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Paul Schrader’s moving OH, CANADA, starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Jacob Elordi, opens Friday.

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In Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada, which we open Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo, and Town Center, Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi play a man at opposite ends of his life, deciding how to live it. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Victoria Hill co-star.

Schrader said this about his film:

“When friend and author Russell Banks (Affliction) took ill I was weighing other story possibilities. I realized that mortality should be the subject. Russell had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked if I would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.

“Leonard Fife became a successful documentary filmmaker after fleeing to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Sick and dying in Montreal, he is interviewed by his former students. ‘I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,’ he says, ‘Now it’s my turn.'”

 

“Paul Schrader and Richard Gere, reunited for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo, are at the peak of their powers.” – Chuck Bowen, Slant

“Energized by the reunion of its director, Paul Schrader, and its star, Richard Gere, in their first collaboration since American Gigolo.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Richard Gere gives his best performance in years.” – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

“Takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning… to sincerely moving effect.” – Justin Chang, The New Yorker 

“My recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.” The New York Times’s Melissa Kirsch on moviegoing in general and ANORA in particular.

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When he accepted the Palme d’Or for his colorful, authentic, surprising, exciting, thrilling comedy Anora earlier this year at Cannes, writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) spoke eloquently about seeing movies in theaters. You can watch the whole thing online, but here’s the key excerpt:
“This literally has been my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years. So I’m not really sure what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life, but I do know that I will continue to fight for cinema because right now, as filmmakers, we have to fight to keep cinema alive. This means making feature films intended for theatrical exhibition. The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone and checking mail, emails and half paying attention is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so. Watching a film with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences. We share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, and, hopefully, have a catharsis with our friends and strangers, and that’s sacred. So I see the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”
After seeing Anora in a theater, Melissa Kirsch of the New York Times wrote this terrific short piece which was posted over the weekend:

“It’s the season when many festival darlings, the films that critics saw and loved in Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto, finally arrive in theaters, and this year, it feels different. More exciting? More like the old days? I’ve been making a concerted effort to actually go and see movies in the movie theater instead of waiting for them to arrive on streaming platforms, and it’s been paying off gloriously.

“The movies I’ve seen recently — “Didi,” “Megalopolis,” “Anora,” “Saturday Night” — have felt urgent and exciting: complicated stories with complicated characters, not a superhero franchise among them. I didn’t love all of these movies equally, but I loved seeing them, loved being in the dark drinking up their writers’ and directors’ idiosyncratic visions. And I loved the intention that led to the experience: I made a decision to see a movie, went to an establishment expressly built for that purpose, sat and paid attention for the length of the film and then, only then, returned to nonmovie life. Contrast that experience with the half-attention I so often pay a movie on a streaming platform, watching it in installments over several nights, maybe on an iPad, maybe while I’m brushing my teeth.

“Each movie I saw in the theater, I talked about afterward, with the friends accompanying me, with colleagues the next day. Some of the movies I’ve streamed — some abandoned before completion — I’ve discussed with no one. As the Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in his wonderful essay “Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?”: “Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation.” I’m willing to wager that no filmmaker ever made a movie hoping or expecting that it would end up beyond the reach of conversation.

“Not every movie you watch has to be a means of connecting with other people, but it could be. Walking out of “Anora” the other night, chatting with friends, comparing the film with the director’s previous ones, I realized how rare the experience of seeing a movie with a group had become for me. Once, it was commonplace, a weekly tradition. Every Sunday evening when I was 14 and 15, my friends Justin and Tracy and I would go with one of our moms (we couldn’t yet drive ourselves) to the SoNo Cinema, an art-house theater in South Norwalk, Conn., where we saw films that would never be shown in our suburb’s mainstream theaters. We saw Hugh Grant in Ken Russell’s horror movie “The Lair of the White Worm.” We saw “Babette’s Feast,” the first Danish film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” After, we’d go out to dinner and discuss what we’d just watched.

“Searching for information about the theater, I found stories about its struggles to stay open over the years, its various fund-raising efforts. “I’m convinced that a lot of the young people we used to draw are raising families now and watching video rental films at home,” the owner told The Times in 1987, the same year we went to SoNo to see the British film “White Mischief,” about the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya. It closed not long after.

“I’ve over-romanticized those early adventures in theatergoing (I’m not the only one — “the movie house equivalent of ‘The Secret Garden,’” Tracy called it when I asked her recently). But the truth is, my friends and I still discuss the movies we saw at SoNo, how they informed our ideas of what life after high school might be like. And while I’m not going to argue that we’re as impressionable in middle age as we were when we’d been alive for barely more than a decade, my recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.”

We are proud to open Anora this Friday at the Glendale, Monica Film Center, and NoHo and November 8 at the Claremont. It is fantastic and even better in a theater.

THE EYE OF THE SALAMANDER Opens Friday.

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THE EYE OF THE SALAMANDER

Opening at the Laemmle Glendale on Friday, November 1

Q&A with Writer/Director Pavel Nikolajev and Producer Olga Polevaya on Saturday, November 2 following primetime showing

An Aztec pyramid figurine found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico stores a dark secret, which is discovered by professor Hiscock, a non-traditional hero, who will learn quantum teleportation the hard way, facing primal folklore fears and his alter ego in the gruesome catacombs of uncharted realm.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“I had a vision to create a film about instant teleportation via an ancient artifact for quite some time and was finally able to finish the script when my son was born, and I had a parental break. Weirdly, COVID that followed helped in creating the creature costume when everybody was locked in and I had plenty of time to do it right. 

For filming, we tried using the style / look & feel of the classic ’80s/’90s Sci-Fi/Thriller films which I’m a big fan of, so most of the effects are practical with minimal CGI! The same technique I used in my previous film HEADSOME. Everything else was just good old exhausting indie filmmaking!” 

-Pavel Nikolajev

FOOD AND COUNTRY Director Laura Gabbert: “Ruth [Reichl] and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system.”

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Ruth Reichl—trailblazing New York Times food critic, groundbreaking Gourmet Magazine editor, best-selling memoirist, and, for decades, one of the most influential figures shaping American food culture—grows concerned about the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestle with both immediate and systemic challenges as the pandemic takes hold.

In Food and Country, Reichl reaches across political and social divides to discover innovators who are risking it all to survive on the front lines. As one person leads her to the next, she follows the unfolding stories of ranchers in Kansas and Georgia; farmers in Nebraska, Ohio, and the Bronx; a New England fisherman; and maverick chefs on both coasts. As she witnesses them navigate intractable circumstances, Reichl shares pieces of her own life, and, in doing so, begins to take stock of the path she has traveled and the ideals she left behind. Through her eyes, we get to know the humanity and struggle behind the food we eat. As Reichl says: “How we grow and make our food shows us our values– as a nation and as human beings.

Food and Country filmmaker Laura Gabbert will participate in Q&As after the 10/9 and 10/10 screenings at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and Glendale. The regular engagement at the Royal begins on October 11.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“What drives me as a filmmaker is finding ways to put us inside, to humanize someone else’s experience; in short to connect us. My own instincts lead me back to food stories again and again because they’re a rich prism through which to understand culture and our relationships to each other. Food is a conduit, a vehicle that connects people to people, and people to culture.

“My 2015 documentary, City of Gold, is about the late Jonathan Gold, the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Jonathan’s writing gave me a way to understand and love Los Angeles. He wrote about restaurants and food as the gateway to connection and empathy across perceived boundaries in a city bursting with multiple cultures and ethnicities. In my next culinary film, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, decadent cakes became an expression and critique of contemporary excess, and laid bare our longing for community in a world of inequity and exclusion. Food and Country, my third food foray, was prompted by Covid, but it’s not actually about Covid; it’s about the people behind our food. Transcending blue state/red state politics, their resilience and ingenuity are the heart of this film.

“In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I saw that independent restaurants were the canary in the coalmine and began to worry about the restaurant owners, chefs, and workers with whom I had grown close while making City of Gold. Knowing so many people in the food world with urgent, compelling stories that needed to be told, I felt I had to document their plight. How they would adapt to survive. I wondered how the potential loss of these businesses would change the fabric of our communities and cities.

“Just as I was preparing to film struggling Los Angeles restaurants, storied food writer Ruth Reichl reached out to me and said, “I hear we’re working on something similar. Let’s talk.” Ruth was taking a bigger picture approach to the crisis — grasping right away the devastating impact the pandemic could have on the entire food chain. Ruth and I quickly decided to join forces and began reaching out to pivotal players in food through video calls. Ruth’s stellar reputation as chronicler and voice of American food culture for the last four decades opened doors, but everywhere we turned, it was Ruth’s authenticity, curiosity, and warmth that inspired trust and elicited truth telling. People across the front lines of the food chain and political divides — from the most celebrated chefs, to food equity activists, to farmers and ranchers— wanted to talk with her. And, we would soon learn, they also wanted to open up and confide in her, and even seek solace. But the connection between Ruth and our characters is a two-way street. Just as they rely on Ruth, so too does Ruth lean on them for insight and closeness.

“Ruth and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system. Collectively their story is the story of all independent businesses fighting to survive an ever-consolidating industry. Their stories also hold up a mirror. How we make and grow our food tells us who we are as a country, who we are as human beings.” — Laura Gabbert

 

“Pessimism, nihilism and melancholia irrigate THE FALLING STAR, but our ensemble of morally inept characters fill our film noir with vibrant, jubilant color.”

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An official selection of the Telluride and Locarno Film Festivals, The Falling Star is the latest caper from Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon (Lost in Paris, The Fairy) filters the language of film noir through their characteristically colorful palette to create a series of deceptively minimalistic set pieces that recall the best of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. Abel plays Boris, a former activist hiding from his dark past, keeping in the shadows as a barkeeper until a one-armed vigilante finally hunts him down. The fortuitous appearance of a double – the depressive recluse Dom (also played by Abel) – seems to offer the perfect decoy. But his tenacious and loopy ex-wife, the private eye Fiona (Gordon), could foil their master plan.

We open The Falling Star this Friday, September 20 at the Royal.

“Next time someone wistfully insists, ‘They don’t make ’em like they used to,’ why not point that nostalgic cinephile to the work of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon? The Belgium-based creative couple are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on-screen.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

“Unique and poetic…a symphony of primary colours, scenes composed as if paintings, bodies which speak louder than words, dances which suddenly possess the various characters, and irresistible visual ingeniousness (only they could find such sublimity in toilet paper).” – Aurore Engelen, Cineuropa

Directors’ note: “The Falling Star, our fifth film, takes place in a world of social turmoil: today. Every time we open the door we can hear the chant: a world with no conscience is destroying the world. We’ve placed our disgraced political hero in this contemporary context. Boris continues to bury his head in the sand whilst all around him, ardent activists protest for a fairer, cleaner world. In parallel, we follow a more intimate struggle with Dom and Fiona, two social misfits who continue to exist in a world that continues to exist without them.”

On their style: “Our films are often described as “poetico-burlesque.” By crossing the road from physical comedy to film noir we aren’t abandoning our desire to create laughter. We’re exploring a more bitter palette. Pessimism, nihilism and melancholia irrigate The Falling Star, but our ensemble of morally inept characters fill our film noir with vibrant, jubilant color.”

Fiona Gordon was born in Australia in 1957, Dominique Abel in a small Belgian town called Lobbes the same year. After their studies (theatre for Fiona, economics for Dominique) they studied theater and movement with Jacques Lecoq, Philippe Gaulier & Monika Pagneux in Paris, where they met.

In the eighties, they created several physical theater shows that toured worldwide and founded their company, COURAGE MON AMOUR.They took their first film directing steps in the nineties with three shorts, then began making features, often with their accomplice, Bruno ROMY.

“It’s a story of how we survive our parents, and the beauty of that survival.” Filmmaker Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio on IN THE SUMMERS, opening September 20 at the Royal and September 27 at the Town Center and NoHo.

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Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, In the Summers is a brilliant portrayal of resilience and survival that follows siblings Violeta and Eva. They live in California with their mother, but every summer travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente. Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva learn to appreciate their father as a person.

Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that “the feature is a visual poem, an enveloping four-stanza ode to experiences shared by a man and his daughters.”

“These understated scenes of familial intimacy introduce Lacorazza Samudio as a director with a deft hand for crafting character development from lived-in behavior rather than dialogue…In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.” ~ Carlos Aguilar, Variety

“The most impressive work belongs to that of Residente, a Puerto Rican rapper otherwise known as René Pérez Joglar. As [Vicente], Residente avoids the pitfalls of playing bad fathers… Residente finds the subtlety in his flaws…Because of this attention to the environment that shapes these hot days, In the Summers is brimming full of its characters’ internal aches rendered elegantly across time.” ~ Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire

In the Summers actor Sasha Calle will participate in a Q&As at the Royal on Friday, September 20.

Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s statement:

“My father was a brilliant and beautiful man. Maybe the smartest person I’ve ever known. He had a love of science he wanted to share, even when his audience wasn’t eager. I knew he was prone to anger and drinking and probably drugs. But there was a lot I didn’t understand until he died. 

“I was in a bad car accident with my father and sister when I was young, one where I was severely injured and suffered traumatic brain trauma. What I thought happened was there was a car accident, an ambulance came, and we were taken to the nearest hospital, and eventually we recovered. What I found out after his death, was that he had to drag our bodies from the wreckage and walk down a deserted road until someone stopped to help him. That realization took the car accident, which I have always thought of as my trauma, and made me realize it was also his trauma. Our shared trauma. It made me realize there was a deeper complexity to my father. A deeply wounded, chaotic, man raised me but he also had a deep love for his daughters. 

“And so I started the long process of creating In the Summers. My aim was to explore this human who, for better or worse, was the root of so much of me. During this process I kept asking, can we make amends? For our missteps, our words, our actions? Or will they forever define us? The closer I get to finishing this film the more I realize that the issue is with the question. Life is far more complex. 

“In the Summers explores Latine identity through its characters and how it intersects with fatherhood, addiction, trauma, sexuality and access to opportunity. It’s a story of how we survive our parents, and the beauty of that survival. This is a personal film for me not only because it is inspired by my life but because I want to see complex Latine and Queer characters shown in an honest way. Thank you for considering this project and having the opportunity to tell my story.”

Featuring a “spine-tingling” lead performance, NOWHERE SPECIAL opens April 26.

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Uberto Pasolini’s new film Nowhere Special stars the gifted English actor James Norton as a single father who dedicates the last few months of his life to finding a new family for his four-year-old son. It’s based on a true story. We open Nowhere Special April 26 at the Royal and May 3 at our Claremont, Glendale and Encino theaters. Pasolini wrote the following about how he, his cast and crew were able to create this brilliant, understated movie:

“I wanted to make this film as soon as I read about the case of a terminally ill father attempting to find a new family for his toddler son before his death. Although the situation the main characters find themselves in is very dramatic, the decision at script level was to approach the story in a very subtle, “quiet” way, as far away from melodrama and sentimentalism as possible, as in a film by Yasujirō Ozu, or, more recently, the work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. This approach was reflected in the style of the filmmaking we adopted, direct and free from distracting stylistic flourishes. Marius Panduru’s camera work was designed to be both fluid and unobtrusive, when appropriate even reflecting the child’s point of view. The main directorial challenge of the film was that of working with a very young child, and of creating a believable and moving father-son relationship on camera. Fortunately, in young Daniel Lamont, then four years old, we have an extraordinarily aware and sensitive natural performer, and in James Norton a most generous actor, who was happy to dedicate long days into creating a connection with the boy well ahead of the shoot, and to support and guide Daniel throughout what for any child would have been an intense and at times bewildering experience.”

“In spite of myself I invested totally in Norton’s spine-tingling, intimate performance; and, in spite of myself, the end had me in floods of tears.” ~ Cath Clarke, Guardian

“Uberto Pasolini’s film takes a real-life story as his starting block and turns this tiny Northern Ireland-set tale into an almost sensory experience.” Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International
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“Be warned: you will need to keep a box of tissues to hand, if not all the tissues in the world.” ~ Deborah Ross, The Spectator

“Accepting and recovering from loss, undoubtedly, is the intellectual motor and the emotional reason for making the animated version of ROBOT DREAMS.”

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Next Wednesday the 6th we’ll be screening Robot Dreams at four of our seven theaters, offering a chance to see this lovely Academy Award-nominated animated feature on a big screen with an audience before the Oscars. The adventures of Dog and Robot in New York City during the 1980s is appropriate for all but the very young.

Director Pablo Berger’s Decalogue:

ROBOT DREAMS is a reflection on friendship. 

It’s importance and its fragility. The passing of time, loss but also about overcoming it. Why do we constantly put our relationships in danger? 

ROBOT DREAMS is an animated film. 

With ROBOT DREAMS I wanted to explore the infinite narrative possibilities of animation. A medium where everything is possible and there are no formal limits. 

ROBOT DREAMS is a sensorial journey. 

A story written with images, sound and music. A film for daydreaming and accompanying Dog and Robot on their adventures and misadventures. An experience to feel. 

ROBOT DREAMS is our interpretation of the graphic world of Sara Varon. 

Varon is one of the best known illustrators from the United States. Her anthropomorphic world of animals with human behavior who live in New York is a constant in all her books. Her stories, her recognizable style and her expressive use of color, make her an exceptional graphic artist. 

ROBOT DREAMS is a musical. 

From the first image to the end, music is present, giving voice to the characters and intensifying their emotions. The soundtrack combines original music by Alfonso de Vilallonga with great musical hits, from the legendary September by Earth, Wind & Fire to the 80s Let’s Go by The Feelies. 

ROBOT DREAMS is my “love letter” to New York. 

The spectators will travel back in time to the NYC of the 80s. They’ll live in a little apartment in East Village, they’ll take the subway to go to Chinatown, they’ll eat a hotdog from a street vendor on 5th Avenue or go skating in Central Park. ROBOT DREAMS is my particular homage to New York, the city that took me in for a decade and in which I became a filmmaker. 

ROBOT DREAMS is for all audiences. 

I want to captivate the spectators, the youngest and the oldest, from all around, telling them a story full of fantasy but as real as life itself. A different film for each one. 

ROBOT DREAMS is another twist in my filmography. 

My aim as a writer-director is always to surprise the audience. I try to make each one of my films a journey to the unknown. Torremolinos 73, Blancanieves and Abracadabra were that. Now it is the turn of ROBOT DREAMS. 

Pablo Berger

ROBOT DREAMS is a Spanish-French coproduction with an international focus. We merged our artistic and economic resources with France in order to carry out this project. ROBOT DREAMS had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and it then participated in the Annecy Animation Festival. As with my previous films, it will be released worldwide. 

ROBOT DREAMS is full of emotions. 

A fantastical fable where a glance contains the boldest action. And where emotion comes from the “human” and sincere behavior of our protagonists when faced with adversity.

Director’s Notes 

Origin 

Over ten years ago, when I was embarked on my chimerical, but finally real, endeavor of making the film Blancanieves, I came across the graphic novel Robot Dreams by Sara Varon. I was gripped from the first pages. 

I didn’t read it, I devoured it. Like all good tales, its story took me to an unknown but recognizable place, where I felt at home. I was captivated by its temporal structure, it made me laugh and cry, and most importantly it made me reflect on friendship. While reading it I remembered my great friends, the ones who are still by my side, but above all, those who moved away or whom I lost along the way… I can say that Robot Dreams has reconciled me with my conflicting feelings about the loss of loved ones. Accepting and recovering from loss, undoubtedly, is the intellectual motor and the emotional reason for making the animated version of ROBOT DREAMS. 

The World of Sara Varon 

Sara Varon, the author of the homonymous graphic novel which inspired ROBOT DREAMS, is an artist with a world of her own. Her stories are fables inhabited by the most diverse animals with human behavior, who coexist in a recognizable, nostalgic New York. The diversity of their fauna reflects perfectly the cocktail of races and ethnicities that live in the Big Apple, giving her stories a greater Universality. Our interpretation of the world of Sara Varon has been from a respectful place, but also from a place of total freedom. Fortunately, from the start, Sara gave us “carte blanche” to create “our” particular ROBOT DREAMS and adapt it to a new medium, film. 

The “ligne claire,” A Visual Punch 

The graphic style of both the graphic novel and the film ROBOT DREAMS derives from the “Ligne Claire” style, with origins in the French- Belgian school and Hergé, the author of Tintin as its greatest exponent. It is characterized by a narrative way of representing reality using continuous clean lines, flat colors and limited shadows. A visual punch. A way of drawing that made a comeback with great popularity in the 

80s with the comics by Serge Clerc, Yves Chaland or Floc’h. In Spain, its ambassador was the publication Cairo and its greatest representative Daniel Torres. A style, the ligne claire, which today is again very present in the comic world thanks to Adrian Tomine or Chris Ware. 

A big part of my love for cinema comes from comics. 

ROBOT DREAMS, the film, was thought as a comic turned into animated drawings. To achieve this, we have used the characteristics typical of both media and the “Deep Focus” technique, meaning all elements in every shot. 

Writing with Images 

It has been over a century since the first animation film, Fantamagorie (1908) by Émil Cohl. A short film that retains its magic and its ability to amaze us based only on the power of the line. Of the image. That

is the essence of cinema, writing with images. As a filmmaker it is a challenge and at the same time an enormous pleasure to write stories without using dialog. 

After my film Blancanieves, I wanted to go back with ROBOT DREAMS to the essence of pure cinema. But this time from another angle, that of animation. A form of representation and storytelling that has no limits. 

The films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd have been mandatory viewings for the ROBOT DREAMS crew. The wisdom, humanity and humor present in their work have been a great source of inspiration. 

The World of Dreams 

An essential part of this film are the dreams of our protagonist, Robot. Cinema is daydreaming. Robot’s dreams are a delirious, Freudian, amazing expression of his most intimate desire to meet his friend Dog again. It’s his “return to Ithaca”. 

One of my reference comics, and graphic oracles, is Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905). A comic strip where the imagination of its author, Winsor McCay, takes us along with little Nemo on his journey to the “World of Dreams”, Slumberland. A place where everything is possible and in which the unexpected narrative twists follow on endlessly. With ROBOT DREAMS our aim has been the same: to put the spectator on a rollercoaster of continuous surprises. 

Art Direction 

As a fan of comics and illustration I have been an admirer of the work of José Luis Ágreda for over twenty five years. 

He has an impeccable technique and a unique sense of color. His exceptional work in the animation film Buñuel in The Labyrinth of the Turtles (2019) and his experience in the prestigious animation studio Cartoon Saloon, made him my first option as Art Director for ROBOT DREAMS. 

A great team of over twenty artists under José Luis’ direction developed concepts, characters, backgrounds, props, color script… the Robot Dreams world. Particular mention for the person in charge of character design, Daniel Fernández Casas. A young designer of enormous talent who has worked on some of the most important films in recent animation such as Klaus or the latest film by Benjamin Renner for the Illumination studio. His first mission on ROBOT DREAMS was to “redraw” our protagonists from the comic to a new medium, cinema. He gave them a fabulous make-over. Then, along with his team, he had to design the most varied jungle of New Yorkers. Hundreds. Sorry, thousands of extras. Be on the lookout. 

The Dreamed Film 

In preparing all my previous projects, I’ve always made a detailed storyboard of the entire film. For me, the storyboard is the treasure map. “The dreamed and edited film” as Hitchcock said. That is what I felt

my move to animation as something natural. Without being aware of it, my previous work process was perfect for the dynamics of animation. 

I used my experience in live action cinema to visualize the story in animated images. A cinematic language where the editing, the composition, the point of view, the visual poetry, the ellipsis and off-screen were essential elements when it came to telling the story of Dog and Robot. 

The process of doing the storyboard and the animatics of the film took a full year. We were fortunate in having the storyboard artist Maca Gil, who had just worked on My Father’s Dragon. Maca is a great artist who with two strokes is capable of expressing a range of emotions or representing very complex shots with precision. The team was completed by the editor Fernando Franco and the music editor Yuko Harami. 

Fernando and I had worked together on Blancanieves, and our experience had been so incredible that we were looking for an opportunity to repeat it. For a director his editor is like his dance partner, and Fernando and I dance wonderfully together. 

Yuko Harami has been the music editor of all my films. There is no making them without her. In ROBOT DREAMS she established the musical concept, looking for and manipulating pre-existing music or “temps” to give emotion and melodic unity to the animatics. Yuko has a unique sensitivity in the selection of this music, which later is of great use for inspiring the composers in their final musical pieces. 

Something particular of animation is the Animation storyboard or animatic. The “almost” final edited film. As a writer and director, this is, undoubtedly, the time that the final result is closest to “my dreamed film”. 

The Animation 

ROBOT DREAMS is a film that looks at the past, at traditional animation, but it is conceived for today’s audience. The film doesn’t exclude any kind of spectator. Classic animation, in two dimensions, drawn frame by frame, has its own 8 expressiveness, humanity and empathy. In ROBOT DREAMS, we have sought a fluidity and a line that reflect the story and its characters with simplicity. And coming from working with actors, I have given maximum importance to the eyes. Our animated characters’ gaze has been the essential element in obtaining performances full of life. In an animation film, in some way, the animators are the actors, they are the ones who give life to each character. Working with them has, definitely, been one of the most gratifying experiences on this long journey. 

During the animation stage of the project I relied on the great artist and animation director Benoît Feroumont. When I saw his last short film Le Lion et le Singe I immediately thought that he would be the ideal collaborator for ROBOT DREAMS. Le Lion et le Singe is a wonderful short film full of truth, tenderness and humor. And in addition, also without dialogue. Benoît has great experience as director of animation and has worked on outstanding films such as The Triplets of Belleville by Sylvain Chomet, or

The Book of Kells by Tom Moore. His know-how and sensitivity have been essential to successfully lead a team of over sixty animators. 

Music and Sound 

Collaborating again with Alfonso de Vilallonga, music composer for my films Blancanieves and Abracadabra, has been, once again, an enormous pleasure. Alfonso is an eclectic, surprising composer, with a prodigious capacity for creating music full of emotion, feelings and rhythm. In ROBOT DREAMS he has done it again thanks to the delicate piano melodies and the cool jazz, a very New York urban sound. 

The film’s sound design is a jungle of sound. From domestic environments and noises to the loud, bustling streets of the different neighborhoods in NYC. The sound design for ROBOT DREAMS is the third dimension. Fabiola Ordoyo, with whom I worked on my previous film, Abracadabra, is an alchemist of sound, capable of achieving the perfect color for any atmosphere or sound effect. But unlike in live action film where the base and backbone is the “location sound” recorded on set, in an animation film the designer has to create absolutely all the sounds. A challenge.