TIFF Redux: Spanish Horror Flick Julia’s Eyes

Director Guillem Morales, producer Guillermo del Toro and actress Belén Rueda

With Halloween coming up in less than a week, we thought now would be a good time to do a little catch-up work from last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, and one of the more rousing interviews we did there was for Guillem Morales’ Spanish thriller Julia’s Eyes, produced by Guillermo del Toro, and starring the gorgeous Belen Rueda, who most American horror fans will remember from the del Toro-produced The Orphanage.

We had just spoken with del Toro at Comic-Con where he hadn’t actually mentioned this film, so we were surprised to see him show up in Toronto with the movie, but clearly, it was another case of a filmmaker that got del Toro excited about what could be done in the genre while building upon Spanish horror wave that began with his own The Devil’s Backbone.

Julia’s Eyes is not an easy movie to describe but it’s not your typical cut-and-dried horror movie where you just have a killer randomly killing people or anything like that. Belen plays a woman whose blind twin sister hung herself, and shortly afterwards, she starts experiencing strange occurrences, particularly a strange man who seems to be hovering behind her unseen. Julia takes a far more proactive at investigating her sister’s death, because she believes it wasn’t suicide, but when people around her start disappearing and she starts losing her own eyesight, she finds herself in a horrifying nightmare.

While up in Toronto, ShockTillYouDrop sat down with Guillermo and director Guillem Morales, and then halfway through, we were joined by the beautiful Belen Rueda, who most American horror fans will remember from The Orphanage. And we finished up by talking a bit about del Toro’s next project At the Mountains of Madness, which he’d recently had greenlit.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: How did the two of you meet? Guillem, I know you had done a previous film called “The Uncertain Guest,” so did you become interested in working together after seeing that movie, Guillermo?



Guillermo del Toro: I saw his movie way, way, way before, but I had done “Orphanage” with Belen and then they offered me the screenplay to read and I loved the screenplay, but then I met him and he’s a madman. I think that very few people realize what a technically, narratively precise and beautiful movie that is, because there is a moment for 25 minutes where you don’t see the face of anyone until the killer’s face comes in. When he pitched that to me in London, I thought he was an insane man, but he pulled it off. It takes a lot of actress and a lot of director to pull that off.

Shock: I remember reading about the influence of Giallo on you, Guillem, but did you have other influences for this as well?



Guillem Morales: Yes, I love Giallo from Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Now I think that it’s quite an interesting sub-genre, and my influences, I love the camerawork of Polanski for instance, and movies from Nicolas Roeg. In terms of narrative, it’s one of my favorite movies, but I love “The Incredible Shrinking Man” as well. I think this is one of the most interesting movies, incredible.



del Toro: Yes… John Carpenter.



Morales: All kind of movies, “Diabolique.” I love the movies at the beginning of the ‘70s, I love so much, I think they’re incredible.



del Toro: Giallo is also very fetishist and I think he’s a fetishist.



Morales: I’m Mediterranean and Spanish.



del Toro: Like my wife said at the beginning of the movie, she says, “If she was blind, she would not be wearing high heels.” (laughs)



Morales: I promised Belen, “You’re going to be sexy with high heels, even if you’re blind.”



del Toro: High heels, leather gloves…

Shock: I’m not sure you have to tell Belen she’s going to be sexy. I think she’s that way naturally. She’s quite riveting on screen, something we saw in “Orphanage” but just as much in this.



Morales: But she’s chasing someone with these ankle skirt and high heels.



del Toro: And I must say, she runs fantastic…



Morales: She runs so fast, that she almost bumped into the camera, so I had to tell her, “Please, can you slow down?”

Shock: The movie deals with a lot of primal fears like “There’s somebody behind me,” “Someone’s going to do something to my eye,” a lot of things like that. When you first started thinking of writing the movie, what was the original idea?



Morales: The original idea was the image of a woman wearing a bandage around her eyes. It was the first idea in the original script, but it’s a version of “The Invisible Man.” In fact, when we were in L.A., we were selling the movie, (we’d be asked)s “What is ‘Julia’s Eyes’ about?” And we’d say, “It’s a blind woman vs. the Invisible Man.” People were staring at us. “What? What? How is that possible?” Because it is an adaptation of “The Invisible Man.”



del Toro: From another point of view.



Morales: From his victim’s point of view.



del Toro: The idea that someone can will himself to be so grey, so not noticeable.

Shock: There have been movies that dealt with that subject but not to this extent, and there are so many different elements and ideas built into it. Now, “The Orphanage” was a big movie in Spain and there’s definitely been a horror resurgence I recent years. Have there been other waves of Spanish horror and it’s now coming back?



del Toro: The tragedy of it is that it’s a genre that from an industrial point of view, it’s a genre that makes a lot of money, and it’s an industry-saver, so to speak, it’s a guaranteed audience genre in a way, and yet it’s not a respected genre.



Morales: But that’s a real industry in Spain and we talk about a new generation who love this kind of movie.



del Toro: Filmmakers and audiences, both.

Shock: I’m assuming Juan Antonio was part of that, but do you make horror movies because you love the genre or do you feel you need to make other movies to be taken seriously as a filmmaker?



Morales: No, no, no, I love thrillers. If you’ve got a good story and you explain this story through a thriller, I think it’s much better.



del Toro: That’s true.



Morales: The thriller encompasses other genres—drama, love story. You can explain everything.



del Toro: And emotionally, I think it’s a great amplifier. A thriller allows you to amplify emotions. You can be super-coruscatedly melodramatic. I was enjoying the movie once more yesterday and I was thinking how crazy those ten minutes are when you do (he spoils some of the reveals), it’s like out of an 18th Century novel.

Shock: That’s definitely where it got into the Bava-Argento territory.



del Toro: It’s almost like the first two-thirds of the movie are a slow burn for them, and I think that the thriller almost goes into overdrive when (Guillermo spoils even more plot twists!) I really love that part.

Shock: One of the things I’ve taken away from one of our earlier interviews is that you defined horror as something that has a supernatural element. This one has those elements, but not really, and you’re never really sure, because a lot of the stuff can be happening with logical explanations. I was curious how much of the supernatural you wanted to include in the story?



Morales: No, no, I’m not interested in the supernatural at the moment.

Shock: But at the beginning, there is stuff happening that clearly seems to be supernatural…



Morales: It seems, but you are talking about an invisible man, so you’re not talking about the supernatural, but you have a monster as well, because for me, it’s a monster, this man.



del Toro: There was a great distinction done in the ‘70s by a Catalonian critic called Román Gubern that says that “Terror is the fear of bodily harm—mutilation, death, etc.—and horror is the fear of supernatural or metaphysical damage, like you lose your soul, you turn into something else.” I think that the movie deals with the terror aspects but the redemption of Belen’s character is very spiritual.



Morales: Absolutely, and for me, horror is just an extra step to drama. Drama, and then the next step is horror.

Shock: It’s a very thin line because you deal with things fairly primal but then you have things where more might be going on than we think.



del Toro: It’s a very Spanish movie in the sense of how emotional the melodrama of the movie is, but it’s very sedate. When people think about the movie, I really feel that the more we explain that it’s a Giallo filtered through a melodrama, the more they will understand the movie. I think that in this case, even the fact that I had been involved with “The Orphanage,” this movie is much more subdued and beautiful and sedate.

Shock: I think when I saw the trailer, I assumed it was a thriller, but I think that people who like horror movies will like parts of it and people who don’t like horror movies will like other parts of it. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.



del Toro: I really think this guy has a pulse for tone and camerawork like a 70-year-old master. I really love the way he handles that, but I do think that it’s almost like it’s more of a movie for people who are not hardcore genre fans. For hardcore, it’s too classical, but the atmosphere and the tension for classical is really great but then there are moments of wild madness like the damage to the eye moment.

Shock: Right, I think everyone in the audience was disturbed by that. I want to ask about your DP, Oscar Faira, and Fernando Velázquez, who did the music. Both of them worked on ‘The Orphanage” and they clearly understand this genre because they nailed the look and the music of the film.



Morales: Yes, I’m very proud about the music, because we are using the music In the most aggressive way, and sometimes it’s very subtle, and there’s a lot of music in the film, almost 80% of the length has music, often very soft, but it’s very important for the atmosphere.



del Toro: I fell in love with his work on “The Orphanage” and then we called him directly and we made a big plea, because after “The Orphanage” he’s become very very busy, but he loved the movie, and he wrote me about two weeks ago, saying, “What did you think of the music?”

At this point, Guillem had to run to another interview, and we were joined by the gorgeous Belén Rueda, and Guillermo stayed on to help with any translations that may be necessary. (Yes, he’s not just a writer, director and producer, but he’s also a translator for the filmmakers he produces!) Incidentally, while Rueda’s English is decent, some of the things she said didn’t make sense grammatically but we’ve done the best we can.

Shock: We were just talking about the style of the movie and the movies of Argento had a very specific acting style, so I was curious if it was natural to get into that type of acting or if it was something with which you were familiar?



Bélen Rueda: For me, it was important when I read the script that I can understand what happens with this character. For example, you can see in this movie that she’s very awake at first and after, she’s changing all the time, and you can see that is a normal situation. She loves to live and she has to do many things that she never thought before. For me, it’s very important that everything that you do, you believe that it’s real. I think that’s the only way that the audience, when they are watching me act, they can feel the same thing that you’re feeling. I think that even if you’re making drama or comedy or everything that you do, you have to believe that it’s true. In this script and in “The Orphanage” script, you can recognize the basic emotions, then you play with them.

Shock: There are elements in this that seem supernatural, and I was curious how you felt about some of the things that happened and whether we were dealing with the supernatural or not.



Rueda: Well, you have to see that this woman, at first, has real fears of the dark, because she knows that in at one moment in her life, she’s going to be blind. I think her fears of the dark is different and it’s not a (fear) of the other person, she doesn’t think about that. For her, (the dark) is more dangerous and scarier than that person. When you’re scared about something, I think that your mind starts to think more and more. You can see for example, the children, they think they have someone behind the bed. I think that you are afraid, your imagination starts to think of another thing that’s not true. For example, you hear a noise and you think that someone’s not there and it’s true. It could be the wind.



del Toro: If I may say this, I think that one of the things that I love in the screenplay–and I like in the movie still as much–is that you start with a character that is afraid of the dark, literally, because she’s going blind, as Belen said. She’s afraid of the physical blindness, and then she literally goe through a huge ordeal in the movie and then at the end, she doesn’t have the fear any more and she accepts the blindness at the end, which is beautiful. At the end, she makes peace, which is why at the end she understands what the husband said to her. “If I’m not here, would you still feel me,” and she says, “Yes I would.” It’s beautiful. She makes peace with that and I thought that was a great character journey.

Shock: Was Guillem able to shoot in some sort of order, because there’s a lot going on where you’re blind one moment and then not and then there are some dream sequences as well.



Rueda: Well, not really, but many people ask me if it’s difficult to be in all the scenes in the movie. For me, it’s very good because you’re with your character all the time, then you can feel every day what is going to happen, and it’s not possible because for example, when we were shooting outside in Barcelona, you have to make everything before other things that were inside.



del Toro: It was a rather quick movie to do, it was around 40 days, which were the style of the movie and for how stylized it is, it was super-fast. I couldn’t do it in 40 days, that’s for sure.



Rueda: At the end, it’s not difficult for me to think about she is in that moment because I worked every day, thinking about that, even when I went to my house. I live in Madrid and we shoot in Barcelona, and I was alone there, but sometimes, when you’re home and your children say, “Hello Mommy!” and you change, but you’re thinking about (the character) all the time.

Shock: How was it different as an experience making this movie compared to “The Orphanage”?



Rueda: It was very different because for example, in “The Orphanage,” it was very important the things happened in her mind, but here, it’s real, it’s real. Well, she’s afraid of some things that are happening but it’s real. In “The Orphanage,” everything was in her mind. I think that’s different because you can have limits when something is in your mind. Sometimes, speaking with Guillermo, he’d tell me, “People said that when you have a horror movie, but it’s not true,” but he said, “Yes, it’s true, but in your mind.” Now, it’s not true because you can touch it, and I think that it’s like that.

Shock: You’ve worked with the DP for a few movies in a row, and you must love him because he makes you look amazing on screen.



Rueda: He’s amazing. I would like to work always with him. (laughs) In this movie, I think that it was very difficult because you have dark, and you can see for example the face of the actors in the moment, but you have to have a different light in the moment. One day, when we were shooting and I was very bad in the scene, I watched it, and told him, “I’m so beautiful. It’s not good, because now I’m (being) bad.” And he told me, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay,” and the director said, “No, because you’re the object of desire,” and I was like, “Okay, okay.”

Shock: A lot of actors don’t like watching themselves on screen, but are you able to watch the whole 90 minutes of yourself on screen?



Rueda: Well, this is the question. You know the first time you see the movie finished, it’s good, because sometimes you can see many things that aren’t your work and then that’s very exciting, because then you see everything. But then afterwards, you start to say, “Oh my God, I thought it would be something different here.”



del Toro: It’s the same for a director.

Shock: Do you think there may be a third movie in this horror trilogy with Belen after “The Orphanage” and “Julia’s Eyes”?



del Toro: I hope.



Rueda: With him? Yes! But it depends.



del Toro: I’m going to pursue her.

Shock: But it would probably have to be with a third director.



del Toro: Well, I think (Juan Antonio) Bayona is onto another genre. I don’t think he’s coming back to horror. I think Guillem will stay in thrillers and horror. He’s a twisted little f*ck.

Shock: Since last we spoke, you got the greenlight to start working on “Mountains of Madness,” so do you have any idea when you’ll start shooting?



del Toro: If everything goes well, we’re designing, we’re budgeting. If everything goes well, we start in June, but it’s 150 days of shoot, so we’ll be shooting for a long time.

Shock: Where are you going to be shooting, do you know yet?



del Toro: We don’t know yet, but there’s a possibility we’re going to shoot in Canada in the North North, frozen North.

Shock: You should figure out where they shot “The Thing” prequel.



del Toro: I think this movie benefits from being in the real cold. I’m not exactly pulling a “Fitzcaraldo” but it’s different when you’re on a stage and you were in your camper having a cup of coffee. I think the way you interact with the cold is very important in that we keep them in reality-based.

Shock: Have you started playing with the 3D cameras yet and started testing them out?



del Toro: Yeah, yeah, we started on “The Hobbit.” We started getting familiar with that in case it happens and in the case of “The Hobbit,” it never went past conversations, we never locked into that, but in the case of “Mountains,” both the DP and I and my executive producer, we all went at different stages to Pace Systems, and we’re familiar with the cameras and rigs, and we’re going to be doing tests. It’s a different rhythm.

Shock: Do you have other things you’re producing in the interim?



del Toro: No, I’m producing “Pinocchio,” the stop-motion animation, much darker Pinocchio with music by Nicholas Cage, and that’s three years, but as a producer, I’m slowing down because I’m about to start directing and when I’m actively directing, I cannot be producing. I can only produce in between directing.

Shock: But you were able to produce this movie and “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” and “Splice,” because you were still in development on “The Hobbit.”



del Toro: Oh, yeah. During the two years of development on “The Hobbit,” I produced two screenplays, two novels, two productions and a bunch of other material that I wrote screenplays.

Shock: Right, you weren’t doing 18 hours a day on set during that time.



del Toro: No, I keep 18 hour days of my own. I try to work as much as possible. I like working. Normal life is what I’m not good at. I think if I could live on a set all day long every day, I would live on a set every day. For me, normal life is very freaky. I’ve never gotten used to it.

If you live in Spain, you’ll be able to catch Julia’s Eyes this weekend, starting October 29, in France on November 17, and Finland later this year. If you don’t live in one of those countries, you’ll have to wait for your local distributor to pick the movie up and figure out a suitable release date for your area.

Source: Edward Douglas

Movie News

Marvel and DC

X