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Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya- Sitges 2007
 

[REC], Balagueró takes your breath away

Per Yolanda Aguilar - 05/10/2007

5th October

A nice old lady

The whole team

Director, actress and director... or Plaza, Velasco and Balagueró

Jaume Balagueró is another one of the regulars at the Sitges Film Festival. While in past editions he offered us paranormal scares, now he’s presenting [REC], a movie filmed as a fake television documentary that with very few resources gets the maximum effectiveness by frightening the audience and leaving them stuck on their seats.

Indeed today it was Balagueró’s and [REC]’s day and it has been a successful one. Once the showing concluded you could hear statements such as: “it’s really scary”, “it’s been so intense” or “I’ve had a great bad time with this one”. And this in a Festival committed to terror films means reaching the goal.

[REC] tells us the story of the crew of a television program that follows a group of firemen films their day to day activity. One night they receive a call to intervene in a building of Barcelona’s neighborhood of El Eixample. What seem to be a simple mission to assist an old woman who had fall at her apartment turns into a strange case, with a series of deaths and a virus thread that forces the tv crew and the fireman to remain quarantined in the building.

The movie is filmed with camera on-hand and simulating a fake reality with real-time action. That makes [REC], easily comparable to "The Blair Witch Project" but goes far beyond that movie by taking a more realistic approach to the action.

During the press conference, the directors Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró, the actress Manuela Velazquez, and the executive producer Júlio Fernández, have told us how the idea for the film was conceived. According to Jaume Balagueró the Project started when he and Plaza were talking one day about "the genre movies, how are they made and could they be made so the audience could see them from the inside ". Balagueró and Plaza chose the to try and offer that experience to the movie goer, as real as possible  without some common ‘tricks’ in this kind of movies such as the music or the editing: “When one of us said ‘action’ the camera started recording and it didn’t stop, not even if one of the actors fell down. We wanted to film a tv documentary about a fake reality so we played with the actors who never knew the whole story. We even had them shooting scenes that we knew we were not going to use, just to disorientate them ".

Balagueró himself thinks that what makes a terror movie successful is the fact that the fear comes from feeling that what you’re seeing is real. Plaza added that “in this particular case, the key is that is filmed television style, a format we’re all so used to. Nowadays, the reality itself does not exist, what’s real is what you can see through a tv camera as in this movie. That’s why the movie also acts as a critic to the media and how they present the reality to the audience today.”

Manuela Velasco, who plays the character of reporter, has explained how useful it has been to her, her previous experience on tv as the presenter of a music video clips program. But when preparing her role in the movie she’s studied carefully the presenters of other tv programs such as "España directo"".

[REC] will be showed on theatres on 23rd November, just at the same time when its American remake will start shooting.

So, you know, if you like one of those proposals that take your breath away while you’re in the movie theatre, one that will make you feel bad but have you loving to feel so bad, this is your movie.

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