It was not easy that Hierro would become a reality. More than 5 years the story created by Pepe Coira was going around until Movistar + gave the go-ahead. Two seasons later and another plot, that of Rapa, Coira continues to produce and also write screenplays. And she says that she sees “no substantial difference” between doing it for a series or for the movies.
His intervention in Alicante Noir is entitled today’s thriller. Has changed?
Well, it is a genre that shows to resist the passage of time very well. It is a very classic genre in the literature and cinema of a lot of countries and it continues to function and has a great capacity to bond with the reader and the viewer. It is about seeing how to keep a genre that has a long history up to date. Perhaps today it would be difficult to write a novel like Agatha Christie’s, but there are ways to renew and keep that formula fresh.
He comes to Alicante Noir as a screenwriter, with series that have been as successful as Hierro y Rapa. When she wrote those scripts, was she aware that they were going to capture the audience like that?
No not at all. The result that a series, a movie or a novel may have is like a mystery, it is an intrigue in itself. It has a lot to do with what you want to do comes out well, is well done and arrives at the right time for the public. Nobody knows how to make things work. And it better be that way.
What elements must a black series have to be round?
The most important thing, at least in our case, is a mixture of two things: making the characters matter to you and having an air of authenticity in the world that you are telling, in the universe that you have focused on. In the case of El Hierro, it is such an amazing island. That it has that air that what you tell can happen in that place and at that time. Especially in a genre that is so hackneyed. You have to be careful that you are not repeating a convention.
Placing a fiction in a recognizable place is a great tourist boost. It has happened on the island of Hierro and also in Galicia, in Ferrol and Cedeira, with Rapa.
There is one thing and that is that the places where things happen are interesting for the mere fact that they happen. There are quite a few of us who love to travel and recognize that this is the place where this happened or where this or that was set. That is an incentive when creating the series and when watching it. The increase in tourism is one of those things of the unpredictable.
With such an explosion of series, is it a difficult task to offer an original product?
I don’t know if it’s difficult but there is a feeling in oneself of trying not to repeat oneself. Nothing is easy, but the goal when you write is that you yourself have to have fun and not have the feeling of redoing something already done. Having that aspiration, which has to do with the fact that you have drawn some characters that you are interested in following and you have gone to a place that you are interested in knowing. I have the impression that what renews it, what makes a series different for the viewer, is not so much what happens but how it happens and to whom it happens. It’s about getting the viewer to empathize.
“I have the feeling that what makes a series different for the viewer is not so much what happens but how it happens and to whom it happens”
You sign the script, but then you have to put it into images. Can a bad shooting spoil an excellent script?
Let’s see, a series, just like a movie, is a team effort, among many people; each with their abilities and their shortcomings. The result is what we have all managed to raise. And it is very difficult and uninteresting to distinguish to whom the merits of each thing correspond because it is very difficult to know, and ultimately what does it matter. The important thing is that it works. A series or a movie has a huge visual component and a sound component, an atmosphere, things that are not in the script. And also some actors who embody the character and have just turned it into something concrete for the viewer, beyond what was written. In the end there is something that is indisputable and it is that person with that body and that voice is the one who makes that character that at first was thought only with words. If that works, everything you have thought will be better and if not, nothing you have thought will matter.
The series have become the lifeline for the audiovisual sector.
Yes Yes. We live in times of many changes and very deep that to see where they go, but it is clear that there was a tradition, a different way of understanding television series, as an offer of free television. Now I have the feeling that today television series are the closest thing to soap operas because they are available whenever you want to watch them at the pace you want, just like the book on your bedside table. I find that very interesting, let’s see where it takes us. Hopefully all those ways of watching audiovisual can coexist.
Is it easy now to sell a series?
It all depends on the bet. We who did Hierro, We spent 15 years proposing projects that didn’t quite fit in on television until Movistar decided to get going and start producing series that were a bit out of the classic free-to-air television canon. Our case was that the playing field was expanded. Hierro It is a series that was circulating 5 years before they dared to do it. He was interested before outside Spain than in Spain. It was a co-production with Arte that made the bet before. These are things that always happen. It has everything to do with the change of model. We came from a television fiction that almost demanded that they be stories that everyone liked, because television asked for those huge audiences.
As a producer, he has a feature film, Of barsby Mario Iglesias For when the script for a film?
I have already written some and I hope that in the near future some will reach the screens. For me it is part of the same thing, I don’t see a substantial difference between television and cinema, they are part of the same thing and require the same skills when we talk about fiction and documentary.
“To write a script I don’t see a substantial difference between television and cinema, they are part of the same thing and require the same skills”
Have you thought about making the leap to the novel?
No, I haven’t. Sometimes I think about it. It can be fun, but the circumstance has not happened. I was never a writer by vocation, if I didn’t have the goal of making a series I wouldn’t write. But I think that the script of series like Hierro it is very necessary. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll get excited because I’m a big reader. I’m intrigued to do it.
By the way, when is the second part of Rapa?
Now it is being shot, perhaps in the second half of 23. The train has already started.
And then?
There are very different projects, of many kinds. The most immediate, as a director or producer, are a couple of things that are going to be released. As a producer, with my brother Jorge and my partner Gaspar Broullón, we have produced open body, a gothic horror film. And we have to premiere next week a reconstruction that I have made of a disappeared film, shot during the years of the Republic. It was directed by Antonio Román, who later made The last of the Philippines. It is from his first stage and it was an avant-garde film. He wanted to emulate Soviet cinema by telling a story of the drama of Galician emigration. The score appeared, some photographs, the director’s own description of the film and we began to work. In Galicia at that time there was very little production and this was a jewel that made it angry that it was lost.