Jonás Cuarón and Eireann Harper discuss 'Año Uña'

Debut director Jonás Cuarón (son of Alfonso) and actor Eireann Harper discuss how they made 'Año Uña', a lovely new film structured like an album of photos

What has been your experience with the film so far? You’ve taken it to lots of festivals – do you enjoy that?
Jonás Cuarón: 'For this film, festivals were very important. When we started making it, we set it out as wanting to grab an experimental format and wanting to try to push the boundaries so it would be accessible to a wider audience. This year, the festivals were a really good opportunity to test and see if the experiment worked. Luckily, we went to over 40 festivals with the film, many of which I was able to attend and see the audience’s response.'

And was it mostly positive?
JC: 'Most of the time. So far, I haven’t had a bad experience. Most of the time, people tell me that for the first five minutes they hate the movie and they are really dreading the idea of sitting through 80 minutes of photographs, but by minutes seven, they forget that they’re watching photographs and they’re more interested in watching the characters.'

How did you arrive at the photomontage format?
JC: 'When we started working on this, I had stayed away from film all my life. I had a lot of experience from being around my father (Alfonso Cuarón), but I studied literature at university because I thought I wanted to write. At that point I met Eireann who was studying film, and she’d just written an essay on Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetée’, which uses a similar format. When we saw it, we just became interested in running with this idea and trying to expand it. As we started working, I realised that film would be the best medium for this project because it brought together all the visual and narrative elements that I had been studying.'

How strict was the dialogue in the film? Was there room for improvisation?
Eireann Harper: 'It was definitely word-for-word. Jonás had the scrip very well developed. The characters were all there. Of course, Diego and I did have some input into the script as the writing process took place over a long period of time. In terms of improvisation, it was very much following Jonás’s words and trying to interpret them.'

Which way round did you edit the film? Was it the images first or the soundtrack?
JC: 'It was a back-and-forth process. Before I even started to write the screenplay, Eireann and I started organising all the photographs just by scene, location and character. Then I recorded a sample dialogue, and then we were able to move things around further. In that sense, the process of writing was very long because I could go back and changing things I didn’t like.'

Could you explain the process of selecting the photographs for the film?
JC: 'We took about six months before the screenplay, editing out the images that we thought worked nice as images, but also the ones that worked in a cinematic sense. Like there was a visual progression to them.'
EH: 'Each image was very thought through, no only in its selection, but the order in which it came. I think until the last minute we were making adjustments. A gesture which may seem insignificant, when it’s frozen on screen, ends up meaning something totally different and can alter the meaning of the film.'

How did you come up with the idea of using inner monolgue and how did that change the 'acting' in the film?
EH: 'Well, I think what the inner monologue does, rather than create two different characters, [is to] deliver a single character who is well rounded and with lots of contradictions. I liked the duality, and in my experience, it’s how people really operate. It was exciting to be able to put that in to a character. In the voice studio, we went over it many, many times. It was Jonás’s idea to whisper the inner monologue which I think was a good one.'

How did you approach the direction of the film, especially the 'acting'?
JC: 'In the visual sense, my role as the director was to keep the camera as invisible as possible. I wanted to capture the most real reality possible. It was a case of taking so many pictures that people forgot what I was doing. For me, the conventional direction came afterwards in the voices. None of the photographs are posed. I gave myself a year during which I took photographs of my day-to-day life. The pictures of the couple on the beach were just one summer when we went to Mexico and my brother came down. With Coney Island, I was in New York and my brother came to visit. None of the situations were posed. I didn’t know that Diego and Eireann were going to be the main protagonists of the film.'

What were your cinematic influences on the film?
JC: 'It’s hard to talk about any particular director. During the process of making this film, I started to watch three movies a day so I became really obsessed by many directors. For this particular film, there were a few directors that really hit me. I like the essence of both Bergman and Woody Allen, and I tried to capture that tone in this movie, especially the way in which the characters talk about important issues in simple, direct and often funny ways. The use of inner monologue was in homage to the famous scene in "Annie Hall".'

Do you have any more plans to experiment with cinematic form in future films?
JC: 'The project I have now is going to have a screenplay first and I’m going to shoot it 24 frames per second. My interest is trying to find new ways of telling a story with cinema. I don’t think you need to go as extreme as using still photographs more than once. Many directors like Reygadas, Kiarostami or the Dardenne brothers shoot in a conventional way, but their language and their narrative rhythm is new and innovative, and I like that.'

'Año Uña' is out now

---