DP/30: Pablo Larrain, Jackie (and Neruda)
He broke onto the American scene with his dramatic reconstruction of a Chilean election in the Oscar-nominated "No," and has two films coming out in 2016, the road show biopic "Neruda" and the study of an American tragic heroine, "Jackie." He talked to David Poland about the work.
Shot in Los Angeles, November 2016
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Video Transcript
So how are you? I'm good, how are you? Good. Are you exhausted by your output or is it
a little less intense than those of us who experienced it all within the same week? I'm
not exhausted. I'm, you know, it's just, it's a long run.
So you want to sort of protect your energy and take it easy and try to sleep well, which
is I guess the key. Were you working on both films at the same
time? Yeah, kind of.
How did that happen? It was a happy accident. I did a movie called
The Club and that movie went to Berlin Film Festival where Darren Aronofsky was the head
of the jury. And then we got an award from them. And then in the after party, I met him,
met Darren, and he invited me to make Jackie. And I was about to go into production with
Neruda, and somehow we decided to just make both movies back to back, and here we are.
So yeah. So you didn't think you were completely insane
to try that? Well, at some point, yeah, but I guess you can, at least I can work in different
things as long as they're not together when you're shooting. I think that's where you
really need to focus on what you're doing and the rest of the time, whether you're prepping
or on post or doing press or whatever, you can probably do more than one, I guess. It's
possible, but not when you're shooting. I think when you're shooting, it's just where
you really are.
You don't want to have more than one thing going at the same time?
No. No, it's just, no. I guess it's enough. Yeah.
So are you, I mean, so far what we've experienced of you, in the United States at least, almost
everything is connected to history in some way.
It's true, yeah. I've done seven movies and five of them are period movies.
So it's, yeah, I don't know why but I keep coming back.
Were you always interested in history? Are you a buff of the past?
I am very interested. I think we have something that's going on today in the world
that it feels like people is just like standing and looking at their feets
and that everything that actually exists is just present and maybe future.
But we have a background.
We've been around for billions of years on this planet
and we have built, whatever we are, for good or bad, a ton of things.
And those things have a meaning and they have a reason and they have shaped who we are.
And I think there's a lot of human beauty in the past.
And you can really, really understand where we are and who we are.
I like to think something that I saw in the White House tour while doing Jackie
and that President Kennedy said, that he said
that the past was the prologue of the present.
which I think is interesting.
And there's always a product,
and there's always things that have shaped us.
And I don't know, and I don't intend to,
when I work and period movies,
I don't intend to feel or to believe
that we're actually in that period of time.
I assume that we have the advantage of time,
that we are here, that we are in 2016,
that so that we know what happened afterwards.
We don't know what's going to happen next,
but we do know what happens in between those days and now.
So you, or I mean, we try to sort of assume that information
