Diego, who is Venezuelan, and Elena, who is Catalan, leave Barcelona to move to the United States and start a new life in the land of opportunities. At the New York airport (Newark), however, they are stopped at a checkpoint and subjected to a grueling interrogation by customs agents trying to find out if the couple has something to hide.
This, in short, is the story of Upon Entry, by Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez, an independent film which has achieved great success with both critics and audiences, and which was released in Italian cinemas in February (the film has received many reviews, among the best of which have been those by HuffPost and Cinematographe). It has been called a pequeña joya, a pearl; is a psychological thriller, a love story and a film of political denunciation, inspired by the experiences of the directors, their families and friends. Upon Entry has collected nominations and victories in numerous festivals in Europe and around the world, such as Tallinn, Malaga and Calcutta, at the Gaudí awards for Catalan cinema and at the Goya; and there are three nominations for the prestigious Film Independent Spirit Awards which are presented in California before the Oscars.
The success of the film is due to the themes covered, a love story that is intertwined with the dramatic and unfortunately ever-present issue of immigration, and to the excellent quality of the screenplay and direction by Rojas and Vásquez, the acting of the main actors, Alberto Ammann and Bruna Cusí, and also the careful, precise, rhythmic and well-orchestrated editing, the work of an Italian, Emanuele Tiziani, which not for nothing has earned one of the nominations for this year’s Spirit Awards.
Emanuele, can you talk to us about the genesis of this film?
Alejandro and Sebas have been friends and work colleagues for a long time. The first time they told me about Upon Entry, about eight years ago, it was just an idea. When they had me read the script, I immediately liked it. This is not always a given, because reading a script is very schematic; there are dialogues but little information on what happens in the scene. Moreover, we are talking about a film that takes place in one room. But it was very well written, and it already conveyed the emotions that made Upon Entry the film it is, and I liked it very much. This was true both for myself and for Carles Torras: it was perfect for an independent film producer like him. It was truly love at first sight, even for the actors, who also immediately fell in love with it after reading it.
It took several years to get from the idea to the film…
In cinema, especially independent films, it’s like this, and those who create content know it: the moment you hear a story and write it, you also know that you will have to hold on, cling to that idea for years, until the process of collecting the funding ends, and then to film and edit…
You say that the actors immediately fell in love with it?
Yes, indeed. This applies first and foremost to Alberto Ammann. Then there is Bruna Cusí in the role of the co-protagonist. They are both Goya award recipients, which he won for Cella 211, while she won for Summer 1993, two beautiful films. Alberto is also internationally famous for his participation in Narcos. The cast is rounded out by two other very good actors in the role of the American policemen: Ben Temple, from New York but who has lived in Madrid for some time, and Laura Goméz, known for Orange is the New Black, who plays the policewoman of Latin origins. All the actors made an effort, an investment to work in this film.
And how did you proceed from there?
We started with pre-production, which also includes tests with the actors. Then there were the shoots, in which I didn’t participate, as I had done with my previous film El praticante, produced by Netflix; the presence of the editor on set is useful because he edits the footage from the day before and every evening the director can understand if what he is doing is working, sees the evolution of the characters, checks that everything is in order. However, it’s something that bigger productions can afford, and in independent cinema it doesn’t happen often. So, I only intervened after filming, which lasted seventeen days. And we started the editing.
How was the editing experience?
For me it was very powerful, because the actors were very good. Every day I saw material that worked, and I didn’t know what to reject; everything was of a very high standard, with very clear ideas developed in pre-production. The many close-ups give you a closeness to the characters, and you feel like you’re there with them, even as an editor. And then the film was shot with two cameras, so for each dialogue sequence I had both the speaker and the listener, something that isn’t obvious and doesn’t happen often, because it requires a more complex lighting system; but the directors wanted to do it, to capture the essential moments. And it works. I take for example the scene in which what Diego kept partially hidden comes to light and we see Elena listening, with this long shot on her: these are moments that the actors live fully and one cannot expect them to feel the same emotions over many takes, so being able to shoot with multiple cameras means having a greater chance of capturing those moments. And this is a great gift, for the editor and for the film, but it also involves a lot of work, because the more good material you have, the more you have to understand what to choose and how to put it together.
You said before that this script moved you, can you explain why?
It seemed magical to me to be able to talk about a love story inside a non-place like an airport, indeed inside an interrogation room, which is the most brutal thing there could be. And then the fact that a love can be questioned for an unclear moment in the history of the two, simply because there is someone who takes that element and decontextualizes it: taking away truth and beauty from love, this is what the police do in the film. This is the most emotional part. Then there is the more political part.
This is a very strong aspect, which does not leave you indifferent. Alberto Ammann said in an interview that, after seeing the film at the SXSW festival in Texas, people approached them to apologize…
The political question of the film is very important. I have carried within me a feeling, from when I first read the script to when I edited the film and now that we are reaping the fruits, and that is that the story of Upon Entry did not just come from the desire to create, but from the desire to talk about a subject. And it’s nice when, while working, you feel that the message you want to give is important; someone had the courage to write it and put it together, the skill to put it together in a certain way, and you feel like you’re participating in a message that’s worth spreading, because it’s important that people listen to it. Let’s not forget that it is always easier to empathize with certain realities when we see them up close, when they make us emotional. This happens when someone tells you their personal experience, and in my opinion the film comes close to this. The directors have put part of their personal lives into it, and some experiences are theirs, while others are those of relatives or friends. They did not indulge in phantom constructions so that the spectator would remain glued to their seats. Instead, they put in order the many things that they had experienced up close and that unfortunately happen at almost all borders, not only in the United States, and especially if you come from a certain part of the Earth. And this is something that needs to be talked about.
Certainly. Especially here in Europe, where we are privileged in this sense.
I was immediately touched by the fact that Elena and Diego undertake the same journey but experience it in completely different ways. She is European, confident, she has never doubted anything, as is the case with us, who when we travel and something wrong happens to us we get angry, we are not afraid. Diego, on the other hand, is Venezuelan, thus he comes from one of those states that are “in another drawer” compared to our West, and already at the beginning of the film, in the taxi to the airport, he is much more nervous than Elena. This difference in experience seemed to me to be a very interesting and complicated thing to convey without being banal, without getting too carried away. In the film it was expressed through small things – how she responds, how he responds, how he tells her to stay calm when she would tend to argue with the police, him taking homeopathic products to calm down… In the end, they are no longer two people living an experience in a different way, but witnesses from two countries, from two parts of the world that live the same experience in a very different way.
Let’s move on to a more technical aspect, which many critics have appreciated: for 75 minutes the film takes place almost in a single environment, but with the pace of a thriller, where the tension constantly grows, but never in an exaggerated way…
At certain moments it could have been tempting to give more tension, speed up the action, use music, or jump from one character to another more quickly, but instead we tried to maintain a constant rhythm, even when the events became more complicated, more tense. This created a pressure cooker effect: we kept a constant pace, and things inside boiled more and more, to the point where it felt like everything was about to explode. That choice was made in the editing room, and it worked well.
Tell me more about editing, often an overlooked aspect in our imagination as spectators, where directors and actors take center stage…
Editing is also called the third writing of the screenplay: you write this at the beginning, then with filming you rewrite it, and it partly rewrites itself, because the actors bring their point of view and because the many factors of real life come into play, which lead the screenplay to take on another aspect. And editing is the third writing: you get the material that has been shot, and what perhaps should have been shot but couldn’t be done, you get what turned out well and what turned out less well. And, above all, you see an idea that you had in your head come to fruition, and sometimes it is actually a discovery, a revelation of aspects of the story or of the characters that were not even clear to the authors before. It is in the editing room where the film finds its rhythm, some lines of dialogue disappear, some scenes change position… Sometimes just a few frames more or less in a character’s gaze are enough to change the perception of what is happening.
How is your relationship with the directors during editing?
Editing is a delicate moment because directors usually arrive exhausted after filming, which is very intense: when you are a director everyone asks you a thousand things and you have to find answers to everything, you have to deal with perhaps the bad weather which prevents you from shooting what you wanted, with the unavailability of technical equipment, and problems of all kinds which cause your ideas to collide with reality. So, a director usually enters the editing room with experience, and in this case there were even two! (laughs) There are directors who come into the editing room at the beginning and then let the editor edit the film, because they want to go away and see the editing later, to be fresh, but in my experience, I have almost always worked side by side with the directors. That’s how it was in this case too, and we did it by discussing and talking. Of course, everyone has their own character, there are those who are stronger in supporting their ideas and those who need more time; for my part, I also tried to understand the different times required by the two directors, so that their points of view added up, rather than subtracted from each other in some way… Finally comes the production: we look at what is there and from there we start reviewing the material again with another, fresher point of view.
Was there a particularly difficult scene to edit?
The first sequence, when they are in a taxi, was the one that made us work the most. Initially it was supposed to be a dialogue sequence between Elena and Diego, with the couple in a difficult moment in their relationship. There is something left of it, for example the fact that she talks to her parents in Barcelona while he calls his brother in New York: it seemed interesting to me to keep, since it gives the idea of how he is projected towards the future, while she has a solid present to lean on. In the end, the sequence became musical: the idea was to edit a sequence of a couple who are emigrating to the United States, towards the American dream, by accentuating a certain lightness which contrasts with the first moment of tension, when they reach the airport and the policeman at the border tells him that they have to do some checks…
What do you like most about working as an editor?
First of all, the simple fact of seeing how the shots are edited in succession makes you feel emotions. And you continue to feel those emotions, even though you have seen and re-watched those scenes perhaps for days, given that you often work like a surgeon, removing and adding even fractions of a second. I take, for example, the sequence of the film in which Elena has to dance in front of the policeman. It is a clear abuse of power, and she suffers for it: after days of working on it, even though I was the one who edited it, when I saw the scene again I continued to suffer with her. This is something that excites me a lot. It seems wonderful to me that after doing so much work, even if it was cumbersome, you press play and go back to being an emotional spectator.
The other thing that I really like is seeing the film from afar, once the first editing of the sequences has been done: you start to ask yourself, for example, where is it not working, where is it that I should intervene, cut, move, so that the same elements work even better? And this is perhaps where editing is truly writing, because if a character says something in one point instead of another, the viewer experiences it differently. Or, if the spectator experiences the same emotion in too many moments, at a certain point he becomes detached and then it is necessary to intervene, even smoothing out parts that were working, to be able to arrive at the key moment with that type of emotion fully experienced. These are considerations that have a lot to do with creativity, with the construction of the story, on which you intervene having the privilege of doing so with pieces that already work, and you just have to work hard, change something, even just a detail.
You studied architecture in Venice, before earning a directing master’s degree in Barcelona. Has this training in architecture helped you?
In the world of cinema people come from all possible and imaginable scenarios – many perhaps have done journalism, others philosophy – and there are several architects among the well-known filmmakers, because in any case you are dealing with the structure and formal choices of the art, and architecture obviously touches on these things. I could say that there are bricks in architecture and shots in cinema, foundations in architecture and in cinema, characters and history, exposed beams in architecture and in cinema, color or music; in any case, elements that you can use. I see this closeness between architecture and cinema, for the formal choices that define a style. And in addition, obviously, there are the structural choices: because beyond the form, just as a building must stand up, so too a film must function on a narrative level. And then, yes, I did my master’s degree in directing in Catalonia. I actually debated between Rome and Catalonia, but in the end I came here.
And apparently it was a great choice. Upon Entry has received many awards, and is also nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards. In particular, you are a candidate for editing…
The film has been going through festivals for a year now. The first was Tallinn, which was a wonderful start, because even if it is less known it is still an important festival, category A like Cannes and Toronto: we entered there as a debut film, but we won the Critics’ Award, competing with all films in all categories. Then, to name a few, the film was in Calcutta, South by Southwest in Texas, where just being there is a great thing. We were awarded in Malaga, which is a very important festival in Spain, we were nominated for the Goya awards, and then there were awards for the Gaudí Prize of the Catalan Film Academy. It makes us very happy that the film worked at home and abroad, that in its small way it brought Catalan production to places where it doesn’t always go, such as the Independent Spirit Awards. For me, as an editor, being there is incredible. Regardless of how it ends, it’s already a great thing.
Translation by Paul Rosenberg
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