Interview: Jon Gargaño and Jose Mari Goenaga Talk Directing Flowers

Flowers is the first ever Basque language film to represent Spain in consideration for the Best Foreign Language Film category. Directors Jon Gargaño and Jose Mari Goenaga were in LA recently talking about this historical moment and casting three actresses who speak the language.

Awards Daily : First of all, congratulations on the film, you know, representing Spain and it’s the first Basque language film to represent the country.
Jon Gargano: Oh, that is very important, but it’s not important for us, but for the Basque culture and the Basque language itself because it’s the first time that the Basque language movie is a candidate for the Oscars, so everybody in the Basque country is really happy about it.  I feel that many Spaniards are happy about it because it’s something that never happened before, and things that happen for the first time are always special so that was something that we didn’t expect. It was a big huge surprise, but obviously we are really, really happy because it is a historic opportunity for us.

AD: This isn’t the first time you have worked together before so describe the process of how you decide who does what when you’re working?

JG: When we are working on pre-production and then the post-production, we do pretty much everything together, but then in the shooting, we split responsibility. He — Jose Mari — works more with the actors, and I work more with the technical crew. But, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have my opinion about something.

I always say that we do argue and we do fight a lot during the shooting, but at the same time, we are used to working together and it’s our way of working and it’s a formula that we are happy with.

AD: Yeah, it is a great formula. What I love is the story of the flowers and their essential part. So, where did the whole idea come from?

Jose Mari Goenaga: The idea for this story came from an image of the flowers that you can find all over Europe on the roads.  When someone dies in a car accident, people close to this person leave flowers where they passed away. So, when you are driving, you see these flowers and you feel that there’s a dramatic story behind this image, but at the same time, you see that there’s a kind of mystery because you usually don’t see the person leaving the flowers so you always have to ask yourself, “Okay what happened here?” You don’t know; there’s a mystery. So we thought that would be interesting to build a story that centers around  the drama and the mystery. And everything that the story is kind of like, what would happen if, in the place where some relative died, then you discover that someone you don’t know is leaving flowers every week. So, we started from that question and then one day we were listening to the radio to a very popular song from the ’70s in Spain that talked about a woman that received flowers every year from an unknown man. We thought that this has a lot to do with the other person that discovers someone is leaving flowers in the place of the car wreck. That’s why we thought we could create two cuts that finally converge. We thought that was really good material for a story because we could play kind of a mirror game of reflections between one wreck and the other and you could establish some kind of parallel because in both stories you are playing with the same elements. You have someone who is happy with these flowers and you have somebody that feels these flowers are something cryptic.

AD: Definitely the flowers reminded me of Europe. Every time there’s an accident, there’s always flowers at the roadside. There’s photos or even religious icons at the scene, so it was very European in that sense. You mentioned the mystery aspect of the flowers; who or what were your influences on writing the mystery side to it?

JMG: Well, although it seems quite far from the style of the film, one of our main influences was Alfred Hitchcock. When we were constructing the story, bearing in mind all the time what information the viewers will have and what information the characters will have, you know? It creates a kind of long suspense because maybe the reason for this type of story has nothing to do with Alfred Hitchcock films, but, at the same time, the way we were thinking when we were constructing the story, in a suspense film, although we knew we were doing an intense drama, I think that Alfred Hitchcock had a huge influence when we were writing the script. Another very influential director for us was Krzysztof Kieslowski; Three Colors Blue or Three Colors Red were very influential to establish the characters and the metaphors and the symbolism of the film.

AD: The film has a combines mystery, drama, and suspense. When you were writing, was is always the plan to mix the three elements together?

JMG: Actually, that was our main goal when starting to write this story. We knew we were talking about loss, love, and death and we wanted this subject to be in the film. For us, the main theme that we use to structure the story was the conflict between the remembrance and the forgetfulness. How when you lose someone, there are people who need to remember this person in order to go on and you have people who need to forget with the same purpose. We have a woman, the mother, that needs to remember, and a wife that needs to forget. And then another character that doesn’t have so much to remember and so much to forget, but she needs to reconnect with this character because she needs to know how he was in order to go on. So, this was a very conceptual issue in the story but at the same time, we wanted to keep the mystery at home. The way we were building all the plot, we were thinking in suspense and what information our characters have, how the audience is going to react having the information they have.

AD: You’ve got three great female actresses in the film. You’ve worked with Itziar [Aizpuru] before, but was it hard to find not just one, but three actresses who still spoke Basque?

JG: Obviously, the three of them are Basque and one of them, the step-mother, was in our first film so she had to be in this movie, and we think she did really, really well. She was really different in our previous movie, she was playing a farmer who falls in love with a lesbian [laughs]. The one who plays Ane (Nagore Aranburu), the woman receiving the flowers every week, auditioned so well we decided she had to be the one. It was interesting working with Nagore because she’s an actress, but she’s also a writer and a director in television so we didn’t rehearse much with her, but we talked a lot about the character. She needed to know how Ane was. Once she knew that, it was really easy. She was mainly concerned with how the character was.

Lourdes is probably the most popular actress of all of them. She plays a cop in a soap opera that has been on air in the Basque country for 21 years. The soap opera character is completely different, and, to be honest, at the beginning we weren’t sure about [her] because our idea of Lourdes was completely different. We thought it could be interesting to have a different woman, but at the end, we auditioned her and she did really well and we like the way she looks and the strength she has. We kind of stitched and constructed the character of Lourdes together [with her]. We rewrote Lourdes because she was giving a lot to the character and we were thinking of what she was giving to us.

AD: Something that I really like about this film is how the role of the women is not oppressed. That was refreshing to see in a Spanish language film.

JG: [Laughs] For us, it’s very important to make it as real as possible. We tried to capture what we think our society is. We believe that there are some Lourdes, some Anes, and some Teres. That doesn’t mean that every Basque woman is that way. There are many different Basque women and we are not trying to do a portrait of what is a Basque woman. Sometimes, some people write about the same thing and do a perfect portrait of what a Basque woman is. This was not our intention. We are just having three characters in the movie and trying to make them feel and suffer and give hope and have a lot of emotions in a film.

AD: I have to say it was a pleasure speaking to you about the film and learning a bit more about your filmmaking process and learning a bit more about the film. Congratulations, again.

JG: Thanks a lot.