Oriol Paul is the record holder of the highest box office in China for Spanish films, and the plot "Reversal King" praised by the audience. Suspenseful, interlocking, each of his stories is like peeling an onion, layer by layer to the audience, every character or thing appears as a foreshadowing, every plot seems to be the ending but there will be a reversal.
There is a mystery in the Asian film industry in 2019: Spanish director Oriol Paulo has had unprecedented success in the Asian film market with Spanish-language films. His film was bought by China, South Korea, and India before it was released. The high overseas box office made the Spanish mainland realize what was missed, so much so that his film was re-released.
Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1975, Paul became the screenwriter of the film Julia's Eyes in 2010 and has since embarked on the road to suspense films. In 2012, he directed his first feature film "The Mystery of the Female Corpse", with which he was nominated for the Best Newcomer Director Award at the 27th Spanish Goya Awards; in 2017, he directed the suspense film "The Invisible Guest", which reversed as many as 43 times and became a popular suspense masterpiece; in 2019, the suspense film "Mirage" was released and did not stop at the box office. These 3 self-written and self-directed films make Paul a veritable "Hitchcock of Spain". But Paul did not give up the creation of TV series, in April this year, Netflix (Netflix) broadcast all 8 episodes of "The Best of Innocence" written and directed by him at once, Douban has a good reputation.
Paul's new work "The Best of Innocence" adopts a multi-line narrative method, gradually revealing the truth from different character perspectives, and the script design is interlocked.
The most eye-catching female character in the play "The Best of Innocence" is Lorena, who inherited her father's business and became a better detective than her father.
The usual suspenseful element
Paul's 3 films feature unfaithful husbands, wise and strong women, and car accidents.
Paul was keen to describe betrayal. Betrayal produces complex character relationships, revenge instincts and interlocking stories, sending the film on a thrilling and inverted, brain-burning track. In his suspenseful world, stories are triggered by betrayal and extended by lies. In "Mirage", Vera's neighbor Angel was found to be infidelity by his wife and caused a dispute, his wife was killed, and then 3 parallel time and space were derived; "The Mystery of the Female Corpse" and "The Invisible Guest" are the whole film throughout the film, and it is the tough and indomitable women in the film who make these punishments come true.
In the thrilling revenge in "The Mystery of the Female Corpse", each character who directly or indirectly stained his hands with blood was finally subjected to their own moral judgment, and the meaning of the story suddenly deepened.
Paul plays for the protagonist in The Mystery of the Female Corpse
The Invisible Guest made Oriol Paul known worldwide, and he was considered the "Hitchcock of Spain".
Car accident is Paul's usual film language. Paul witnessed a car accident as a child, and the bloody scene haunted his mind until he became an adult. Since he couldn't get around it, Paul incorporated it into the film—he repeatedly used car accidents to describe the unexpected events that changed the trajectory of his life, leading to new clues. Without a car accident, there would be no vengeful parents in "The Invisible Guest", no cops who set traps in "The Mystery of the Female Corpse", and no Vera in "Mirage" who travels through time and space to save Nick.
In the film "The Invisible Guest", there are as many as 43 reversals, the silver-haired female lawyer and the male protagonist have pushed the case down and reorganized in several confrontations, the tension has changed, and until the last second, you can never guess what will happen in the next second.
Paul has a lot of strong women around him who inspire him, and he incorporates their qualities into the film. The protagonists of Paul's 3 films are all women. In Paul's eyes, female personalities are more complex and fascinating. At the same time, he noticed that in the film market in Spain, Hollywood and other places, female actors and female filmmakers have much less opportunities than men, and he feels that it is a responsibility to push women to a more important position, and Paul's good scripts also give many actresses the opportunity to improve themselves. Playing the role of the mother who lost her son in a car accident in "The Invisible Guest" is the famous Spanish actress Ana Wagner, who was immediately attracted to the brilliant heroine after reading the script. On the day of the interview, as soon as she entered the door, she arrogantly said, "Say, who do I have to kill to get this role?" Adriana Ugarte, who played Vera in Mirage, is the heroine of director Pedro Almodóvar's film Julieta. After the completion of "Julieta", Ugart has not encountered a script that can make a breakthrough for himself, and did not take the role for two years, until the appearance of "Mirage". The courage and wisdom of these actresses to rise to the challenge are constantly giving Paul new inspiration.
Promotional poster for Mirage
Every time he mentions the three films he directs, Paul always adds: "They are still emotional films in the final analysis. All suspense and reversal, lies and hurt, truth and helplessness are born out of love, complicated by love. "Paul's films are also deeper and richer because of love.
The road to dreams
Paul's grandmother was a mystery fan and often took little Paul to the cinema to see Hitchcock's movies. Grandma also read Agatha Christie's novels, and Paul's family still has a complete collection of Agatha Christie's novels from Grandma, and he himself has read almost all of Agatha's books. When he was writing "The Invisible Guest", he often had in his mind the game of changing the identity of the characters in the novel "Prosecution Witness". Hitchcock was Paul's master and mentor he had never met, and his influence on Paul's films can be seen in many details. The body is buried in the trunk in "The Invisible Guest" and the scene in "Mirage" where Nick sees a murder in the opposite building from his window are Paul's homage to the master. Paul says, "I am who I am because of my influence. ”
Paul grew up watching movies with a different focus than other children. He has no feeling for the thrill of explosions and racing cars, but enjoys the thrill of complex character relationships and ups and downs. He also pays special attention to the language of the camera, when watching Hitchcock's films, he sees not only interesting reasoning stories, but also pays attention to how Hitchcock uses long shots, close-ups, long-ranges, and close-up shots to express the psychology and emotions of the characters, which have had a great impact on Paul's future filmmaking.
Paul, 15, read a long conversation between the famous French screenwriter and actor François Truffaut and Hitchcock, and the book became his "bible" ever since. Since then he has decided to learn to make films and become a director. But under pressure from his family, he had to choose an economics major after going to college. A year later, Paul still couldn't give up his dream of directing, so he transferred to Pompeu Fabre University in Barcelona to study audiovisual media.
At school, Paul realized that if he wanted to make his own film, he had to tell a different story. He began experimenting with various styles, and also made some short films, always exploring his own characteristics. In 1996, Paul saw The Death Paper directed by Spanish director Alejandro Amenavar. In that era of popular reality, this traditional suspense film opened a window for Paul, who decided that this was the movie he wanted to make. Two years later, Paul applied for a scholarship to continue his studies at the Los Angeles Film School.
Paul realized early on that screenwriting was essential to a good thriller, so when he was a student at the Los Angeles Film School, he focused on training his screenwriting skills. Later, when he was a student at UCLA, he also insisted on writing, and there were no limits to stories, scripts, diaries, etc. He also wrote a letter to himself 6 years later, "I hope you are happy, I hope you can make a difference, don't forget that there is more than one side of life, there are many levels, many things that need to be explored." He wrote his thoughts on life into a letter, and engaged in a philosophical dialogue with himself 6 years later, vaguely laying the first draft of the time-space paradox in "Mirage".
Every director has his or her own path to success. For Paul, writing was the only way to make a movie. After graduating from the Los Angeles Film School, Paul did not rush to make a movie, but wrote the script for 5 years. Some people question whether he kept his dream of making movies and wrote scripts for TV series as a compromise on reality. He recalls that time with gratitude. He felt that he was able to pay the rent with the money he earned writing the script, after all, there were many colleagues who graduated at the same time who did various jobs because of financial pressures, and even gave up film creation. Paul sees script writing as a great opportunity to exercise, "You know what you like and don't like, even if you're doing things you don't like, you have to find a way to succeed, and this is a great opportunity to improve your screenwriting skills." 」 ”
After 5 years of writing, we have finally ushered in a qualitative leap. In 2010, Paul wrote Julia's Eyes. The birth of this story marks the formation of Paul's suspenseful style. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Paul felt it was time to make the film himself after the film's success!
Three brain-burning suspense dramas in a row have realized Paul's film dream. However, the road of dreams continues. Paul always carried a book with him, insisted on writing every day, and he wanted to pay tribute to Hitchcock with better works.
Beginning as a screenwriter for the film Julia's Eyes, Oriol Paul gradually emerged.
Brain-burning narrative strategy
Some say that Paul's films are like his hairstyles, with constant reversals in a mess. He likens his ideas to seeds, seeds grow into trees, and those intricate branches are layer after layer of story details. Paul is often in two extreme states: inspiration comes in a frenzy, and he begins to conceive with a calm mind. His studio has a wall for note boards, and before each writing, he writes the plot he thinks of on a card, pastes it on the wall, and then moves around to find a reasonable logic. The plot that can be used is left behind, and the plot that cannot be used is taken away, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, this process can last for several months. Once the "puzzle" was complete, Paul began to write.
However, the creation is endless, and new ideas are constantly emerging. To keep the clues clear, Paul tries to make life more organized, putting everything in a fixed place like an engineer. When he's uninspired, he'll go swimming, read books, and do things that have nothing to do with creation.
Paul admits that the creative process is actually a process of dealing with passion and reason. That's how Mirage was born. Around 2014, Paul lived in a state that looked perfect at the time, with a smooth start in his career and a happy emotional life. One day his girlfriend proposed that he wanted to have children, and Paul thought it was a big decision that should be discussed first, but the result of the discussion was that the two parted ways a week later. Paul began a series of thoughts, asking himself hundreds of questions: Was the woman who was his girlfriend a week ago the woman he once thought she was? Is the life he lives a life he really has? What would it be like now if he had immediately agreed to have children instead of speaking his true thoughts? How many such crossroads in life, if you do not choose to go to the left, but choose to go to the right, what will be the result? Will there be a different life? Or is it the same life, different reflections?
"Mirage" tells a story of yin and yang. In order to save the boy who died unexpectedly 25 years ago, the heroine triggered a fork in time in the past, resulting in her life being rewritten in the past few decades. The story progresses along the two timelines of 1989 and 2014, the heroine whose life has been turned upside down step by step to find out the truth, and the rescued boy to explore the truth step by step.
Paul figured out the plot with the actors on the set of Mirage
These thoughts kept haunting Paul. He began to record these thoughts, and watched as the story was about to be born. Yet Paul's calm side triumphed over passion. First, he was working on The Invisible Guest, and he wanted to focus on bringing the medium-cost work to the screen; second, he realized that he needed to keep a distance from the emotional state after the breakup so that he would not uncontrollably use the screen as a channel for catharsis. So it wasn't until "The Invisible Guest" was completed that Paul resumed the creation of "Mirage". By then he could calmly look at the life-changing episodes of many years ago. And the audience is undoubtedly lucky, we saw the "Mirage", a thriller and philosophical film.
Paul came to China to promote the movie "The Invisible Guest" and went out of his way to climb the Great Wall.
On March 24, 2019, Paul and the actors attended the premiere of "Mirage" in Beijing.
When "Mirage" premiered in Beijing, Paul was named the "King of Burning Brains" at the publicity scene.
Be back to the little boy
Paul in life is simple and casual, but he prefers to create thrillers with intricate plots, which makes people surprised. But in Paul's view, tragedy represents power, layers of complex emotions, and his suspense is beautiful in constantly revealing what people are hiding, unexpectedly and reasonably.
Paul said: "When I was making movies, I was back to the old little boy (he was watching the movie for the first time). He always remembers going to see Hitchcock movies with his grandmother when he was a kid, "The lights in the movie theater were going out, my heart was pounding, and all my attention was focused on the screen, as if entering a kind of game realm." Without missing a single plot or a line, I actively look for hints in the shots and speculate about what's going to happen next... "Paul wants his audience to be as engaged as well."
In order to ensure that there are no flaws in the logical clues, Paul will spend a long time to repeatedly deliberate on the script, and the script of "Mirage" was written for 1 and a half years, and 13 drafts were revised before and after. After the script was completed, he showed it to his friends to make sure the script was seamless before filming began. On the shooting scene, he was more hands-on in every detail. While filming the scene where Laura dies in The Invisible Guest, Paul wanted to shoot from different angles so that he could have more options in post-editing without losing any detail, so throughout the day, Barbara Lenny kept repeating the action of collapsing in the bathroom. The filming of "Mirage" took 10 weeks, but before the start, all the actors spent 2 months rehearsing on the basis of reading the script, in order to ensure that the 3 time and space conversion shooting performances were natural and not flawed. During the 3 weeks of shooting on the Canary Islands, the probability of a sunny day was high, but what needed to be filmed was the story that took place in the storm. Therefore, the crew prayed to the moon every day for a cloudy day the next day. This funny little episode reflects Paul's care and rigor, and he wants the audience to feel the real effect of the real storm scene and lightning shining on the actor's skin, rather than using special effects to produce it later.
Paul was on the set of Mirage
Paul says a great thriller is like a house of cards, and any card drawn from it will collapse. Paul didn't want his audience to leave for a second, and he worked extra hard for it.
This article is an excerpt from the July 2021 issue