Interview: Carla Simón on Alcarràs and Seeing Life from a Familial Perspective

In just two feature films, Spanish director Carla Simón has already proven herself a master of capturing childhood on screen. Her masterful recreations of free play extend far beyond creating an on-set environment for her young actors to be natural. Simón also creates space for the audience to slip back in that unstructured mindset of youthful imagination.

This sense of boundless possibility and limited understanding becomes a crucial emotional entry point to understand a world shaped by forces that can be felt but not necessarily seen. In Simón’s autobiographical debut feature, Summer 1993, this was the AIDS crisis that left her orphaned at the age of six. In her latest film, Alcarràs, it’s the shift of using land in the titular Catalonian village from the family farming of peaches to the installation of solar energy panels. The youngest children in the multigenerational Solé household are merely the first to experience the change as construction equipment clears a broken-down car in which they play.

Simón’s patiently observational camera gently reveals the symbiosis of the family unit. This seismic development occurring across the country affects them all, both materially and emotionally. The grandfather (Josep Abad) grapples with the reneging of a handshake agreement that represented the unspoken deed for their land. The middle-aged father (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) deals with the economic uncertainty. The teenage son (Albert Bosch) thinks through what his future looks like with his previously inevitable path closed off. The teenage daughter (Xènia Roset) just wants the distracting drama to stop so she can focus on her talent-show dance routine. And the kids, through it all, just want to play and learn.

I spoke with Simón shortly prior to her the Berlinale Golden Bear-winning film’s stateside theatrical run. Our conversation covered the way in which she draws naturalistic performances from adults and children alike, her approach to reflecting the gender dynamics of rural Spain, as well as her construction and calibration of the film’s poignant final scene.

Your experience working with children ranges from the tactical as a summer camp counselor to the intellectual as a student of child psychology. What’s your method for directing them on set?

It’s something very intuitive. I love working with children. I wouldn’t say I have a technique. For me, the most important thing is that they believe in what they are doing. They [must] believe the relationships are somehow real, so we spend enough time together for them to believe in this relationship. There are play scenes and games in the story as well. The rehearsing part of the process is very important. What I try to do, usually, is to spend a lot of time together with not only the children but also the adults, and create a family to improvise moments that could have happened before the story of the film. We create a shared memory between all the actors and the children, and they go through things that feel part of the film. When we get into the shooting, they feel that this could be their dad, their mom, or their siblings. Spending a lot of time together and creating this world, for me, is very useful. Whenever we’re shooting, we follow the script because I tell them what to do. But I can give a little bit of room for improvisation for them, which will always make sense in relationship to the world that I created before.

Children have to believe the situations, but do they have to understand them—especially if their characters don’t?

No, they don’t have to understand so much, I think. And also with adults, I don’t tend to speak a lot with them in terms of background and things like that. What we do is go through moments that could have happened before the story. This helps for them to kind of have lived some things that will make sense later. But we don’t have a debate about it. When we were improvising moments with the adults about their losing their land, I made a friend of mine come to play a lawyer and help them look for the papers. The children were there and around. They would peek at things in the way that a child would do. This obviously helped with what happen later in the shooting and the telling the story. They don’t have a full knowledge at all. With my previous film, I worked with kids as well. It was about death, but we never really talked about that.

How do you ensure you get what you need when shooting the script while also leaving room for them to feel free to explore a scene?

This is always a difficult equilibrium. I am very controlling, but then I also like when things look like they happen by chance in front of the cameras. With kids, you want them to feel spontaneous, but at the same time, you want your shots the way you want them. Maybe there are some specific things that they have to do here or there, but we don’t put marks. It doesn’t help, it feels so rigid. I always said that the camera adapts to them. I shot-list a lot, and more with a film like Alcarràs that has many points of view. It was very important to always be very clear where the camera would be and with which character it would be. I go with an idea of the shot list. But, then, things can happen [on location]. And if it doesn’t feel natural, the camera has to adapt to something that feels more natural. Sometimes I have to just forget about my ideas and try to make it work for them in a more natural way. With the children is where I give more room for that. Just let them [go about their business] and then we’ll shoot.

Both your films concern the experience of childhood, not just narratively but also visually. How do you determine where to incorporate their visual perspective?

With my first film, Summer of 1993, it was [clearer] because it was told through the point of view of the girl. There was a lot of voiceover and off-screen dialogue for the adults. We never got lost because it was from her perspective all the time, and emotion-wise as well. For me, I always think about emotion. Where should we be for the audience to feel the character that I want to portray? Because children don’t fully understand everything, this point of view always brings more mystery to things, which is very important in cinema.

For Alcarràs, it was more complex. It was a big challenge—this idea of portraying the perspective where the main character was the family. We built the script with this idea of how the emotion of one character can affect [someone else] and so on. It’s a domino effect that happens a lot when you have many people sharing the same roof, basically. Someone gets angry, and then suddenly everyone is angry. They don’t even know why. This idea of passing the emotional baton was very important in terms of the camera. There were scenes that were quite choreographed, in a natural way, but we would rehearse together with the camera. Others, though, could be a little bit [freer]. We even spent a whole week with the heads of department just talking about point of view to make sure of where the camera should be in each scene. We had many options—we had many characters, so the camera could be anywhere. It took us a while to decide with whom each scene would be.

How did that revelation that these were not individual characters but a collective protagonist affect the way you conceived Alcarràs?

That was very important. For me, it was probably the most difficult part of the film because usually we follow one character. When you spend an hour and a half or two hours with one character, you really get emotional with him or her. Here, the challenge was, like, how do you get emotional with many characters if, all together, you spend just a little bit of time with each of them? So the casting was very important, obviously, and the fact that they were all magnetic.

How do you balance staying true to your vision for the script with incorporating revelations from improvisations and spontaneous discoveries during the shoot?

That is also very intuitive. I don’t let [my actors] learn their lines [at first]. In this case, we spent three months rehearsing. And when I felt that the family was really created, only then did we read the script. Then I told them to give it back to me. We rehearsed for one month more, but in a very loose way. I would tell them what to say, but not [in a fixed way]. It’s very important for me that they speak the way they would speak. It’s finding my equilibrium between following the script and having some little moments where they can improvise. If I find something interesting, then I ask them to do it again. And also in the rehearsals, there are some things that come up. I just write it down in my script, and then I try to bring it up again when we shoot.

How has—or hasn’t—childhood changed since Summer 1993? Did making Alcarràs require you to learn anything new about what it means to be a kid today?

In terms of the childhood we portray in Alcarràs, it’s quite close to the one in Summer 1993 because it’s also set in a rural area where kids can be quite free. This, obviously, is the big difference. Even in Alcarràs, not so many kids now live in these kinds of houses. In my childhood, this was a more normal thing. Now there are just a few people who live in houses like that. Obviously, it’s changing a lot, because when kids live in a village they don’t have this freedom that we portray there. We knew that it was not the most typical thing, but it still made a lot of sense to explain this world that’s kind of ending. And, with it, this will also end the fact that you have many generations sharing the same roof.

The music, for me, was something tough. What they listen to now has nothing to do what I used to [listen to]. The techno music that the teenage boy [played by Albert Bosch] listens to, this doesn’t change so much. There were people in my village that used to listen to this kind of techno too. But for Mariona [played by Xènia Roset] and the song she dances to, I had to do a lot of research. But, in the end, I always think that children are children and teenagers are teenagers. Of course, times change, but there’s something in the essence that’s always the same.

How do you find the rhythm and pace of your films? They move forward, of course, but not with the same intensity of narratives of accumulating plot points.

I like that my films look like life, and life doesn’t have the rhythm of a film. For me, there’s always a game between the everyday life scenes and the scenes that move the plot forward. These things that make the plot move forward are very small. We’re talking about little details within relationships. What’s important is the journey. The end of Alcarràs is announced at the beginning. And, at the end, it happens. The plot is really simple, but the important thing for me is how you make the journey with these people and how they deal with this crisis as a family. It’s funny because when we were writing Alcarràs, we always said that it was like an action film because there are many things happening at the same time with the whole family. This is also what happens when you have many people in the same house. Everyone is doing something, and all the time things are happening. But it’s not so plot-driven. It’s character-driven.

You’ve talked about how in the region where the film takes place, “women are not as empowered as I would like yet.” How do you weigh portraying the world as it is against creating a world as you might want it to be?

When you try to do a portrait of a place, you find yourself portraying things that maybe aren’t as you would like. It’s a place that’s really evolving slowly. It’s amazing how different it is there than in Barcelona. Even like the two sisters-in-law that we portray, the film has been like a kind of liberation for them as real people. It’s an escape from being the moms who work to take care of the house. Suddenly, they took some time for themselves to do something that they wanted to do. Seeing them, it was, like, “Wow, it is really different.” What I see now is that my cousin is in this feminist assembly in Alcarràs. She’s taking part in that, and she’s 17. She’s teaching her dad to stay conscious of that, and her dad goes crazy with that. He’s, like, “What are you talking about?” What I see is that the new generations are really moving forward. That’s why it was important that Mariona danced to this song called “La Patrona (The Boss).”

I love the juxtaposition of the film’s final two scenes because they embody the tension of the film itself: a rabble-rousing protest against agricultural farming, followed immediately by the destruction of the land to make way for the solar panels. How did you land at this conclusion?

It took us a little bit to find the ending. We started to realize that the film should end with the pulling up of the trees. It’s true that, at the beginning, we had a happy ending, more of a feeling that maybe they would continue doing this somewhere else. But, then, talking with the farmers, we realized that they’re very pessimistic about the future of farming in families. We decided to change it because it felt a little bit naïve. It’s an open ending, but you feel that they probably won’t keep doing that. The idea of pulling up the trees, that was an image that we knew for sure we should have. At the beginning of the writing, we had them pulling up a little bit of a small field. But then we realized it was stronger to have it at the end [and leave the audience with the] feeling of, okay, they are going to lose this land but the family will stick together. And then the demonstration, for me, was always there because it was a way to tell that this isn’t only this family’s story. It’s something that’s happening to many other people in the area. It’s a way to zoom out suddenly and realize that it’s a general thing. I’m very happy that I fought for the scene because, production-wise, it was more complicated. It’s what made the film more political than we thought, even surprisingly for us, because you have this [larger] perspective.

And the bulldozer is something we hear ominously before you show it, which makes it significantly scarier as we wait for the big reveal. Why that build-up?

The film starts with the same machine that takes out the car. It’s like a thread, this idea of this threat being there all the time. Something very magical happened [during shooting] in that the grandfather started crying. And, then, after him, the teenage boy, the teenager girl, the mom, the aunt, and the little girl. Everyone was crying. That wasn’t written like that. I was like, wow. And then the whole crew was crying, so it was like a tragic moment. I didn’t know how to stop it! But I just let it be. And then I went home thinking, “Wow, this is really touching.” So it was very interesting to see that once we were in the editing room, it just didn’t feel right. It felt like it was pushing the emotion too much. We ended up going back to the previous idea and taking out the crying. Because, at the end, it’s a moment of acceptance that they have already understood what’s going to happen. The pain is already digested. That’s why it was better if they didn’t cry.

It’s not the last image of the film, because you have the tableau of the family observing the destruction of the land. It feels as if it caps Alcarràs. Was this shot something you wanted to compose in order to stand out from the rest of the film?

For me, this image was important because it’s a way to tell that the family is going to remain together. We tried to find a way to have it feel natural but also like a family photo. It was a difficult thing to stage. We had some marks because, otherwise, they would just be one in front of the other. And then they had to feel emotion, so it was very complicated. I struggled a lot, but it was very helpful for me to just talk. I do that a lot. I talk during the take, and then we take out my voice in post-production. This helps to get [the actors] in the mood, to be able to guide them using my voice. That’s something we do in the rehearsals a lot, so they get used to it.