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What is the story of the film "City of Pirates"?
The origin and the making of the film?
I must say that the beginning was very surprising.
I was preparing...
... a movie based on a novel by Pierre Herbart, "Alcyon".
I believe you know the novel. It's a story...
... that ends in tragedy. It takes place in on an island
and there's two youths and an old man.
The story is about two youths that run away to an island.
It seems to be the island of Porquerolles, in the south of France.
On that nearly deserted island,
they find a children's cemetery.
There had been a youth detention centre there,
in which many children had been killed as a result of a riot.
This was the starting point for some research
into the heroes and role models
of this sort of fantasy, so to speak.
Two weeks before shooting, after we'd some location scouting...
Some weeks after that we found out that FR3 was going to shoot "Alcyon".
We would not have the film rights and I then started working
on those images from childhood,
mostly my first impressions after
my first visit to Chile after ten years in exile.
I went back to Chile, a country still under dictatorship.
I had expected to find a more lenient dictatorship,
because many people had told me about a new moment in History,
regarding the dictatorship in Chile, but the country was unchanged,
even worse maybe.
It was as if the regime was having an epiphany...
... the height of Chilean nationality.
I was somewhat horrified at my own country,
as if I'd had a nightmare during my nap.
An incredible country, without light,
with images where...
Dali, Chirico and Walt Disney all came together.
I had kept these images
and was also imprinted with a sort of hate...
It wasn't really malaise,
but I did develop an aversion for the "Little Prince" by Saint-Exupéry.
But we did not have the budget,
we only had the costumes from a film
in which there was a character that dressed like the Little Prince.
In the meantime, I happened to meet Melvil.
He'd been to some press conferences for "The Territory", back then,
because his mother was a journalist.
To me, the golden rule to working with children
is to cast their parents first. The children usually are very good,
at least they were back then. Now everything has changed.
They watch a lot of TV and mimic what they see, but at the time
they were more naïve and fresh. So I found Melvil.
I also worked with André Engel,
who lived with Anne Alvaro at the time,
so I had her as well.
I thought, I have Anne Alvaro, I also have the boy...
Then Hugues Quester came along.
I can't quite remember how or where we met, but we took to each other.
All of a sudden, I found myself with these three characters.
I worked as if I were dancing on a Persian tapestry.
I discovered some years ago, that Persian rugs...
There's a special technique to make them,
which involves playing the theme of the rug on a flute.
To me, this worked as an example...
of what cinema is supposed to be.
I'm sorry, I'll just disconnect the phone line.
So we had all these motifs, real patterns...
... like audio-visual tapestries.
A Little Prince mixing childhood and surrealistic pictures.
Genet... A Genet-esque vision of the "child assassin".
The concept of a nightmare during nap time.
I added some trivia that took place in Chile.
Two policeman had killed couples whom they caught during lovemaking.
All this was to be part of a film I wanted to call
"Impressions of Chile", like "Impressions of Africa".
Little by little, the movie started to come together as a collage...
It was a sort of collage of clichés.
I'm very fond of pulp fiction
and of all the surrealism it entails.
I enjoy over-the-top pulp fiction.
By over-the-top, I mean the works of Pérez Zaragoza,
a Spanish author extremely popular in France,
contemporary of Lautréamont.
We could say that Pérez Zaragoza is like "inferior wine"
and Lautréamont is like real alcohol.
There's this counterpoise.
The film was made...
...by using ingredients of the surrealist kitchen.
I chose certain objects.
A ball, teeth...
... spoons... I don't remember all of them,
but there's spoons, forks...
A series of objects that surrounded me when I took my nap.
Usually I'd write after taking a nap
or early in the morning,
between 7 and 10:30 a.m.
We would stop for an hour for lunch.
Then the younger ones would play football
and the wiser would take a nap. Some of us went fishing.
We'd restart shooting at 5 p.m. and go on until dinner.
Sometimes, we'd either shoot
or play poker, after dinner.
That's how the movie was made. In an atmosphere...
... totally opposite to what usually happens on set.
There was no actual workflow.
There was no script, since I wrote it every day.
There were no shoot sheets.
I think Paulo doesn't even know...
what this surreal thing is, a shoot sheet.
This movie is a sort...
...of game of collages,
very similar to association games.
We try to forget...
...narrative structure altogether
and privilege an atmosphere
that allows key elements to emerge:
the Little Prince, the "child assassin"...
Well, the good assassin, the good criminal.
They are all motifs from the 19th Century or early 20th Century.
There are also some unintended effects.
The character of the maid, played by Anne Alvaro, is called Isidore.
I didn't know that Isidore is a man's name, not a woman's,
which adds another layer of meaning.
I remember a review from "Cahiers du Cinema" that said
transvestism was an obsession of mine...
... and I wondered why.
The people who translated my texts,
written in a mix of French and Spanish,
they were Portuguese and didn't realise that either.
The name Isidore pervades the whole movie,
up to the editing and no one ever asked
why she was called Isidore and not Isidora.
That was one thing. But something else happened.
To me, it was clear
that if Anne Alvaro addressed a woman
of the same age has her or even younger, as "mother",
that was because that woman was her employer, her "mistress".
But in France maids do not address
their employers like this,
so it ended up sounding somewhat feudal, so to speak.
It's something that does not occur in France.
To me, it's obvious that "mother", refers to her employer.
But you don't address the employer's husband as "father", though.
He is an older gentleman... Anyway, I was criticised for this.
In England, critics said about "La Espera"
that *** was another one of my obsessions.
I must say that, even today, certain events are cultural accidents.
Melvil told me that one of his childhood memories
is that shooting "City of Pirates" was extremely fun,
but also a complete mess.
One thing explains the other. It was a complete mess.
But we were there to shoot a film,
and it all turned out well. All of a sudden, we were done.
We stopped once we had everything we needed for post-production.
Paulo would stop every now and then to talk to the team.
He talked to people and played cards with everyone.
Maybe it was a way recovering the money he pad them.
So this is how things went.
We were on an island...
The weather was always slightly odd there.
It was on the Baleal Island.
During high tide, until noon, the weather was always unstable.
This was our way of making the movie.
We worked a lot, but when we were not working
we took time off to have barbecues and we had fun almost every night.
We had a second unit,
directed by François Ede who only shot landscapes.
I switched between the first and second unit.
The rule to capturing good landscapes is to shoot all day long.
You can't stop a whole team just to shoot landscapes,
so we had a second unit, almost like a fisherman.
They'd fish every now and then, place the camera, apply the filters.
We had a colouring artist to paint the image in the glass...
In front of the lens?
Yes, it has a nice effect on glass.
We used a camera that allows rewinding...
It has two layers of film,
you can rewind it and see it all over again.
All these effects created...
a shining pirate island.
Another element we used and that also pervades my films
is the story of the Brotherhood of Pirates that existed in Chile.
It is sometimes a motif in my films,
almost like a permanent obsession.
- Sometimes those pirates come up. - What is the story?
It is the story of the film "Love Torn in Dream",
where there's two pirates who are brothers Deul.
They were pirates, runaway Dutch Jews.
There was a Brotherhood of Pirates for 50, 60 years.
Drake was part of it. I only recently found out that he was a Jew too.
Most of them were Jews.
There were also other ones called Ségyptiens,
a sort of pre-mason brothers.
We have documents from those pirates portraying mason brothers.
There was a Portuguese,
of course, a Norman...
All of them founded a sort of city of pirates.
It was close to La Serena,
500 km north of Santiago.
They stayed, hid their treasures there
and became a myth for a long time.
The treasures were hunted to no avail but we know that they exist.
There may have been several hidden treasures, in any case.
The pirates were annihilated
in battle in 1658 or 1660.
For more information, there is a book by Exquemelin,
containing descriptions that date back to 1691.
People carried out searches in the beginning of the century and found...
I saw some pirate maps that look a lot like the ones drawn by children.
They're very childlike, written in...
... Hebrew, Greek and Berber symbols.
They're basically accounting data,
there's nothing esoteric about them.
But there are also texts with political and anarchic content.
That's where I first saw the formula,
"In the name of my mother..."
Instead of "In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost",
we have "In the name of my mother, my actions and myself."
It's a bit like Kaurismaki.
This isn't merely a personal opinion. It's part of Chilean childhood,
all this fantasy since there are very few documents.
Almost all where destroyed
and the ones left were melted into gold,
because they were written in gold plates. Oh, well...
So, the idea of a city where pirates live,
not very far away,
is one of the constant nightmares
in a country attacked relentlessly
by Francis Drake, by Sharp and, sometimes,
by Dutch pirates that stayed long in the south of Chile.
Most of them survived.
What is typical about these pirates.
As opposed to Caribbean pirates,
is that they mingled with the Indians.
They managed to overcome women's distrust
and they took Indian wives.
But the pirates of the Caribbean turned to homosexuality
for political reason.
They did not want to complicate life, they didn't want children,
nor commitments to children,
wives, school, churches,
cleaning, garbage... On my opinion, those pirates...
... just became ridiculous.
In the south, on the contrary, they became close to the Indians
and after the battle, they disappeared into the mountains.
At least, the Deul brothers didn't die.
We might say they created a utopia.
Well, yes... I don't know. There are few documents left...
It was a strategic location,
north of Valparaíso, which means they controlled all the traffic
between Peru and Spain.
It was harder to control the passage in the south, the Strait of Magellan.
But where they were, the weather is nice,
there was a protected harbour
and could attack the galleons leaving Peru...
... on their way to Europe, to Spain.
Francis Drake... The father...
Francis Drake and his son...
It was mostly his son who stayed on and died after the big battle.
Well, it wasn't that big.
They say 2000 soldiers were sent in from Peru
to attack some 500, 600 pirates.
But a community settled there
for over 50 years, which a considerable period.
"City of Pirates" is a film with several ambiences,
with a lot of magic and illusion.
We could say it is a film with plenty of effects,
should we want to put it negatively.
I did return to some aspects of the silent movies, for instance,
having the actors act without fearing artificiality.
Cinema after the 1940s developed a true obsession for naturalism.
It's actually a deviating naturalism, another type of artificiality.
Anne Alvaro acts frequently like actors in silent films.
It's true, since the first shot where she indulges in her heartbreak...
- ...and weeps. - Yes.
Then, there all also other primitive effects.
Such as reversing the film, applying filters,
using polarisers, since the light allowed that.
In Paris, you cannot use polarisers, because it shows.
There's also the depth of field.
- And all the objects... - Let me explain.
We focus what is close and far away, but also what is in the middle.
All things that help create the impression of a dream.
After "Three Crowns of the Sailor", I increasingly...
I got more...
...and more convinced
that silent movies only include images of the mind,
contrary to what people say.
Realism in cinema is...
... the mental synthesis of a reality...
... we can dub as realist, out of politeness.
Anyway, our eyes have some 30 functions
to decipher the outer world,
whereas cinema uses no more than 5 or 6 functions,
most of the time through editing.
So, in the end, it is all a game...
... to force the eye to decipher...
... what it is seeing...
... and to confuse it, at the same time. �