Rebecca Palacios
Nalda (La Rioja), (EFE).- The film director Isabel Coixet prefers to have female teams on her shoots because “women are used to taming our egos, we don’t shout so much and we don’t get noticed as much”, as she has said this Wednesday, in the Rioja town of Nalda.
Coixet has assisted journalists during a break in the filming of “Un amor”, which is filmed entirely in rural locations in La Rioja and is based on the homonymous novel by Sara Mesa, with whom he has written the script, together with the journalist and screenwriter Laura Ferrero.
Starring Laia Costa, winner this year of the Goya for best actress for “Cinco lobitos”, it also has in the cast Hovik Keuchkerian, Hugo Silva, Luis Bermejo, Ingrid García-Jonsson and Francesco Carril.
Costa plays Nat, a young woman who escapes from her life in the city and takes refuge in La Escapa, a town where she decides to rebuild her life in a house in ruins, where she has to face the mistrust of her neighbors, the hostility from his landlord and, furthermore, he receives a disturbing sexual proposal from his neighbor Andreas (Keuchkerian).
Filming, which began on February 20 and will continue until the end of March, has had to incorporate the inclement weather of recent weeks into the film, “with snow, fog and hail”, something that did not even appear in the script , nor in the novel, but that has been included in the tape, the director has admitted.
Admiration for Sara Mesa
Only Nat’s voice appears in the novel, “as a spectator of her own life”, which has made it difficult to turn the entire plot into the film, according to Coixet, who has expressed her “total admiration” for Sara Mesa, “one of the best contemporary authors.
“When you admire a novel and its author so much, you sit down and see that cinema is something else. It has already happened to me and that is why I swore that I would never make an adaptation again and here we are, ”she joked.
For this reason, with the film “Un amor” his work was approached from “respect” for the spirit of the novel and for the character of Nat, who is “the column of the book”.
She has acknowledged that she is not Michael Haneke, whom she greatly admires and respects, but she has the “hope” of making a good adaptation and “reaching the difficult balance of satisfying those who have read the novel and, at the same time, that they like it ” to fans of his movies.
Table, Coast and Nat
Laia Costa, whom Coixet had already directed in the series “Foodie Love”, appears “in all the shots of the film. She is an accomplished actress, very intelligent, who has nothing of the Nat character in her”.
She explained that the protagonist “has talked a lot with Mesa” and with herself about Nat, and also with people who have gone through similar situations, which has allowed her to “internalize” her character very well.
The author of the novel visited the filming in La Rioja a few days ago and, “for the moment”, she told the team that she liked how it was going and “she seemed happy”, added Coixet.
After so many years of work, Coixet thought that he would be able to “distance” from a character, but, after the first days of shooting, “he returned to the hotel with a heavy heart” due to “the crushing loneliness that Nat suffered, in a house cold, with leaks and the hostility” that it suffers.
work with women
On International Women’s Day, the hundred members of the filming have commemorated this date with a purple ribbon on their clothes.
Coixet has highlighted that 80% of the team is female and has already made several films in which the majority of their technical managers are women, who have a great presence among their staff, such as those of the documentary “El techo amarillo” and the films ” Elisa and Marcela” and “It snows in Benidorm”.
“I am not going to say that women do it better, but, from my experience, there are fewer shouts and fewer egos. We also have great guys who work with us ”, she has pointed out.
But, he has clarified, “when the film crew is made up of women, people do their job without saying that they do it: they do it. That is the big difference, everyone knows what they have to do”.
La Rioja locations
The Catalan director, who received the Logroño Current Festival award in January 2022 in recognition of her career, opted for locations in La Rioja to achieve “landscapes that had never appeared” in other films.
Thus, on a trip from Logroño to Ezcaray, he saw a little house in the middle of the field and associated it with Nat’s house, although, finally, the house is located among the orchards of Nalda, and it is also shot in the small municipalities of Ribafrecha and the outskirts of Villalobar.
Producer Marisa Fernández Armenteros, from Buenapinta Media, has explained to journalists that there is still no release date for “Un amor”.
Fernández Armenteros, who has already worked with Laia Costa in “Cinco lobitos”, has ironized that it could be “the talisman” of the film, although they also have the dog Flor, “the great revelation” of this film, who plays a great role in the novel and “has stolen the hearts” of all the members of the filming. EFE.