{"id":143663,"date":"2025-10-24T23:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T23:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/143663\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T23:25:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T23:25:07","slug":"david-trueba-talks-adapting-david-trueba-life-after-great-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/143663\/","title":{"rendered":"David Trueba Talks Adapting David Trueba, Life After Great Love\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn David Trueba<\/a>\u2019s \u201cAlways Winter,\u201d the closing night film of this year\u2019s Valladolid Film Festival<\/a> in Spain, Miguel Mena (David Verdaguer), 40, a jobless landscape architect travels to a Brussels conference to pitch a project, Gardens of Life, in which people are invited to sit on grass or a bench and contemplate three-minute hour-glasses.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe love hour-glasses because they are a visual representation of time sliding by. They allow is to see the passing of something we never see: the Passage of Time,\u201d Miguel says on stage, commandingly. And then he can\u2019t remember how to go on.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe importance is to go back to the real world. Technology has become a real religion,\u201d he says in a debate the next day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDistances apart, Miguel could be talking about David Trueba\u2019s film.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s the first time in a now 30-year-career that Trueba \u2013 selected for Cannes with \u201cThe Good Life\u201d and \u201cSalamina Soldiers,\u201d has adapted one of his novels, and one of his best, the 2015 novella \u201cBlitz,\u201d an international breakout, hailed by Liberation as \u201cdelicious, original and subtle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn both, Miguel is accompanied to a conference by Marta (Amaia Salamanca), his girlfriend of dazzling beauty and his only emotional mainstay. In Brussels, Marta reveals she leaving him. \u201cBroken and out of place, Miguel meets Olga (Isabelle Renauld), an older woman who works as a volunteer at the architecture congress. At her side, he will begin to rebuild himself and to understand what his new life project consists of,\u201d the film\u2019s synopsis ends.<\/p>\n

\n\tBringing the Power of Cinema to the Table<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAlways Winter,\u201d however, brings the full power of cinema to the table. That cuts several ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSome people may have read \u201cBlitz\u201d at one sitting, others not. Everyone will catch \u201cAlways Winter,\u201d at least on its theatrical run, in one go. That allows the film to capture far more clearly, the emotional density of time. Its January chapter, where Miguel is left by Marta and meets Olga, lasts 90 minutes. Other months, until a final December, go by in a flash, one-minute or less chapters.<\/p>\n

\n\tSingle shots capture the felt strangeness of rupture. When Marta is leaving the Brussels hotel to travel back to Madrid, while Miguel stays, Miguel is caught lying on his bed. Marta\u2019s face enters the frame to kiss him goodbye and then she is gone. The camera lingers for a few seconds on Miguel, in his new emotive state for the rest of his life, without Marta.<\/p>\n

\n\tAbove all, the film captures the ravages and awe of time, on the actors\u2019 faces and bodies, or on the sun suddenly peaking out above a dawn Mediterranean sea horizon, the real world, manifest in a scene of incontrovertible wonder.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAlways Winter\u201d reunites Trueba with actor David Verdaguer and Ikiru Films, Atresmedia Cine and La Terraza Films, and also Film Factory, star, producers and sales agent of 2023\u2019s \u201cJokes & Cigarettes,\u201d which broke out to an appreciable \u20ac891,991 ($972,270) at Spanish theaters. Verdaguer went on to win a Spanish Academy Goya \u2013 and indeed any Spanish best actor plaudit going in a historic first \u2013 for his performance in \u201cJokes & Cigarettes\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tVariety\u00a0talked to Trueba on the eve of the 2025 Valladolid Film Festival, about the power of cinema, post great love and a kind of adult coming of age.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019ve said that some aspects of \u201cBlitz,\u201d turning on the passage of time, were apt for new expression in a film. One could be the emotional density of time, caught in the length of the January chapter, contrasting with many others. This is felt more strongly in a film\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAbsolutely. Yes, I think it\u2019s more noticeable. Also, there\u2019s a visual aspect. You can describe in a book bodies but differences in age, bodies\u2019 skin, are all the more evident in film.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDid the fact you had developed the story in a written form, \u201cBlitz,\u201d encourage you to focus more on the especially \u201cfilmic\u201d aspects of \u201cAlways Winter\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s say the second or final part of \u201cAlways Winter\u201d was precisely about that: Trying to find cinematographic way of telling what\u2019s apparently the same story, but telling it in a different way to how it\u2019s told in the novel, precisely because in the novel you have the voice of the narrator and it\u2019s easier to sat what he\u2019s thinking. Film\u2019s a more eternal in this sense\u2026\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film is pretty open, beginning with its title: \u201cAlways Winter,\u201d which seems a reference to Miguel\u2019s spiritual malaise and then, three quarters of the way through the film, he\u2019s says just that, as a joke about not being able to turn off the air conditioning in the office, which has given him cold\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThe novel was called \u201cBlitz.\u201d Given in the film, Olga is no longer German, it didn\u2019t make much sense to keep the title. \u201cAlways Winter\u201d is a reference to the state of spirit: After rupture, there\u2019s a kind of emotional blocking, like a freezing. You become someone who can\u2019t give nor receive. I\u2019m very interested in that. It\u2019s a state where a person seem normal but is really blocked. People ask me: Isn\u2019t that a bit sad for a title? And I\u2019d answer that as soon as you see David Verdaguer, you know there\u2019s an irony in the title\u2026..\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI sense the film asks if the break-up isn\u2019t part of a larger life-cycle\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond break-ups, also when there\u2019s a death of someone close, from that point on it\u2019s as if life is a matter of surviving that absence, going on living despite that absence. It\u2019s a bit the sensation that the film tries to transmit, that\u2019s there\u2019s something missing and in a way will be missing now forever. So you\u2019re life has received a message. What Martin Amis called \u201cThe Information.\u201d You have to learn to live with this information, while before you lived in another way, because you didn\u2019t have this baggage. It\u2019s the accumulation of experiences which transform a person.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a way you could call \u201cAlways Winter\u201d a coming of age tale in which Miguel learns to abandon sexist taboos like that a man can\u2019t have a relationship with a quite older woman.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAnd, the architect he joins at his company, he judged without even knowing him, forming an opinion based on rivalry. Miguel learns that people aren\u2019t always what they seem and many times your opinions about them are too hasty. And learning that, you feel a bit better about the world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sense of coming of age cuts other ways. With Marta, he\u2019s a bit like a funny child. Olga also talks a the feverishness her you grandson has, always asking: \u2018What do we do now?\u2019 And after her own great love ended, she lost that sensation\u2026.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tMiguel has to learn that he can\u2019t remain anchored in the past, petrified in the past. After something, there\u2019s something else. He has to learn that.<\/p>\n

\n\tI wrote in April, announcing Film Factory\u2019s pickup of \u201cAlways Winter,\u201d that it melded the intimacy and sense of fragility of characters of Frech Cinema, the bathos of Spain\u2019s Rafael Azcona and the structural play of the U.K.\u2019s Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McKewan generation. But maybe I\u2019m totally wrong\u2026.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tCertainly, one of my big influences, is the spirit of films, like those from \u00c9ric Rohmer. \u201cMy Night at Maud\u2019s,\u201d for example. Films which unspool in closed spaces, whose spectacle is their intimacy. I\u2019ve also always felt a large affinity with many of the works of Julian Barnes. He\u2019s written about time, absence, relationships, mixing elements from an animality in behaviour to the rationality of cultivated characters whose reactions are much more sophisticated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In David Trueba\u2019s \u201cAlways Winter,\u201d the closing night film of this year\u2019s Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, Miguel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[84937,18,117,19,17,327,84938],"class_list":{"0":"post-143663","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-david-trueba","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-valladolid-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115431730216846500","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}