El espejismo, Mirage

I had read a little Rampo before, but in 2014 my friend Ethan Spigland brought a collection of his tales to me with the idea of putting together an anthology film, with various filmmakers adapting different stories. One especially stood out to me, in part because of how eerily it mirrored certain elements of the film I had just finished making, For the Plasma: the close relationship between two protagonists whose individual points of view are set into conflict and confusion within an intersubjective space, the emphasis on vision, optical technologies and the contemplation of nature, the use of framing devices. Also, a mood, or iridescent combination of them: romantic but uncanny, melancholy and sometimes a little funny. I also thought it would be interesting to in some way return Rampo, who modeled and named himself after Edgar Allan Poe, to an American context.

Well, the anthology film never came to be, but I also never forgot about “The Traveller”. Then, in 2023, I had a month or so of relatively free time and I decided to write another long gestating project, an original feature script called A Sun Sets in the East. I was worried about getting fatigued with that, so as a kind of productive distraction, I took breaks writing a short adaptation of the Rampo. This first version of the story was mostly set in New York City’s Lower East Side, where I then lived.

Shortly afterward, I moved to San Sebastián, Spain, to attend Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. My initial plan for my time there was to continue reworking and developing the script for A Sun Sets in the East. But I arrived and was fascinated by the city’s topography, and realized I would get very impatient with myself spending the next year and a half dealing only in abstractions rather than shooting. I looked back at the Rampo script and it occurred to me that San Sebastián, with its hills and mountains, island, elevators and escalators, was ideal for the verticality so important to the story. So I began reworking it, in great part around the places and people I had found in San Sebastián – including Francisca, Maria and Rita. As the new script came together, the prominence of the city in the story, as well as my own position and that of much of the cast and crew as outsiders in it, began to interact in interesting ways with not just San Sebastián’s current identity, but its history. The film started to ask questions about how we affect, and how we are affected by, the places that are not ours, but that perhaps draw us in or shut us out.

In the original tale (in which the siblings are male), the “traveller” of the title has a very strange position in relation to the events of the story. He witnesses everything, but is denied access to the mystery at its heart. I didn’t want to lose the ambiguity of that, but to increase it – so I made my siblings’ lives mirror each other in certain ways, while also exploring their differences, and how the actions of each could reverberate within their relationship in ways difficult for either of them to fully perceive or understand. This also allowed me to push other intriguing elements of the original story a little further: for example, the strangeness of the displacement of the action of tailing, with its erotic undertones, from the obsessed character onto the “normal” one. Also, building out a more realistic drama at the film’s center made the ostensibly fantastic elements at its beginning and end more complex and unsettling, and created new shadings of uncertainty throughout the film.

I love to feel these elements – bodies, space, camera – in complex circulation with each other. It’s maybe the most thrilling thing in cinema for me, the thing that affects me most deeply, that feels most endless, most mysterious and inexhaustible. Of course, the long take is not the only way to achieve it. But one of the most exciting things about the long take is that it has the capacity to include other shot and montage structures within itself, other things that fascinate me. This is one reason I’m drawn strongly to directors like Somai, Kumashiro, Wyler, Astruc, Dreyer, in whose work the shot might go on and on, but the relationships within it (between bodies, spaces, camera, or one shot function and another) are constantly in a state of change and flux.

As you point out, the film foregrounds the act of observation. My previous films have all done this as well, but I think that another interesting thing about long takes is that a certain play with continuity and discontinuity, with ambiguity in point of view and perspective, is inherent in them. If El espejismo is particular in how its long takes operate, it’s a matter of emphasis.Placing that emphasis is also an attempt to respect the viewer and the people and things that are filmed. Filming is not natural, images are not natural. For me, this is a fundamental problem of cinema. By what right – moral, aesthetic, psychological – can a camera be where we are putting it? Are we speaking for ourselves or someone else when we do that? And to what extent is it even possible for a film to speak for a person? All of my films try to find new ways to ask these questions, while never claiming to answer them.

There was also an economic aspect to the decision to shoot long takes: it was a solution to the problem of how to have a robust, complex mise-en-scène on a very tight budget, to treat actors and their performances well while still allowing the space around them to exist. Paul Vecchiali, especially Encore and C’est la vie!, was something of a guiding light in this respect. Those are films where you could see that the long take was a structuring principle all the way through the film, from the writing, to the budgeting and scheduling, to the emotions of the performances.

Between the NY and San Sebastián versions, the script was rewritten with the long takes in mind to consist of large blocks of action. This resulted in eleven main sequences, each of which took place in a single location and could usually be covered in one or two principal shots. The scenes had also been written around or inspired by existing locations. I had the shots’ most important beats worked out in advance, though I was careful not to do so too strictly. And I had talked much of this through with Chris, who has been a close collaborator and dear friend since my first film. However, as with that film, he had never set foot in the locations before the shooting began.

Each shooting day followed roughly the same schedule. In the morning, I would draft the blocking of the shot with the actors. Chris watched, then, when the actors felt ready, he would join us with the camera, and as they continued to rehearse, he and I would work out how the camera could follow (or lose) the action. Then we would break for lunch.

It wouldn’t be until we resumed afterward that we began shooting. The first takes always revealed lots of problems to solve. We would make adjustments, try again. With more classical decoupage, on set the film only exists in the director’s head – everyone else is seeing fragments, usually without any clear sense of how they go together. But with the long takes, playback on an on-set monitor gave both crew and actors a strong sense of the overall sequence, of what was working and what wasn’t, and after watching everyone could propose solutions or additions. We would usually hit our stride around take nine, and by then the air would have this electrifying feeling, of everyone, in synch, doing their individual part – while new surprises and chance events could still occur at any moment.

Yes, but I think that the film is trying to always be careful to situate its reflections on cinema in an external reality. And in experiences and ambiguities that don’t belong to cinema alone, but that cinema aggravates and brings into relief, as a dreamed version of those experiences.