2024-09-24 03:01:00
“Follow me, Chango.” For generations born before the 1990s, the phrase is an inseparable part of linguistic DNA, one of those catchphrases that can be used daily in all kinds of circumstances. But its origin, as viewers who saw the “investigations” of José de Zer in Nuevediariothe news program on the popcorn channel, is very specific. It was enough for the man with gray hair and a broken voice to follow, microphone in hand, some clue – a strange sound, an unusual movement in the middle of the night, a bloodcurdling scream – for the order to be directed to his inseparable cameraman, Chango, who from that moment on had to professionally record everything that happened, protecting his life from unspeakable dangers at the same time. The story of José Bernardo Kerzer, better known as José de Zer, and how he managed to add many, many rating points with the idea that visitors from other worlds were wandering around the mountains of Córdoba, is the starting point of The man who loved flying saucersthe new feature film by Diego Lerman.
Based on real events, although with a significant degree of imagination when it comes to bringing them to the screen, the film is being shown on the big screen this Tuesday, as a world premiere, at the San Sebastian Film Festival. On the same day that the San Sebastian meeting decided to organize an action aimed at making visible the state of cinematographic things in our country, with an INCAA thinned out by the new administration and an uncertain future for Argentine cinema that was achieved. On the screen, Leonardo Sbaraglia, with a hair tone and a voice to match, embodies the famous television journalist in his golden agewhile the Tucuman Sergio Prinathe protagonist of The motorcycle snatcherhe puts the U-matic camera on his shoulder as his inseparable companion in his adventures. With supporting roles played by figures such as Guillermo Pfening, Norman Briski, Daniel Araoz, Monica Ayos and Osmar Nunezin addition to an important cast of non-actors from the areas where the film was shot, the new feature film by the director of The invisible gaze y Refugee will have its global launch on the Netflix platform on October 18, probably preceded by a brief appearance in local movie theaters.
“It is a project that I have been working on for a long time, and it has a personal component that goes beyond the generational,” says Lerman in conversation with Page/12a few days before travelling to the Basque Country to present the film with his team. “I often go on holiday to Córdoba, usually to Traslasierra, but every now and then I have gone to the Uritorco area. There are all kinds of stories and mythologies there, and the figure of José de Zer is very strong.” Lerman remembers that the previous research on the character was somewhat truncated, “especially in Buenos Aires, because the people who knew him were generally very hermetic. But when I arrived in Capilla del Monte a world opened up to me, and thanks to the interviews with various people, such as the former mayor, or people who participated in the phenomenon at the time, I began to visualise that there was a possible fiction there. Always talking about the public figure, not so much the private one. Afterwards, with the project already underway, I met his daughter. Paula received us at her house. We went with Leo Sbaraglia, we had a snack, he showed us photos.”
In the fiction, José de Zer attends the rehearsal of a typical revue play, visits a vedette in the dressing room with whom (everything indicates) he has a romantic relationship and goes through the days and nights of work as he has been doing for some time. Until an idea changes everything; an idea plucked from memories in distant lands, in a very different role from the present. A concept that seemed to be planted like a seed that slept for many years and, suddenly, germinates and begins to bear fruit. Lerman insists on the fact that the film is very loosely based on the life and work of the chronicler. “I was also interested in diving into the origin in Nuevediario of what we usually call today fake news. The idea of fake news, or the news show. Also something linked to beliefs. Myth, skepticism, falsehood. Because in the end It is the story of a man who ends up believing his own story.. Or the story that is being built, in the middle of the ratings and in a more open area. During the investigation I not only heard testimonies but I also read scientific notes. It’s crazy: NASA recently came out and said that it has classified information about UFOs.”
-For these reasons it is very difficult to describe your film as a biopicthe classic biographical film, although perhaps many viewers will place it within that category.
-Clearly for me it is not a biopicbut the interesting thing here is that the very de Zer built his own media personaif you will. In the film he is treated with a lot of affection and respect, but he is also a plot device and a place from which to address many issues. There is something megalomaniacal and even messianic about his story. What is the place of truth, reality, point of view? After all, he was a media man. It’s very interesting that he was a guy who came from covering entertainment and suddenly ends up doing a show on a newscast. With something of the famous version of The War of the Worlds Welles. It became such a phenomenon that many people went to settle there, in the town, that suddenly it exploded. People from other countries, members of sects. Finally, there is the issue that he He was a builder of fictions. Something that film directors, at least I, identify with a lot. The guy was there, he had to get X amount of notes done and, using very few resources, He built a whole universe with a plausible languageThe character that Leo plays ends up becoming something like an audiovisual director.
-Beyond the mimetic aspect, the physical representation of José de Zer, how was working with Sbaraglia in terms of acting direction? What did you need from him as an actor?
-We had wanted to work together for a while. There was even another film that we were about to make but it didn’t happen. When we wrote the script I always had him in mind, and when I gave it to him I told him it was a project to take a risk on. There was a lot of filming on location, outdoors and with natural light. The filming was very long and demanding, in four different places, and Leo is in practically every scene. There was some risk there, in the sense of jumping into the deep end without measuring much. We had agreed that we shouldn’t stop halfway with the character, and in that sense we created a code of preparation. At first something linked to the physical, to José de Zer’s voice, and then to abandon it a little. The man who loved flying saucers It’s a film where the point of view is important, so there was a very free zone, which even allowed us to improvise. I remember that for one scene I asked for animals and suddenly a lot of goats came, to the point that they interrupted the filming. So we ended up incorporating that into the film, the interruption itself. The script we wrote with Adrián Biniez was strict, but we also allowed ourselves to play. There are many non-actors, or natural actors, mostly people from the towns where we filmed, so there was a whole area of searching, of testing. Scenes that were written on location the day before filming them. Luckily the shooting plan allowed that. Other things didn’t. For example, I had the ending written from the first script treatment, five years ago, and it wasn’t changed.
-There are also scenes in Buenos Aires, inside the canal and on the streets of Buenos Aires…
-That was the first thing that was filmed, and since it was a period film, the image had to be very controlled. The usual thing: don’t let a modern car pass in front of the camera. To film the scenes on the channel, we went through a fairly long journey. The first thing, of course, was to think about Channel 7 or Channel 9, but we realized that it was a mess, because they are channels that operate all day and that was a problem for filming. Finally, we found a plastics factory in CABA, which after the pandemic was a bit abandoned. The channel was recreated there thanks to the work of Art Direction, trying to stick to what Channel 9 was like, which started out as a house and then grew. I wanted to do sequence shots, so we needed a large space that would allow the movement of the camera and the people.
-Were the scenes from the television reports recorded with video cameras of the time or were they resolved in post-production?
-No, no. We shot with U-matic equipment from that era, an area of the film that gave us quite a few headaches. That was during the shoot, because later in editing I was infinitely grateful that we got into that mess, because the result is great. Every time we filmed with that camera we didn’t know if everything was going to turn out well. Also, there were long scenes, like that sequence of the bird’s footprints, which was a forty-minute improvisation. We finished filming and didn’t know if the material was ok.
-Speaking of technical issues, but which inevitably have an aesthetic corollary, you used anamorphic lenses for shooting in widescreen. This results in an image that is deformed at the edges, like the first Cinemascope of the 1950s. What were the reasons behind this decision?
-We talked about this a lot with the director of photography, the Polish Wojciech Staron, with whom we collaborated for four films. The problem with anamorphic lenses is that they are very heavy, but Wojciech managed to get some lighter ones. We were thinking visually about something linked to the period. We were looking for a particular aesthetic, which was not just about deforming the image but thinking about the reconstruction of the period for contemporary eyes. At one point we imagined a more square image, but in the end we did the opposite. We deformed everything (laughs). That brings a visual magic, a texture, a somewhat distorted place, and that in combination with the U-matic. We taught Sergio Prina how to do a bit of camera work and some scenes were filmed by him. We filmed him actually filming.
-Is a new José de Zer possible today? Or are we surrounded by similar figures on television and social media? With flat-earthism and other such things on the rise, it’s as if we’re bombarded by such stories, all the time and everywhere.
-In the film, when José de Zer goes to see the channel’s editor-in-chief, played by Osmar Núñez, the latter tells him, “But this is all a lie.” “This is the television of the future,” de Zer replies. There is something about post-truth that has to do with that: it is not all journalism, but there is a large area that is exactly that. The paradigm today is that the show takes precedence over the truth. Or the press operations on networks, where manipulation is a daily occurrence. In those days, in the beginning, everything was more naive, but suddenly José de Zer in particular and Nuevediario In general, they put that debate in the center of the scene. Just think that with those reports they got 40, 50 rating points. And he had different sagas. We focused on the reports about UFOs, although he did many other stories. He also covered La Tablada and interviewed Monzón. But at that stage, which is the one I was interested in telling, de Zer was in that. And today the sources, the truth, the real thing… Today we work all the time with the concept that José invented.