Illusions of grandeur

Spanish director Oriol Paulo returns to China to promote his latest suspense thriller, which taps into time travel to deliver the master storyteller's trademark punch, Xu Fan reports.

Thanks to the hit thriller The Invisible Guest, Spain's highest-grossing film of all time in China, director Oriol Paulo has already built up a sizable fan base in the country.

Recently, the Barcelona-born filmmaker visited Beijing to promote his latest flick, Mirage, which will open in theaters across the Chinese mainland on March 28. It is now available on Netflix.

Starring Spanish actress Adriana Ugarte and Argentine actor Chino Darín, the plot-twisting thriller - told through a sci-fi, time-travel frame - begins with a murder that takes place in Spain in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A teenager inadvertently witnesses the death of a neighbor, but is run over by a car as he tries to escape from the killer. Twenty-five years later, a nurse (played by Ugarte) finds that the effects of a storm miraculously enables her to communicate with the boy through television, and her warnings to the boy about the impending danger he is in spark an unexpected chain of events.

One interesting fact about the film is that the inspiration for the movie came from Paulo's personal life. Speaking at a Beijing hotel, the director candidly recalls how he fell in love with his partner five years ago.

"She asked me for a child and I said 'OK, but we should talk about this because it's an important step'. So we had a huge discussion," says Paulo, who is visiting the Chinese capital for the third time.

"When I woke up the next day, the world seemed completely strange to me and I was thinking that I didn't really know the person who was with me ... It was so weird. My head felt like it was going to explode but I knew there could be a story in it," he says.

Spellbound by this seemingly crazy idea, Paulo invited his university classmate Lara Sendim to co-write the story. He wanted a female scriptwriter to develop the lead character of the nurse, to make her as convincing and identifiable as possible to the audience.

"I like to make movies with strong female roles. This story needs to be told through the eyes of a mother because it makes it much more powerful," he explains.

In the film, the nurse is married and has a lovely daughter. After she rescues the teenage boy, the timelines change and she wakes up to find that she is single and has no child. The desperate woman then tries to find her "missing" daughter by any means necessary.

To make the story more believable, Paulo turned to a local quantum physics professor to help him polish the sci-fi elements, including the scientific terms and the principles of time travel.

The director - who is considered by many Chinese fans as a master storyteller - interweaves real-world historic events into the plot, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Explaining the sequences as a metaphor to symbolize the changes in the protagonist's life, he says he tries to examine the uncertainty of life and the possibilities that would take place if people were given a second chance to make an important decision.

"I think everybody at some point in their life has thought about what would have happened if they had turned right instead of going left in the past. And this is what the movie is about," Paulo says.

While the limited time allotted for the interview didn't allow media to delve deeper into his past, there is perhaps one thing above all that Paulo does not regret about his life - his passion for suspense tales.

When he was a teenager, his grandmother - a huge fan of detective novels and suspense thrillers - used to "force" him to watch Alfred Hitchcock films and read Agatha Christie books.

"She wanted to discuss the stories with somebody. So that's how I fell in love with mysteries.

"So, when I started to make films, I thought I would like the audience to feel like I felt when I was a kid. By then I was so involved with what was happening on the screen that I didn't want to blink.

"I think that's why I like suspense films, because I don't want people to blink while they're watching the movie," he says.

Born in 1975, Paulo grew to fame as a joint screenwriter of the 2010 thriller Julia's Eyes, produced by Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo del Toro.

Following the success of his directorial debut, The Body, in 2012, Paulo's second feature The Invisible Guest raked in 172 million yuan ($25.6 million) in China, earning a score of 9.4 points out of 10 on box-office tracker Maoyan.

Revealing his favorite Chinese films such as Xin Yukun's sleeper hit The Coffin in the Mountain (2015) and Hong Kong blockbuster Project Gutenberg (2018), Paulo says he would like to work with Chinese filmmakers to create a suspense thriller.

And, he has a special routine he follows when he is writing a story. Paulo usually swims in the morning to relax his mind, before moving indoors to work, where he conceives and develops his plotlines in a room with a large board mounted on the wall.

"I put all the cards and organize all the information on the board. It's like doing a puzzle," he says.

"The script is like the seed that you put in the earth, and then from it a tree grows. Without a good seed you have no tree. So I've paid a lot of attention and invested a lot of time in writing. For me, the script is the most important part of the process."

Contact the writer at xufan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/28/2019 page16)