This article contains spoilers, please read as appropriate.
With the same evidence, how many stories can make sense?
"The Invisible Guest" shows 5 of them. Under the same evidence, an accident and murder together are transformed into different forms in the mouths of two people, and they are interpreted over and over again in front of the audience.
The scene is relatively simple, and a female lawyer, Virginia Goodman, meets with Adrian, a male entrepreneur suspected of killing his lover Laura, hoping to find a way to help Adrian clear his suspicions. To get help, Adrian confides in Goodman and The Truth about an accident related to the killings. But in the conversation between the two, it is found that based on the same evidence, there is far more than one story that can happen, and the truth of the matter is far more complicated than Adrian initially revealed.
As a suspense film full of thriller elements, "The Invisible Guest" follows the setting of many classic mystery stories. Among them, there are only relatively fixed characters, Adrian and Laura, a pair of cheating lovers, parents of car accident victims and two lawyers, which are the main characters of this film. From the beginning, the murderers in both cases were almost locked in a few people other than lawyers, and the reasoning was to argue for each of them separately.
Such a film that relies purely on dialogue and picture to promote the development of the plot is difficult to make well, and once it is filmed, it is usually regarded as a "god work" by fans, such as "The Night the Comet Came", "Memory Fragments" and "Perfect Stranger". Compared with these films, the biggest difference between "The Invisible Guest" is that the crime and thriller elements are perfectly combined, using different tones and background music to create a tense atmosphere in ordinary scenes, and most of the time, the horror atmosphere is almost to the point of ignition.
"The Invisible Guest" opens with an exquisite female lawyer walking into Adrian's home. According to the director, this is the beginning he thought of in order to make the audience fully focused on the film in the first 5 minutes. From a dramatic point of view, the film uses flashbacks and interludes to show the third act at the beginning, and then through their exploration of the "truth", the stories that may occur in the first act and the second act are told from different angles.
The quadruple reversal in their dialogue is carried out precisely to peel back the shell of disguise that has shrouded the truth. In fact, these stories were gradually revealed by Adrian under the pressure of lawyers. The lawyer, on the other hand, reasoned and revised Adrian's answer to make it more factual.
This process is very heart-wrenching, and it is also the most abundant fragment that the director uses the lens to reflect, and even the plot that seems to be slightly repetitive also makes several people in the memory show the temperament that is in line with the story at that time, and repeatedly starred. However, if you pay too much attention to the details of these memories that occur in the dialogue, you will fall into the trap of the director.
The director's method is to deliberately throw the audience in the wrong direction, so that they can continue to ponder along this line, so that they cannot find that the truth has already been placed in another direction. When watching the film, when all the attention of the audience is on the truth of these two murder cases (yes, at the end of the film, the accident becomes a murder case), it is difficult to find many details that the director has buried from the beginning of the film, such as the lawyer sorting out his makeup in the elevator, looking out the window with a heavy heart, and the pen that never leaves his hand.
It is entirely the director's credit that these different stories based on clues are established separately, but in these kinds of stories, the male and female protagonists are shown to behave in line with the human setting of the time, which need to be attributed to Mario Casas and Barbara Legne, who played them. In fact, in order to allow the two to grasp the role more accurately, two months before the start, the actor entered the group to start reading the script, and after starting the camera, it was also according to the closest to the real situation, that is, the suspect Adrian controlled everything, and the victim Laura's conscience was tormented, step by step to push back their fabricated appearance in the deformed story, so that the degree of emotional change had a sense of progress.
However, the final answer is only a reasonable explanation. Perhaps it is precisely because of the director's own love for British classical speculative fiction that the famous detectives in the book care more about reasoning that can be used as truth. This long-planned revenge plan, which came to an abrupt end before the prisoner was punished, also made it impossible for him to turn over.
Interface Entertainment: Your new work", The Invisible Guest, is a film with a strong sense of suspense and horror, and the stories you have created before are also in this style. How did you fall in love with the subject? Have you been influenced by any of your predecessors?
Oriol Paul: Actually, the one that has had the biggest impact on me is the suspense mystery novel. I've been in love with suspense mystery novels since I was 14 years old, and I'm crazy watching them every day. Favorites are the works of British suspense novelists Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Watching this kind of suspenseful reasoning story, I would have seen the ending from the first sight to the end.
As for the film, Juan Antonio Barden's The Death of a Cyclist and Otto Preminger's The Secret History of Lola have had a very profound impact on me. It can be said that these childhood hobbies of mine have made me love this subject today.
Interface Entertainment: "The Invisible Guest" is indeed a film that follows the classic suspense and reasoning setting, with simple scenes, relatively fixed characters, and creative inspiration from these classic works you love? There are so many stories of this type, is there any way you can make them particularly appealing to your audience?
Oriol Paul: Yes, it's all from the novels I read back then. My method is actually very simple, one of which is that I will add some horror to the reasoning story, which is something I value very much. On the other hand, I also attach great importance to the setting of the first 5 minutes of the film. During these 5 minutes, I will clearly and clearly explain what happened and what the case is, and completely confine the audience's attention to this range.
In fact, when I'm creating, after the beginning is complete, I'll create the ending. After the two ends are completed, I build a bridge in the middle, interspersed with several stories that reverse and fill each person's different.
Interface Entertainment: In watching, it is obvious that you are leading the audience into the story in front, a few steps ahead of the audience and not behind the audience, how does this work?
Oriol Paul: It's actually quite simple, when I create a story, I keep throwing the audience in the wrong direction in the process. As a director, I have always let the audience see what is on the top, but the most important details and logical points are hidden below.
Interface entertainment: For example, after the last female lawyer reveals the true face, think about it carefully, and even look at it a second time, you will find that you have buried some details in front, but it is difficult for the audience to guess in that direction.
Oriol Paul: In fact, some viewers may have guessed it in the process, and some viewers will need to watch it, or even watch it a second time, to fully understand it. There are indeed many details, and I hope that the audience can watch it several times, and each time they can see something new and get new ideas.
Interface Entertainment: But the logic of the whole film is so tight, there are two places that are complete coincidences, right? One is to rescue Laura, who happens to be the father of the child who was killed by the collision, and the other is that the fake lawyer can leave a few minutes before the real lawyer enters the house.
Oriol Paul: Actually, only the first one is a coincidence. This is what I set up on purpose, in order to move the plot forward. After all, only his father and his father, let Laura go to their house, will happen the next series of episodes. However, this is also a kind of echo of the title of the film. In fact, the title of the film "contratiempo" in Spanish, there is the meaning of encountering misfortune and encountering things that you do not want to encounter, and this coincidence is a point here.
The second is not a coincidence. Ever since the fake lawyer entered the house, she kept stressing that she only had 180 minutes. It was before she had done enough research to understand that the real lawyer would only come at that time.
Interface Entertainment: This detail is really ignored when watching, because the four reversals based on strict logic in the film are really attractive, and the actors who play the male and female protagonists accurately show the temperament of the characters at that time at different times in the plot. How did you guide them into the role during filming?
Oriol Paul: Actually, before the official shooting, we had been working on the script in Madrid for two months. We'll do an in-depth study of the changes in these characters, so they already have a deep understanding of the characters before filming starts, and they will be more aware of what to do when they start shooting.
When filming actually started, I certainly didn't shoot in chronological order in the film. From the beginning, I first let Mario Casas play the role of Adrian first, that is, play the bad guy first, and then shoot how he pretended to get better little by little in order to cover up his mistakes, and finally filmed at the beginning of the film, he said that he was a good man.
In contrast, when Barbara Legne played Laura, she also cooperated with Adrian's changes, starting from the situation that she was a good person, getting worse little by little, and finally becoming the initiator of Adrian's mouth. From the timeline, it is also similar to shooting backwards.
Interface Entertainment: In fact, "The Invisible Guest" was released in Spain in 2016 and is your second director's feature film, do you think there is anything worth improving in this film now?
Oriol Paul: Haha, I haven't actually seen this film since its Spanish premiere. Seriously, when I came to China, I would rather watch it a second time with Chinese audiences when it was released. In this way, I can know how the Spanish audience reacted to the film, and then I can know how the Chinese audience will react to my film.
Interface Entertainment: The response should be good, and many friends around me like this movie. With such an aura-filled low-budget film, have you ever received an invitation from some of the biggest Hollywood studios to direct commercial blockbusters?
Oriol Paul: Hollywood did invite me, whether it was to write a screenplay or direct a film. Unfortunately, I now plan to start shooting my third directorial work next January, a sci-fi suspense film based on a beautiful love story, with traversal elements. In terms of time, I can't go to work in the United States unless the next one is completed. Of course, I felt that the probability of shooting was very low, because I didn't want to be controlled by the big studios, I still wanted to shoot what I really liked.