The film is titled Exhaust and finds Mario Casas in a heavily guarded prison. As Rodrigo Cortés (Orense, 1973) himself admits about his latest film, it contains “all the tropes of prison”. The poster referring to Life sentence“the brass cup striking the bars”. “Hanging on the window with the sheets and clothes attached,” continues the filmmaker. “And the tunnel, only in our case, is not to leave prison, but to enter it.” This slight nuance completely marks this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Enrique Rubio published in 2022. It resembles typical prison fiction, but in an opposite sense. The desperate goal of Casas’ character is to remain imprisoned. Totally deprived of his freedom.
The bet is risky. But Cortés, an eternal sympathizer of narrative challenges, shook Hollywood almost 15 years ago with his decision to lock Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for an hour and a half, to Buried—, he hugged her tightly in his arms. He knows that confusion “can end up being joyful,” because “many things seen and perceived through such a bizarre character are so overwhelming that the brain has to deal with them through laughter.” To “precisely take advantage of the reversal of the rules”. Flaunting his signature speech, Cortés gives us the perfect description of his sixth feature film: “It’s like a prison movie that you hold by the ankles and shake until you get a confession.”
To begin with, it is inevitable to wonder about the presence of Martin Scorsese as a producer.
Scorsese is the reason I make films, you can imagine what that means to me. We met at the Princess of Asturias Awards, when he received the title of Princess of the Arts in 2018. They asked me to speak publicly with him: he had seen all my films and we hit it off. Some time later, when we finished assembling love in its placeI sent it to New York. He was excited about the film and we chatted a lot on Zoom during the lockdown. Then he asked me to send him my next script. Honestly, I thought he was just being polite and didn’t send her anything, but weeks later they called me from his office demanding the project. This time I sent it to him and a few days later he wrote to me that he had never read anything like it. He was excited about the script and the tone. He assumed it was going to be difficult to finance and offered to do whatever he could to make the film exist.
You haven’t made a feature film in Spanish since Competitoryour beginnings. Is this a sort of return to basics?
Exhaust is linked to Competitor for its insane character and Kafkaesque atmosphere. It is also true that homeland is language before place: films like Buried, Red lights either love in its place They were mostly filmed in Spain, but they were spoken in English. Rolling in your language, and especially in such delicately rhythmic material, allows you to control every syllable, every nuance, every inflection of the music of the language. It helps a lot that you’re doing it surrounded by a cast like this, of course.
Did the dedication of Mario Casas, who worked so hard in recent years to leave behind his teenage idol figure, help?
He is a great actor who, through hard work, has been getting rid of prejudices for some time. And a suicide bomber who seeks risk with the same relish with which others avoid it. I felt he was at a point in his career where he was ready to jump from the eighth floor without looking down and without a net.
It is curious that his character is called N, a single letter, just like the name Ax of the character who made him famous in Three meters above the sky.
And it’s even more curious, because in the original script I called him H. I hadn’t seen this film and for me it was a way of bringing him closer to Kafka, so instead of calling him K as in The process I gave him the H for “man”. Of course, when I learned the name of one of the iconic roles of his career, I decided to call him N. But I left the H as a trace on his identification number.
Exhaust adapts a novel by Enrique Rubio, for whose work you feel a great affinity…
We met a long time ago, when he saw Competitor and he wrote to me with enthusiasm because he connected a lot with the film. He in turn sent me his first novel, I have a gunand something similar happened to me. Read Exhaust not a year and a half ago (when it was published) but ten years ago, in its first version. But the original version of Exhaust It’s very different. It’s the story of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who was raised by his parents on the fringes of society, in isolation, with his own code of conduct and his own values. When he reaches adulthood and goes out into the outside world, he feels overwhelmed by all these stimuli and seeks to return to mental isolation.
We tend to think that freedom is about doing what we want. But freedom is surely more linked to responsibility
Rodrigo Cortés
— Director
As you see, these are very different stories. In fact, I told him that it seemed unadaptable because the result would be very essayistic, almost an entomological treatise on the human condition. But the principle seemed too powerful to me: the counterintuitive drive of someone who yearns to go to prison, perceiving as a reward what for others is a threat or punishment. I told Enrique that if he gave me permission to betray the novel, I thought I could honor it and respect its DNA. He saw the film for the first time recently and it was very nice to see his reaction. It was that of a spectator who sees how the seed he sowed ten years ago bore fruit in the most unexpected way.
Here in Spain, another writer, Santiago Lorenzoalso spoke of this desire for isolation, to get away from everything, in his novel The disgusting ones. Why do you think we are so concerned about making decisions in this society?
This happens in any society because it is part of the human condition. We tend to think that freedom is linked to whim, to the multiplicity of options, to ultimately doing what we want. But freedom is surely more linked to responsibility. One is free if he accepts the consequences of his actions. We are only free if we take charge of our freedom, and that is why we often prefer not to be. We often prefer someone else to make decisions and reserve the right to judge or complain. We don’t want the responsibility that freedom brings.
This existentialism leads us indeed to Kafka, but in Exhaust He adopts a surrealist tone that is reminiscent of José Luis Cuerda. Do you think it is inevitable to come across Cuerda if we want to take a look at the surrealism of our country?
I suppose absurdity is our way of being realistic and Cuerda is indeed part of a tradition that begins with Quevedo, continues with Valle-Inclán, then with Rafael Azcona and Eduardo Mendoza, etc. It is anchored in our subconscious. And tone is indeed the key Exhaust. This is the most delicate element to handle because it always moves on a very unstable edge. I had the opportunity to see the film several times in fortunately full theaters. At first, there is complete confusion among the audience, who are trying to interpret what is in front of them. Then the first laughs begin, without anyone really knowing whether they should laugh or not, and at one point they feel that the film is giving them permission to laugh. And the laughter begins.
HAS Exhaust He is very concerned with the individual as a rebel against a series of ideologies that the state or system would like to emit. Here I also thought of Kubrick and A clockwork orange.
I have often talked about it A clockwork orange during filming, for different reasons. One of them was the ladder. In Kubrick’s filmography, we find giant films and bourgeois films like A clockwork orangewith a more contained budget and at the same time great creative ambition. It is also a seemingly difficult film because it imposes a different reflection on free will. It’s not easy to digest because Kubrick doesn’t give a clear solution to what he’s showing and leaves the viewer to decide how they feel about what they just saw, and how they deal with all these contradictory and ambivalent impulses. And yet it’s a very easy film to watch.
It’s a film that 100 Nobel Prize winners and 100 Bakalas would react to in the same way. Because it hits them in similar emotional zones, deep down. It is also an unrealistic film, with a fable tone that inhabits its own world. All these elements interested me because I have always designed Exhaust like a big question which does not give an answer or which offers several answers, all possible at the same time. And it respects the viewer, allowing everyone to decide how they feel about what they just saw. Coming out, we can say that N is a poor victim. Another will say that he is envious, because on several occasions he would have liked to get away from his responsibilities. And a third party might say that N is a complete idiot, who doesn’t want to take care of himself and wants others to do it. And all three will be right. Many things are true at the same time.
Despite its rarity Exhaust It also “feels” like a commercial projection film. And this reminds me of something that you have mentioned on other occasions, the capacity that commercial cinema has to surprise depending on the money it cost, depending on what the budget and its industrial context allow. allow. I remember you mentioned Oppenheimer as a meritorious case.
Exhaust It should have cost three times what it cost and it was done with the money that could have been financed, juggling of course all kinds of procrastination so that the public would not have the slightest feeling of scarcity. But there is indeed an almost axiomatic law which says that the more money there is, the less freedom there is, and the more freedom there is, the less money there is. We have found a balance, which is indeed very delicate. Because all films are themselves statistical implausibilities. So I can only experience the existence of Exhaust with gratitude.
