problems through jokes. Since I was little, I have tried to transform the things that scare me into humor. It is not a good thing, it is because I do not know how to seriously approach problems. It is something that comes from cowardice. Comedy is a second way when you are not courageous. I use jokes to tell you something that matters to me and not seem to matter to me. I live the genre from there.
And I love it so much that I can’t conceive of reducing it to just one type, the most industrial one that I’ve had to do several times and it’s very complicated to do well. Sky blue This is another type, which has more to do with the concept. Seriously telling a Treasury inspection as if it were a thriller or a horror film is in itself nonsense. That is why the comedy is in the concept and not in the fact that later in each scene there must be a clumsiness or someone who makes a mistake or who makes mistakes.
The main thing was to know that telling a Treasury inspection as if it were a David Fincher thriller is ridiculous and we had to do it seriously. Sara’s character is super intelligent and that doesn’t allow you to make so many jokes with her. She is a woman who knows what she is saying, where she is. He has lived and if we take him to a place, he will not be wrong because he is very eloquent. And this type of protagonists, if you take them seriously as we wanted to do, give you another type of comedy that has nothing to do with their stupidity. There is a lot of comedy that requires you to make the character stupid, and here the one played by Carmen Machi is not.
Comedy is a second way when you are not brave.
Diego San Jose
— Creator of “Celeste”
Shakira’s reference to the character Celeste is very obvious. Was this a conscious decision from the beginning?
No. The show doesn’t focus on Celeste as much as it does on the tax inspector. And we’re trying to make it harder for ourselves because, if a tax inspector is already a strange protagonist, then she’d be 62, she’d be smart and eloquent; that made it more complicated. We were minimizing the typical equation of the profitable protagonist.
Once we had her, we thought about who her nemesis should be and we found someone who is the opposite. We don’t start with Celeste but with Sara. In fact, it Sky blue I know the title is really a lie, because it is an obsession of the protagonist.
That is why the references to the real escapees that we know, and there are many, have not been as present. We knew that our photo was heading to a place that does not appear in the photos of the escapees’ reports. In fact, if someone is looking for Shakira’s morbidity, they will be disappointed because we do not say it. We tell you what the press does not tell you, namely who is behind all this when they investigate Mourinho and everyone hates him. The series wants to talk about this inspector hated by an entire country because the escapee is famous, which has happened to many footballers.
Does being rich make you unpunished?
Yes, in 2015, when Messi was investigated and put on trial, people went to cheer him on. It’s very strange that people go to court to applaud someone who is suspected of a crime. You don’t applaud someone who is accused. Maybe if suddenly, in the end, it’s innocent, but when you go in, it’s strange, because maybe there were people there who needed the public, some kind of help or something. And the investigation was about seventeen million euros that he was taking from them. These paradoxical things were the fuel to build the plot of Sky blue.
