2024-10-08 19:13:00
While the hole It was released in theaters before the arrival of the pandemic, it was those months of confinement at home and the explosion of platforms that transformed Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s film into an almost unprecedented phenomenon. Its data remains astronomical. In the ranking of the most watched films in the history of Netflix, it continues to be in fifth place in the top ten of films not spoken in English with more than 82 million views worldwide. A surprise that put a previously unknown director under the spotlight, thanks to the particular universe he had created. Which was nothing more than a metaphor for inequality and class struggle in the form of an infinite hole where those at the top always have a better chance of surviving and complaining than those at the bottom.
The sequel seemed obvious, but despite this, four years passed until the director published, also on Netflix since last October 4th, The 2nd holea film with which he continues to raise questions about today’s world thanks to this lifting tray loaded with food. A film whose place in the universe’s timeline is revealed at the end, but which also places a sort of commandments on the rules that prevailed in the previous film and which were already established. In this case it is Milena Smit and Hovic Keuchkerian who discover them.
What this sequel does have is a bigger budget, and therefore there is also more spectacular staging which makes one wonder how certain moments were filmed. Is the hole real? How many visual effects does what you see on the screen have?… Questions to which the director himself answered by analyzing four scenes of the film in depth. The 2nd hole and revealing (warning, with SPOILERS) all its secrets.
The harshness of ‘The Hole’
One question that runs through the entire film is how much of the hole is real and how much is not. Galder Gaztelu Urrutia begins by revealing it. The three levels of the vertical structure were built in Barakaldo, at the Bilbao Exhibition Center, and everything up and down these levels is a visual effects construction. The fact that that structure physically existed is crucial and also demarcated the order in which the entire film was shot.
Another question that fans of the film usually ask is: what happens to the platform that goes up and down and affects all the actions of each level? Good inside the hole Every time something can be real (and be resolved with a practical effect) it will be, which is why this platform is “the typical platform that all the works in the world use, the simplest that can be found, on which we put our real platform with food.” Naturally, later the lower part was eliminated and sometimes it was even generated “entirely in 3D”. The conception of a scene like this requires preliminary work, in fact the director designed all the plans and the choreographies of the actors and actresses, every camera movement, so that an action scene like this seems easy even if it is a choreography in There is also another trick, to ensure that the stunt doubles are not noticed.
Zamyatin’s suicide
The physical scenes aren’t always the most difficult, but the dramatic intensity often provides more complexity. This is what happened in what Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia calls “one of the toughest even if there is almost no action”. It was “for what is conveyed in the scene and for the intensity with which Hovic played it and with which Milena lives this moment, which is the end of her partner, with whom she empathized so much in the first month”.
In this scene you can also see the fourth set of the film, the only one not to be built and which is located on a pediment in Bilbao. But beyond these details, the director believes that the key is the performance of his lead actor. To this we must add several tricks, including those performed by a specialist who “became a bonze and jumped into the hole in the wire mesh”. The fire is real at almost all times, yet one could play a guessing game which of the burning objects falling through the hole are real and which are digitally created.
The sacrifice of the protagonists
Another “very intense” scene where the actors’ choreography is essential and where, to complicate everything, there is “a lot of dialogue”. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia says filming was logistically simple, but “difficult for those of us who were stuck in that hole for 54 days, this sequence is a good example of that.” Two whole days of filming were dedicated to those minutes of film. If it was hard for everyone, it is even more so for Óscar Jaenada, who acts blindfolded and without “the most important means of expression for an actor, the eyes”. A mix of practical and digital effects resolve the moment when the character shows what’s behind that blindfold.
For this reason, “the intensity with which all the actresses and actors arrive” stands out, something which according to him has to do with the space itself, that 9×6 meter square which also psychologically affects the technical team. “After a long time here you come away a little shaken”, says the filmmaker resignedly, who also explains the tricks for using light as fill and how one of the bloodiest and most violent moments of the film was created. For the curious, a detail, a cameo that no one knows in the shape of a hand…
The green sequence
The director of The 2nd hole The number of each scene is also known, which they called “the green sequence” corresponds to the number 81 and the spectator’s sensation coincides with what was his creation. It’s easily one of the film’s most visually spectacular moments, a less than five-minute scene in which Milena Smit moves in zero gravity through a block of people with a startling green light.
Inside the set they called that block “human kebab, txorongo or zurullo”, and to recreate that sensation of floating, U-shaped horizontal levels were used, with removable walls and a network of cables that kept the actors in movement giving them that effect of flying. “A scene like this needs to be well planned to know exactly the shots you need. “This sequence was designed about nine or ten months before shooting,” says the director and confesses that at the beginning he had no idea how he would shoot this scene, which hides another of those secrets that cannot be seen with the naked eye : a doll that replaces Malik’s character to compensate for the risk of filming with children and not subjecting them to the usual long days of recording.
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