Jaume Col­let-Ser­ra: ​‘If I was in that sit­u­a­tion, I would die in two seconds’

In a moment when any halfway com­pe­tent hired gun is exalt­ed as a new-style auteur, the Barcelona-born Jaume Col­let-Ser­ra seems like an actu­al­ly cred­i­ble can­di­date for crit­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion. Start­ing with his inter­mit­tent­ly star­tling 2005 remake of House of Wax, he has cul­ti­vat­ed an expres­sion­is­tic, care­ful­ly colour-cod­ed aes­thet­ic in genre forms from hor­ror (Orphan) to cloak-and-dag­ger mys­tery (Unknown) to action (Non-Stop, Run All Night). In his new thriller The Shal­lows, he sly­ly inter­cedes into Hol­ly­wood block­buster his­to­ry by set­ting up a Jaws-style sac­ri­fi­cial vic­tim (Blake Live­ly in sur­fwear) and then watch­ing the blonde out­last the shark, one close encounter at a time.

LWLies: It’s great to get to talk to you about how you direct your films.

Col­let-Ser­ra: Well, I’m actu­al­ly in the mid­dle of direct­ing one right now.

Right now?

I’m wrap­ping The Com­muter, which is anoth­er movie with Liam [Nee­son] and Vera Farmi­ga. It’s basi­cal­ly a mys­tery on a train. Late­ly, I’ve been try­ing to get away from remakes or sequels.

But not to get away from genre films…

No, not at all. That’s what I do.

Do you con­sid­er your­self a ​“genre film­mak­er,” or is it just the way it’s worked out with the sorts of projects you get attached to?

It’s not a coin­ci­dence. It takes me a year or a year and a half to make a movie, so it would be a long coin­ci­dence. It’s what I like. I keep get­ting inter­est­ed in movies that have chal­lenges and I think that genre films usu­al­ly have chal­lenges in them – a con­cept that’s inter­est­ing but dif­fi­cult to explain to the audi­ence. Or you’re keep­ing a secret, maybe. Or it’s one loca­tion, with one actor. Those are the kinds of films that I like, with two or three mov­ing pieces, or play­ing notes over and over again. Some peo­ple might find that lim­it­ing but I find it inter­est­ing, and it sparks my imag­i­na­tion. I like to work with­in cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions and find cre­ative solu­tions to the prob­lems I’ve been giv­en, or the chal­lenges of the script. I like that envi­ron­ment a lot. Obvi­ous­ly, the movies are high-con­cept, but that doesn’t mean we can’t aspire also to hav­ing good sto­ries and char­ac­ters, or emo­tions. That’s what I aspire to, to ele­vate things from the con­cept and to con­nect with the audi­ence. Some­times I make it, some­times I fail, but that’s my aspi­ra­tion, always.

The Shal­lows is on one lev­el very con­crete – it’s about prob­lem-solv­ing – but also has an abstract element.

The essence of direct­ing is that you’re direct­ing more than one thing at a time. There are a lot of balls in the air. The more expe­ri­ence you get as a direc­tor, the more balls you can keep up there. When I start­ed, I would do a scene and it would be about one thing. ​“This scene is about this char­ac­ter,” and that’s it. In The Shal­lows, there isn’t a lot of room – there isn’t any­body for her to talk to or react to. I want­ed it to feel real. We put a lot of work into that char­ac­ter, build­ing her slow­ly through the movie, and it paid off. The audi­ence feels like they dis­cov­er the char­ac­ter, instead of hav­ing it telegraphed, which clos­es them off to her. This is the first movie that I was real­ly able to do that, because I couldn’t use expo­si­tion. It was the dan­ger of the movie and at the same time, it’s what made it spe­cial. There’s no way to put ADR in post pro­duc­tion to explain things. We put the work in, Blake and myself, to make her a per­son from the ground up, and so that there were things for the audi­ence to absorb.

The descrip­tion of the moun­tains around the water as look­ing like a reclin­ing, preg­nant woman is very evocative.

We chose the loca­tion for a lot of rea­sons. I want­ed a loca­tion with a rock for­ma­tion, most­ly to give the audi­ence a sense of geog­ra­phy. When we found this place, we felt like we had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to express some­thing about the char­ac­ter, and we impro­vised things. That’s one of the things that came out of it. When you do that sort of thing a lot, you dis­card 90 per cent of the moments. Then you keep the right ones that help you to tell the sto­ry. When we shot it, we didn’t know if it would stay in. It was day two of shoot­ing, we could have had a lot of oth­er chances to express that con­nec­tion between the char­ac­ter and the island. As the shoot­ing pro­gressed, we realised it was one we want­ed to keep. You have to stay open to those moments. We were lucky, but that’s because we were look­ing for it.

We’d have assumed, with an entire­ly CGI char­ac­ter like the shark, that the entire movie would have to be sto­ry­board­ed and blocked and chore­o­graphed in advance – that there isn’t much space for impro­vi­sa­tion giv­en the tech­ni­cal challenges.

I’m a sto­ry­teller, and I’m inter­est­ed in peo­ple. I do make movies with CGI, and I can do that all day long, but I’m always try­ing to con­nect with the audi­ence. If I had my head down and I only looked at the tech­ni­cal aspect of it, I would nev­er come close to any­thing like that. It’s one of the hard­est things, to con­nect. Com­e­dy is hard, as we all know. Mak­ing peo­ple cry is less hard. Hope­ful­ly what we accom­plished in The Shal­lows is show­ing a per­son trans­formed in a nat­ur­al and believ­able way. The shark nev­er got in the way of that.

The shark clar­i­fies the emo­tions of the sto­ry; it’s excit­ing to watch how resource­ful she is when her sur­vival instinct kicks in. And there isn’t a lot of irony in the movie, is there?

No. In a sit­u­a­tion like this, faced with choic­es that need to seem real­is­tic, I had to put myself in that sit­u­a­tion too. I nev­er try to teach a les­son. If I was in that sit­u­a­tion, I would die in two sec­onds, because I’m not a doc­tor. Visu­al­ly, things go into very movie-ish ter­ri­to­ry, but you go with her and it’s like she’s earned it – and then to try to teach a les­son, or to be iron­ic… it would be going too far in a movie this simple.

Is there more humour or irony in a movie like House of Wax or Orphan?

With House of Wax, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like 28 years old.

Orphan is fas­ci­nat­ing. It’s about trau­ma but it’s also very funny.

I try to put humour in some­times. I try to go against the grain now, but I was younger and felt less restraint. You put amus­ing things in with­out see­ing the effect on the big pic­ture. Humour is great in genre movies, though, because it can human­ise things. In Orphan, there is the moment where Vera slaps the girl and I felt like the audi­ence need­ed her to slap a kid. That’s very hard. It’s usu­al­ly vio­lent, and you won­der if they need­ed to do that, it’s very off-putting. Our audi­ence clapped when she slapped her. To get the audi­ence clap­ping when a grown woman slaps a kid means that they real­ly hate that lit­tle girl. To get them to that point is the whole point of the movie. Even at that point, they don’t know the secret, but you’re still putting them in a posi­tion they don’t expect. You use every trick to get them there – des­per­a­tion and humour. The humour in Orphan is in that rela­tion­ship, and it’s dark, but I enjoyed it.

How did you approach shoot­ing water in The Shallows?

Most of The Shal­lows is not real. It was shot in a tank. We had to enhance real­i­ty a bit. I want­ed to make a movie that was real­ly colour­ful after Run All Night, which was very dark and urban. I want­ed to make some­thing that peo­ple in sum­mer would see the trail­er for and want to watch it – to go into a dark the­atre and expe­ri­ence some­thing bright. And then turn that beau­ty against her. It lures her there, she’s com­fort­able there, noth­ing could go wrong, and then she’s trapped and it becomes dark­er. I’m not afraid of colours. I just go for it. I always end up in the blues and the greens. And red is a strong colour – when it comes into the movie it has to con­trast. So I use a lot of colours that are oppo­site of red. So when red comes in, it’s the oppo­site of some­thing. I always try to do things dif­fer­ent­ly. And then it always ends up being the same.