“My first film, Caja Negra, was born with a guy walking down the street. I started following him, and we became friends. When I asked if he was an actor, he said it was a stupid job and left. He was a partial cross-dressing tramp – handbag, one heel on one foot, a woman’s hat – [who was] going into pharmacies and weighing himself. When I faced him he said: ‘Look, I weigh zero, I don’t exist, I don’t exist, but I’m being followed.’”
Filmmaker, screenwriter and producer Luis Ortega is recalling his debut feature. Without a doubt, upon seeing El Jockey (titled in English, Kill the Jockey), his new film, it is impossible not to be surprised by the similarities in those vignettes.
Ortega, the maker of El Ángel and Dromómanos, has just premiered his latest film, a sports comedy-drama thriller starring Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Úrsula Corberó.
“After a friend took me to the races, there and then I said this guy could be a jockey who fell off the horse, his hard drive got deleted and he was lucky enough to go back to a pure state of vision. He’s standing on the pavement, hallucinating like a baby, seeing the world for the first time. That’s how it started,” he recalls.
After thanking the Hipódromo de Buenos Aires for their inspiration, Ortega talks, speaking of film, the world, about many things, with confidence but no lavishness.
As for his latest creation and its themes, Ortega believes there are some questions that emerge.
“What is to love well? How is it done? What does it mean to be part of the medium and triumph? These are questions that come up in the film. How many times do you have to die to shake off a character you can become and find another one?
“Everything starts all over again, in every life you can live during your lifetime, and one, everyone, bites on the same hook: they want to fare well, they want to be loved, they want to be recognised.
“The whole time in the same crashing carousel. How did it throw me off? That perhaps is achieved by letting go of ambitions. Weighing zero.”
What interested you about that path of the character?
I’m always interested in the human adventure, the labyrinth where you find a mirror, but it’s not you in the mirror. I’m interested in that concern, of knowing who you are and never knowing it. It’s easier to know who the other person is, at least relatively.
My relationship with film exists because I feel we’re a camera. I don’t know who’s watching the reel, but obviously there’s a mission we don’t know. But we can wake up within that frenzy of a delirium and understand what’s going on is not normal, not even looking through the window. You stand at a corner and it’s a hallucinatory postcard. There’s nothing normal about what we experience, whether you’re at a studio flat in Tibet or Miami: the brain is trained to process information and the fact that we don’t ask ourselves the essential questions, I don’t know if it’s part of some diabolical plan or if it’s a way to stay protected, to live in a permanent crisis.
You can only make a movie in a state of permanent crisis, I guess that’s the way it is for any type of art. I wouldn’t see the need to make a film if I felt comfortable.
What does it mean to you to make a film then: to be part of an infernal plan or to escape something?
No, on the one hand, it’s about escaping the matrix, the mechanical and plain life proposed as a unique setting. It’s a part of giving credit to the imagination you have had since your childhood and have to repress to become functional to a stupid and mechanical system, conditioned by the fact or producing or being recognised for your merits, or such nonsense.
When you’ve been following the carrot for a long time, and seen that there’s nothing there, you push the boat out. You’re 10 or 20 years old again. The time when the world hasn’t colonised you yet.
When did you understand what the language of the film was going to be?
Right from the outset I knew, as [film director Leonardo] Favio says, that film is there to handle miracles. Everything else means reducing it to a security camera recording – which is valid, sometimes more valid. But I’m interested more in the miracle of Favio – I’m interested in [his 1975 film] Nazareno Cruz y el lobo, [Vittorio de Sica’s 1951 film] Milagro en Milán, [Leos Carax’s 2012 film] Holy Motors. Film as a fly on the wall, maybe.
But I don’t believe in the objective outlook, I believe the power of miracle and the fantastical is in you, and you very much deny that, like kids who cannot share their madness because the world reduces it to a toy shop.
But therein actually lies the whole power of being alive. Then we are domesticated by impulse, and making believe we’re not surprised. As Baudelaire says, dandies like to surprise people, but they don’t like to surprise themselves. I believe that can be translated into any adult, obsessed about not being put out of their comfort zone, speaks of a diabolical domestication.
What was it like working with Nahuel Pérez Biscayart?
To me, he’s one of the finest actors in the world. There are very few people walking on the bandwidth with faith, so to speak. Knowing that salvation lies in power, not in safe places. If there is a salvation, it’s in the line of fire.
Nahuel is in the line of fire. He doesn’t want to look good, he doesn’t need to understand the message, because there is no message. The miracle is the message. The point of view is the message. And there’s nothing wrong with not understanding what’s going on at all.
When you’re a kid and you’re told ‘When you grow up, you’ll understand’ and that moment never comes! What arrives is the time to pretend that you’re comfortable, that you understand cars go from here to there, and stop when the light goes red, and all those conventions. You trust very few people to say: do we agree that we understand nothing of what’s going on? Everyone has a theory, even film theories, of many things. I prefer a purer vision where everything is possible.
There is an outlook of the film as a surrealistic thing, which is legitimate, but to me it’s the most direct thing I can be with human experience. I didn’t want to make a ‘crazy’ film, nor am I trying to be realistic. Surrealism came about as something necessary to break away from something automatic about life, then it became a stylistic gesture, but it was born to blow up the death eye, and look at things like a baby, and draw like a child would draw, like Picasso did, who acknowledged by making the reverse road by celebrating the trace of the interior world.
If something exists, the interior world is the one with the most chances of becoming a reality.
Is there something that showed up in the film you didn’t expect would be there?
I was surprised it was made! The whole world said no. That we couldn’t make it. Then I put together my own production company with Esteban Perroud and Cristóbal Palacios, with whom I also wrote the script. We got together with Rei Cine, and they basically got the funding and moved incredibly fast. But going to standard places, even production companies I had worked with, they all said no. I’m kind of used to that happening. If you don’t go for the four or five predictable trendy actors, you’ve started at minus 10.
With [Ortega’s 2018 film] El Ángel, nobody wanted me to use an actor who wasn’t an actor, who had never worked. I see the film today and that speaks for itself. When it comes to fire branding the unknown, it’s the place where the industry shrinks back. It is understood, but clearly it is no place for poetry to attempt a degree of sincerity I understand implies an economic risk.
It’s difficult to get together with people who don’t want to do predictable things, and even things that are not quite profitable. I mean, I was surprised it was made at all.
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