Fernando Trueba speaks about film, literature and piracy.

The themes he discussed were as vast as the cultural background of the Spanish director who has won 23 Goya prizes, a Silver Bear for El año de las luces and an Oscar for Belle Epoque. Trueba will compete again for an award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences next year with one of his most recent films, El baile de la Victoria. 

Trueba, who is in Morelia for the first time, said he was captivated by the novel written by Antonio Skármeta, winner of the Planeta 2003 prize.

“Once I read the novel I was hooked from the very beginning; it kept going round and round in my head,” he said.

El baile de la Victoria tells the story of Ángel Santiago (Abel Ayala) and veteran Vergara Grey (Ricardo Darín), a famous safe-cracker. Both were prisoners, but after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, the new Chilean president decrees a general amnesty for all prisoners who have not committed violent crimes. While Grey only wants to find his family and change his life, Ángel dreams of vengeance against the prisoner warden. But Victoria (Miranda Bodenhöfer) comes into the picture, and the lives of the three change dramatically.

Trueba says he generally doesn’t like to adapt novels or compare literature with cinema. “A novel or book is a take-off point for making a film,” he said.  “A film has never harmed a novel, even in the worse movies the novel is there, intact. Nevertheless sometimes cinema has purified novels or has found new angles. I don’t think you can compare, they are very different things.”

The director spoke about Mexico as a country with great cultural vitality, “a country between surrealism and hyperrealism, a hyper so hyper that it seems realistic.”

He added that he liked the work of different Mexican directors – from Arturo Ripstein, Guillermo Del Toro to Felipe Cazals. “I was late in discovering the classics by Fuentes, like Compadre Mendoza and ¡Vámos con Pancho Villa! As a boy I watched films of the silver-masked El Santo.”

Asked about the transcendence of the awards he has won, he said, “They help you by giving you the freedom to make the films you want to make. They are like the lottery that permits you to make films with independence and freedom.”

With his characteristic modesty, he added, “I think that the awards that I’ve been given are more than I deserve. I always am sure that someone else who perhaps I don’t know deserves them.”

The theme that most interested the press was piracy. “It affects us a great deal,” he said. “There are distributors that now bring them out ahead, even with the publicity; including in Spain there are large production companies that are bankrupt. Piracy is suicide for film. In Spain politicians don’t dare take measures against it because they fear losing the vote of young people who, by the way, don’t even vote.”