Guillem Morales is pleasant company. We are ushered into a little room at the Soho offices of the film’s UK distributor Optimum Releasing. There are some colourful promotional pictures on the wall and we sit down at a black table, surrounded by black chairs that contrast with the bright whiteness of the walls but match Morales’s hair and T-shirt perfectly. He has the eager, slightly nervous, energy of those creative individuals who, still at the beginning of their careers, are bursting with the desire to express their ideas and visions to the world. He is thirty-six but looks ten years younger. He tells me he left his native Barcelona in January for London where he is based now. We chat briefly about London; what a great, cosmopolitan city it is. I remark that it’s funny how the English, obsessed with sunshine, flock to Spain whereas the Spaniards head for England.
‘When you get sunshine after sunshine after sunshine, it’s too much and you get fed up’ he jokes. I’m sure he has other, perhaps strategic, reasons, too. But we don’t have much time so I come straight to the point; his new psychological thriller Julia’s Eyes. It kept me on the edge of my seat. I ask whether Hitchcock was his main influence.
‘It’s difficult to talk about influences because you’re not conscious of them. It’s very funny when people say “oh, it reminds me of that moment in that film” because you’re not conscious when you’re working on the script; you’re just trying to find the truth and make decisions. Of course Hitchcock, I love Hitchcock’ he enthuses. ‘I love classic cinema, Polanski, fantastic cinema, you know, thriller and horror, and I suppose they influenced me. We don’t see that kind of cinema very often nowadays on the big screen. You know like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ or ‘Don’t Look Now’, those kind of films., where the threat is more subtle – it creates more fear than the slasher effects.’
He tells me that Julia’s Eyes has also been compared the gialli, those stylish, dramatic Italian thrillers of the 60s and 70s which featured a lot of blood and gore and a wee bit too much misogyny.
‘Do you remember those kinds of films from Italy? Dario Argento? Mario Bava?’ I nod and I sense a little pride in him at the comparison to such a classic genre. But he wants to reassure me. ‘I think though that if Julia’s Eyes is a giallo, it’s the first feminist giallo in the history of cinema because…I remember those kinds of things and they were…so chauvinist.’ He looks at me seriously, his eyes slightly probing.
I ask him what it was that inspired the story.
‘I came from an image. Ideas come into your mind, you know, and they’re there and then they are hovering around until it all makes sense. The point is, we think in images. The first image that came into my mind was the one that’s on the poster now, of the woman with the bandage around her eyes. You don’t know a lot of things at that moment, it’s just an image. The only thing I knew was that she was Julia, she was going blind, she had to be operated on and that the doctors said she shouldn’t move her bandage or the fruit of the operation would be ruined and that’s all.’ So even at that initial stage he had a name for her? ‘Exactly. Julia was her name and that was all I knew. Then you need to start thinking about the characters, creating the plot and the script, but yes…that was the starting point.’ He pauses. ‘I didn’t dream it…I didn’t dream it.’ We laugh.
Morales wrote the script for his first feature The Uncertain Guest, another thriller,on his own, but Julia’s Eyes is a collaborative effort with another filmmaker, Oriol Paulo. Why did he decide to work with a co-writer?
‘Because it’s more fun, it’s more creative and it’s faster. Oriol and me, we get along very well, we love the same films and so on, and that’s a basic, if you want to write together. I’m going to keep co-writing because I think it’s the best right now. For my first film I was alone, completely alone and it’s quite different. It is more difficult and it takes longer.’ So did he ever cherished a desire to become a writer instead of a filmmaker? There is a long pause.
‘Ah…that was my dream’ his voice is suddenly low as if suppressing strong emotions. ‘One of my dreams, yeah, was to become a writer. Then when I was fifteen, I was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and I replied: a filmmaker. And I never thought about it again, you know. I made a decision because it’s what I love.’
I cannot help but feel that I touched a nerve when I mentioned becoming a writer. There is a definite change in his emotional current. He has become more guarded, so I change the subject. I ask him about genre and whether he wants to try his hand at other things; comedy perhaps. He lights up instantly.
‘Oh, comedy is very difficult. I feel a lot of respect for comedy and I love it’ he smiles widely ‘and I have a sense of humour. I think you will see in my thrillers. But I think that it’s really difficult to make a comedy work. I would love to do so but I think genre is genre. Directors who have made genre films all their lives, I consider them as authors, you know. So I try not to make a distinction between serious cinema and genre films. I know a lot of people think genre films are not serious but to me they are. The thriller genre is amazing, it’s so flexible; you can tell a lot of stories in a thriller. To me, Julia’s Eyes is a story of a woman, who’s going blind, she needs to accept it and she faces all the fears that we would feel if something like that happened to us. In a way it’s The Invisible Man told from a psychological point of view. The Invisible Man wants to be seen. And Wait Until Dark came to my mind very often with this film. Wait Until Dark is the film that I know a lot about.’
Our time is nearly up but I push a little further and ask whether he’s working on something new.
‘Yeah but I can’t talk about it’ he sighs. ‘But yes, it’s something very tense…unpredictable…. It’s a very tense situation, not comfortable.’ I think if we were given another half an hour, Guillem Morales would be happy to talk about his new story. As I’m about to go, he adds ‘I think it’s pretty interesting, you know, this next project. I’m going to push myself a little bit more, as I know I can do, in order to offer entertainment but the same time, quality. Entertainment is the top level and emotion, you know, and then food for thought, in that order precisely. So I’m just working on it.’
I absolutely believe him.
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