Having made its way around the festival circuit to great acclaim over the past year, the Spanish film TIMECRIMES opens commercially in the U.S. in limited release December 12 from Magnolia Pictures as part of its 6-Shooter Film Series. It’s a unique, low-budget riff on the classic science fiction trope of time travel, spiced up with black humor, a dash of eroticism and a large heap of brooding atmosphere that at times makes it feel more like a formal European horror thriller than a mindbending SF exercise.
Writer/director and co-star Nacho Vigalondo, making his feature film debut here after several acclaimed short films, says that mixing up genres was exactly his aim. “When you’re making a time-travel movie, you have to make it detailed and intelligent, but you also have to make it funny,” he explains. “I also love crime films, stuff from Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, so it was fun for me to put these two genres together. Finally, I love the Italian horror movies, the gialli. I see TIMECRIMES as a twisted giallo. You have the strange killer, the lady in an erotic situation—we have the basic elements, but in a new, twisted way and mixed with science fiction and other elements. At the end of the day, though, it’s still a psycho killer chasing a girl!”
It’s hardly that simple, though. TIMECRIMES starts with a man named Hector (Karra Elejalde of THE NAMELESS) relaxing with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez) at their country house, when he suddenly spies a beautiful nude girl (Barbara Goenaga) in the nearby woods through his binoculars. Walking into the forest to investigate, he is assaulted by a frightening figure whose head is wrapped in ragged, bloody bandages. Running further into the woods, he stumbles upon what seems to be a laboratory facility, where a lone scientist (Vigalondo himself) quickly ushers him into a strange contraption. Hector emerges seconds later—only to find out that he has traveled hours into the past. Thus begins a bizarre and increasingly complicated chain of events that finds Hector repeatedly going back in time, leading to a confrontation with…himself.
To say more would ruin the surprises of Vigalondo’s compact yet intricate screenplay, and it might be fruitless to attempt to map out the story’s twists and paradoxes anyway. “From the beginning, I knew I wouldn’t have a big budget, so I knew that my special effect would be the script itself,” Vigalondo says of his well-crafted puzzlebox of a movie. “And when you have a long time off while trying to raise the financing for even a little film like this, you end up having time for one more draft of the screenplay. So that was my secret weapon in a way—writing another draft, and another, and another, in order to create a script that really worked. At the same time, you want to make everything line up and have a structure that makes sense, but you cannot forget that you want to make an entertaining film as well.”
Having come out of the world of TV and short movies (including 2003’s 7:35 IN THE MORNING, an Oscar nominee for Best Live Action Short Film), Vigalondo was used to working with tight schedules and budgets. Costing the Euro equivalent of roughly $2.5 million, TIMECRIMES was shot in 2006 in the northern Spanish region of Cantabria, near where Vigalondo lives. The film took an unusually long—for an indie—eight weeks to shoot because of meteorological problems, including a tornado that destroyed the locations. “This movie was my little APOCALYPSE NOW, in the sense that the shoot was so complicated by weather,” Vigalondo recalls. “When you’re shooting outdoors in the north of Spain and the weather is so unpredictable, you get into this ridiculous situation where you have to wait for the real rain to stop so you can use your fake rain, because the real kind doesn’t show up on camera.”
Shooting the movie with so little time and money meant that special FX, so prevalent in most science fiction films, would be virtually nonexistent. “I feel very comfortable and safe in dealing with just a few elements,” notes Vigalondo, who adds that other scripts he’s been developing are also “really, really cheap.” “It’s like doing magic with only a deck of cards. I love the idea of coming to Hollywood and working with bigger actors, but even then I would like to keep making smaller-sized films. There is some CGI in TIMECRIMES, but all of it is photo-realistic and should not be noticeable.
“For me, science fiction is about ideas,” the filmmaker continues. “When you’re reading Philip K. Dick, you don’t have specific and detailed descriptions of spaceships. Those are just devices. I don’t care about the technical aspects. For me, science fiction is about crazy ideas that allow you to talk about human nature in an entertaining and fun way.”
Vigalondo has plenty more of those crazy ideas up his sleeve; he has several projects in mind to shoot in Spain, all of which involve the same blending of genre elements that he pulls off so well in TIMECRIMES. Hollywood is also tentatively calling as well, thanks to the strong buzz surrounding his debut feature. “What’s funny is that the good North American reception to TIMECRIMES came before the Spanish reaction,” he reveals. “We found American distribution before we found Spanish distribution, so it was a strange situation. Plus I was an Oscar nominee for one of my short films, so I keep feeling this kind of good relationship with Hollywood, even more than the Spanish film industry. So it’s not hard to picture myself making movies here. Each time I come to LA, I have a batch of meetings and we keep trying to find something to develop. It’s still too early to know what my first U.S. project will be, but it seems it’s going to come sooner rather than later. And I’d like to stick with films like TIMECRIMES, which mix genres.”
Like just about every foreign genre film these days, TIMECRIMES has also been picked up for an English-language remake, with United Artists grabbing the rights and a screenplay already penned by Timothy (CHILDREN OF MEN) Sexton. While David Cronenberg has been said to be involved as director, Vigalondo isn’t sure if the horror legend is still in the mix. “I don’t know if David Cronenberg is still attached to the remake,” he says, adding that he himself is not working on the project in any way. “[Cronenberg] was linked to it in the beginning, but now I have seen a list of other directors that could be involved in it. It’s an incredible list, but if I reveal any of them they’ll probably kill me!” (One name that has been bandied around the Internet is George A. Romero.)
Vigalondo is not upset with the idea of his picture getting a Stateside revamp, possibly because the original is receiving the relatively rare chance to screen for U.S. audiences. “It’s not difficult for me to picture a bigger and better version of TIMECRIMES because of the potential names involved,” he admits. “But I’m amazed and pleased that American audiences will get to enjoy both films. It’s so strange for a movie like this to come out in theatres in the U.S., so I feel fortunate about that. I know that when you hear about remakes, your automatic response is, ‘Oh no, I prefer the original,’ but when it happens to you personally, it’s so cool. This is my first feature, so for me it’s like living a dream, and it gives me confidence in my own future works. So I have to confess that I’m OK with the remake.”
Jorge makes this comment
Thu 04 Dec 2008 15:30:25 CST