An Interview with Jonás Trueba

Jonás Trueba won the Label Europa Cinemas prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his feature The Other Way Around, about a couple’s separation party. The film costars – and is cowritten with – Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz, who appeared in Trueba’s best-known film, The August Virgin (2019) as well as his previous feature, You Have to Come and See It (2022), among others.

Ale (Arana) and Alex (Sanz) are a filmmaker and an actor who have been together for 14-15 years. But one day, they convince themselves things “cannot go on as they are” and decide to separate. Moreover, they take Ale’s father’s (Fernando Trueba, the director’s filmmaker father) advice to throw a party to celebrate their separation. “It’s like a wedding, but the other way around,” they explain.

Soon, the soon-to-be-ex-couple are informing their friends and their family of their plans, while also trying to navigate their lives. Alex and Ale look at houses to see where they might move after the split, and Ale is trying to complete a film that stars Alex. 

The Other Way Around has the gentle rhythm and humour that is a hallmark of Trueba’s films, and that aligns with the talky comedies of Eric Rohmer. Both Ale and Alex repeat the phrase, “We’re OK; It was a mutual decision,” whenever the couple mention their separation to others – save an amusing moment where Ale informs her TV actor friend, “We’re not being renewed for another season.” But it’s a question as to whether to believe them.

Jonás Trueba

Trueba also includes a heavy “meta” component in his film. As Ale works on her feature, the film blurs reality and fiction. A scene of Alex walking on a bridge in what appeared to be The Other Way Around, is also a clip from the film she is editing. And as she hosts a screening of her project, and receives criticism about narrative and repetition, the feedback may be suitable for Trueba and his film. 

What exactly is going on here is best left for viewers to determine. Sense of Cinema conducted an email change with Trueba about making The Other Way Around in an effort to find out.

– G.M.K

What can you say about creating the tone of The Other Way Around? It feels kind of bittersweet, but also gently comic, then it throws in a curveball with a “meta” twist and the film within a film. You are obviously riffing on the idea of celebrating the end of a relationship, which may seem strange, but you make it weirder. 

I’ve been able to feel that strangeness that you have felt too. I mean, it is not due to a whim or a calculation, much less a desire on my part to do something weird. It’s just the way things have turned out. It seems to me that the tone of the film is a mixture of things, sometimes contradictory. We wanted to make a comedy. The starting point, when we started writing the script, was a comedy. But as I was finishing the first cut of editing, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was a portrait of depression, something I don’t know with this clarity at the beginning. What we show is two characters who are depressed, but trying to appear that they are not… That can have its comic side, can be funny, of course. Maybe we could say that it is a depressive comedy. 

The “meta curveball” is just one more layer of meaning. I’m aware that in contemporary cinema there are perhaps too many films that introduce this “meta” side or film-within-a- film. I like to think that this is not exactly that; for me it’s another kind of gesture, a way of showing how cinema and life are confused until they are almost the same, if they are not… It may also have something fun, but it also has something sickly. For me it doesn’t have a very clear explanation, it’s not something I can or want to intellectualise too much about. But that’s definitely how I feel it.

Can you describe your collaboration in this film and in the past with actors Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz, who have appeared in several of your films? How did you work together on the screenplay?

We have been learning together, film by film. It is the fifth time I have worked with Vito, the fourth with Itsaso, and it is the third time they played a couple for me. Each time it has been a little different. We like to feel that we work with similar elements in each film but introduce variations each time. And it is a great privilege to have actors like them. They are very good, very non-stereotypical. They work with the truth, and are intuitive, but also demanding and precise. “Transparent” actors, I like to say – that is, they let themselves be known from the inside.

In this film we needed greater precision than ever. In other films we had made before, they had more space to let themselves be, but here we were trying to respect a score of dialogues and situations. The truth is that there were many sequences and all of them were very demanding. But the interesting thing is that they have been the screenwriters themselves along with me. It was clear to me that they had to be involved in the entire creative process from the beginning. That they felt the film was entirely theirs, not just the characters. That they were aware of the internal rhythm, of the fluctuations of tone. And I also tried to make them aware of almost all the production decisions. Sometimes it can be difficult for them, but I like that the actors get involved in everything, so that they feel the film is entirely theirs. My theory is that this also becomes clear later. Also, there are doubts and hesitations. I have many doubts, and I don’t mind showing my doubts. I never think in terms of characters – in the sense of a character being built with a dramatic arc. I like that their development is something that is revealed as the film progresses. 

Itsaso Arana

We don’t know much about Ale and Alex or their relationship except for what is revealed in the film. There are a few scenes where we see her contemplating things (e.g., on a bus ride). Can you talk about that decision? It is canny; we have to decide for ourselves how they met, and what their lives are like, etc. That engages me, but that approach can be frustrating for some viewers. Can you discuss? 

This has to do with what I was trying to explain previously. There are many aspects of the characters that we don’t know, either. We always start from one idea: “seeing ourselves as possible fictional characters.” We start from things we experienced, things we have seen or heard, also from certain fears or aspirations, from ideals. But for us, the film always has to contain a mystery – something that intrigues us, that we don’t know well. And we trust that the film will reveal it to us. We ask ourselves questions through movies. We also laugh at ourselves, we parody ourselves, we put ourselves in crisis. The reasons for the separation of this couple are not entirely clear, there could be many. But we were clear that we did not want a specific, visible motif. And then each of the three of us, Vito, Itsaso, and I, had our theory. I think this couple needs to put themselves in crisis, as if they needed to question it out loud, in front of everyone, and then draw true conclusions about their love and their state of mind. 

It seems evident that working together making films has its complications. That’s how life and work mix. Maintaining loyalty to the people you work with is also difficult, you have to renew the pact with each film, just like in love, every day. Suddenly those sequences that you mentioned, which are more contemplative, began to emerge. They might not have been in the first version of the script, but as we progressed and filmed, we needed to see those other moments, which came to question everything, to add more doubts. I’m not sure what all this means for the viewer, but I always try to think about the viewer, I don’t ignore them, rather I try to create spaces where they can feel comfortable and think for themselves. I also like to ask questions and participate in the movie you are watching.

Vito Sanz & Itsaso Arana

You also showcase your father as Ale’s father here, which adds another layer of meaning to The Other Way Around. What do you have to say about that?

I could say a lot of things, of course. It’s a long story with my father… He transmitted to me his love for cinema since I was a child. He is a true cinephile. And the best thing is that he is a cinephile with very diverse tastes. But it is true that comedy and humour are key to his way of being. Keep in mind that we are talking about someone who, when he was young, considered himself to be a surrealist, and said that André Breton was his political boss… I hope some of his humour comes through in the film. For me it was the great challenge: how to film my own father? And how to capture something of his personality, his humour, but also his humanity? This is perhaps the most difficult thing, I had thought about it many times before, but I had never dared to propose it. This time everything seemed to fit; I told him that I had the intention to make a film based on a phrase I had heard him say when I was a teenager. His phrase was something like, “We should celebrate breakups and not unions,” a phrase that may sound like a joke, but has a lot of hedonistic philosophy, of fleeing from sadness… Furthermore, it seemed to me that that phrase could be the seed of a comedy in the tradition of “Remarriage comedies” – films like The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve … films that my father adores, and I do too. And in those movies, there is almost always a secondary but important character, who is the father of the bride. So, it seemed very clear to me. Also for him. 

Anyway, filming family is a strange but a beautiful thing. When today we recorded with a cell phone, or in the old days people who did it with a Super-8… I told myself that I wish I could film it without a camera. Actually, that is my true ideal, making films without a camera.

Speaking of your father, who remains active in cinema, your career is taking off with the success of The August Virgin, and now The Other Way Around, which won a prize at Cannes. What observations do you have about the state of Spanish cinema today and how easy it is to make a film like The Other Way Around? 

Making films in Spain is never entirely easy, nor is it as evident as in France or the United States, where there seems to be a truly recognised tradition and cinema is part of the identity of those countries. In Spain, this has never been the case, and that complicates things. This translates to, for example, within our European environment, our country being one of the least invested in cinema in proportion to its size. But I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I believe there have always been very good filmmakers in Spain, sometimes working under very difficult conditions. My father, for example, started making films in the early ‘80s. At that time, there wasn’t even an industry as we call it now, but his generation contributed to creating a new state of things after the end of Franco’s dictatorship, where culture played an important role. The ‘90s were a kind of consolidation for Spanish cinema; many new directors emerged, and a new base of viewers was created. I grew up as a teenager with that Spanish cinema; young people of my age sometimes wore T-shirts of Spanish films, Spanish cinema was “cool.” Then that faded away. Now I’m quite critical of that cinema, to be honest. When it was my turn to start making my own films, that whole model of cinema, my parents’ model, had entered into crisis. And it coincided with the global crisis, particularly the crisis in world cinema, with the changes from celluloid to digital, and then Spain’s economic crisis in particular. The generation of filmmakers I belong to has become strong out of that crisis. It’s a very different generation. Right now, I would say that my generation is perhaps the most diverse there has ever been. I can name some filmmakers who are slightly older than me and are references, like Javier Rebollo, Isaki Lacuesta, Albert Serra, Andrés Duque, Fernando Franco, Elías León Siminiani, Virginia García del Pino… and others born in the ‘80s like myself or Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Mar Coll, Celia Rico, Carla Simón, Elena López Riera, Carles Marqués-Marcet…

Vito Sanz & Itsaso Arana

I love the Ingmar Bergman tarot cards and the idea of the past, present, and future in the couple’s relationship. The argument they have is about the film 10, there is also an homage to Truffaut (a visit to this gravestone) and The Other Way Around reminded me of Rohmer’s films. What inspired all the homages? 

I like that you call them “homages” and not “quotes.” For me, it’s like what many painters do in their works when they paint a motif that reminds them of another painter who has inspired them. In other arts, these homages are accepted naturally. In cinema, they are viewed with suspicion. But in the end, cinema is also an art that needs to reflect on itself, where we can and should accept that there is a tradition we can engage with. I like to think of Truffaut, Rohmer, Bergman, or Blake Edwards as friends. They are part of my life; I think of them often. They have helped me love cinema but also love life. So, it’s normal that finally they end up sneaking into the film, just like other friends and experiences do.

You employ split screens, and a film-within-a-film, as well as flashbacks, and recount episodes from different perspectives. Can you talk about the visual approach to the film?

It is always an intuitive approach, as I mentioned before. All those elements you named emerged naturally, and I have tried to integrate them into the mise en scène with that same naturalness, without feeling forced to do so.

What can you say about the editing which is fragmented at times – especially in the last act. It reflects the nature of the couple’s relationship at that point.

Although we could say it’s a film driven by the script, I would also say it is above all a film of editing, or one where the editing has undoubtedly been part of the writing process. I also remembered what Truffaut used to say: that you have to shoot against the script and edit against the shooting…

What do you think about second chances? There is a suggestion that Ale and Alex should try again and not make the same mistakes. The Other Way Around builds its tension on the couple’s breakup while creating the hope they will stay together.

I definitely believe in second chances, especially in a relationship. That specific dialogue comes from Stanley Cavell’s book Pursuits of Happiness, in which he analyses the Remarriage Comedies. In those American films from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, there’s almost always a couple that goes through a crisis, decides to separate, and eventually recovers their love or the essential aspects of their relationship in an even more intense way, precisely because of that breakup or crisis. I think there’s a great truth in that. We were interested in engaging with those films and ideas in our own way, within our own context.

Itsaso Arana & Vito Sanz

There are some interesting symbols in the film – the clogged sink, the peacocks, and the books, as well as the DVDs that are suggestive of the relationship. Can you describe how you emphasised these elements? They inform the characters’ lives in places where dialogue doesn’t.

They are symbolic elements, no doubt. Some are almost fortuitous, like the peacocks, almost metaphorical, and others are related to everyday life, like the clogged sink, books, or DVDs… These elements help us build the story and the characters. Perhaps these elements tell us things about them that they themselves wouldn’t say. Now that I think about it, the film works mainly in a paradoxical way: celebrating a separation. It is a paradox that often drives narratives. But it’s also true that this forces us to make the characters almost never say what they are supposed to say. Their dialogues almost never mention the dramatic, the obvious, or the evident. So, these elements end up being fundamental, almost more revealing than anything else.

Some characters are shocked by the idea of a separation party. Others think it is a good idea for a film. Should we celebrate a couple’s separation and toast to the bride and groom? What are your thoughts about the central concept of The Other Way Around?

I really don’t have a clear idea about this concept. Sometimes I think it’s a complete nonsense, just a joke. But I’ve also come to think that it’s a pure philosophy of life. It depends. I oscillate between one reaction and the opposite, much like the rest of the characters in the film.

You blur reality with your film. The film can be read in different ways. What do you want viewers to believe? 

I like what you say, “blur reality…” I don’t know. I really don’t have a clear idea of ​​what I’m doing, I feel around. But I would like the viewer to ask this question, and they don’t necessarily have to get a clear answer. What matters is to give the concept a spin, and that it serves to continue thinking about love, but also happiness, routines in life, and if life as a couple is really worth it. Those are the questions we ask ourselves, and this film just tries to go a little deeper into them. It does not intend to reach a conclusion but rather a new beginning with those same questions. Renewing doubts is also feeling alive. Don’t you think the same…?