It was hard to imagine Ana Asensio sitting still for any length of time when her directorial debut “Most Beautiful Island” inspired the kind of response upon its premiere at SXSW in 2017 where she had audiences on the edge of their own seats, eager to see what was next. Still, she had invested herself fully in the harrowing drama of an immigrant in New York just trying to keep her head above water, thrusting herself in front of the camera as fearlessly as behind it and while the film proved exhilarating between the energy of the city and her own, she wasn’t about to rush a follow-up.
“Filmmaking is such a such a personal thing for me, and eventually I will be happy to start doing [some other movie], but it’s been such a cathartic experience that I had to find something that was as powerful and as honest or something that was inside of me, so it took me a while,” says Asensio, now back in her native Spain after living abroad for the better part of two decades.
The wait was worth it to go by “Goat Girl,” a film that confirms Asensio’s unique voice while illustrating her versatility, redirecting her eyes from the dangers of Manhattan where the night holds plenty of secrets to an equally fraught yet considerably lighter environment in 1980s Spain where the eight-year-old Elena (Alessandra González) has to navigate growing up in the wake of her beloved grandmother’s death. Like Asensio framed herself in “Most Beautiful Island,” the camera is never more than at arm’s length from Elena to channel her youthful energy, initially introduced at a ballet recital where to look out onto the crowd is to see where the empty seat where her grandmother would’ve sat. Her parents are too consumed with keeping a roof over their head to give Elena any additional attention when they’re also grieving themselves, prompting Elena to look for elsewhere for comfort, from the family of gypsies that play music in the courtyard of their apartment building with Serezade (Juncal Fernández), a girl her own age, and her goat Lola, to her classmate Eusebia (Ángela García) who is curiously disliked by others in her friend group.
When Elena quite directly has the fear of God put in her at the start of “Goat Girl” to beware of black goats for they represent the darkness of the devil by her church, it seems like she is tempting fate by befriending Serezade, who has one for a pet, yet with her grandmother no longer around to give her guidance, Elena starts to realize that she actually has to come to her own good judgment when it makes no sense what her family and friends tell her to stay away from with their own biases. It may not seem like much when Elena makes a decision like trimming her own bangs for the first time, but it turns out to be one of many that start to add up to the person she’ll ultimately be, just as the film itself accumulates in power with every subtle choice Asensio makes that strays a bit from a traditional coming-of-age tale formula when it inevitably is tinged with nostalgia as it unfolds in the ‘80s, but hardly sees the past with rose-colored glasses with its irrational prejudices and surfaces the ways in which kids see the world more clearly at times than adults.
With Asensio all set to make a triumphant return to New York this week to kick off the stateside run of “Goat Girl,” the writer/director graciously took the time to talk about what story finally made it worth it to get behind the camera again, finding the right young actors for the roles and incorporating memories from her own youth.
This is radically different from your first feature, not only the fact that it’s set in Spain, but that it’s a period piece and you’ve relieved yourself of acting in it. Was it actually as different as it looked to make?
I was writing and rewriting this script that I was convinced was going to be my second film and I got support from Cinereach and from the Sundance Institute and it was like everyone was cheering me on, helping me to get it out and then I was just stuck. There was something that was not working, and I would just sit down to read and I meant to do another rewrite or another pass on the script, but instead of digging into this world that I was writing, I kept thinking about my childhood and these landscapes in Spain that were half-fantasy, half-realistic. I would waste my time daydreaming on that [thinking], “Oh how beautiful this is, almost like postcards.” And then I realized, “Maybe I need to write about this, but I don’t know what exactly.” So it’s a strange process the way this happened. First I started to remember myself as a little girl in the late ’80s in Madrid and then I wanted to tell a story about my childhood, but I don’t know exactly what that was the beginning of.
You find that just navigating the world as a child during that time is fascinating enough. I’ve never seen any tell the story quite this way where the girl has to decide for herself who she should be friends with when there’s pressure from both her friends and her parents. What was it like to find a narrative here?
Of course we remember you know these coming-of-age moments that we all get and cherish in in some ways, like, “Oh, that was the moment that things changed for me and often happens in your teens.” But for me, my early childhood was very powerful in the sense that I always have it present and one of the things were friendships. I remember how cruel kids were at the school and also in the neighborhood, so it was a way to explore something that when you’re an adult, you overlook the emotions that the kids are going through, but when you’re a kid, that is extremely powerful and starts to define the kind of person that you’re going to be in the future, making those decisions and deciding not to be a follower but perhaps a leader or standing up for your ideas or other people even though they might not fit in the group. Those moments are the very first moments of coming out of your shell because up until that moment, your schoolmates are your friends. And then at some point you start to create these selected groups and that moment is very important in in in the life of anyone. I think how things happen in your early friendships marks us for the future as well.
What was it like to find Alessandra and Juncal?
We wanted actors that had never done anything before and it was such a challenge because at that age, of course kids haven’t done anything, but it’s also hard to find them. There’s one or two acting schools in Madrid, but we were basically searching in all sorts of venues — on the streets, the schools, parks. Anyway. It was an old fashioned type of casting, putting up paper on street lights and trees and so many applied to this audition, but just from the very first moment I saw her, it was magnetic the attraction that I felt towards her. Then when I met her in person, the way she reacted to any direction, it was just very interesting and very different than any other girl that I saw.
And Juncal came just from a submission video that she made on her mom’s cell phone was so impressive and so fresh and unique. The way she talked, I never heard anyone talking like her, so it really was just so clear from the moment of her first submission that she was this Serezade character, this magical free spirit full of energy and charming. She conquered all our hearts.
Once you get them together in a room, does anything change about your ideas of this or you know anything you can get excited about you may not have expected?
Yeah, I wanted them to be like the yin and yang, so different in many, many ways and when I put them in the room for the first time, they were so different – the way they approached the props that I put to play with, just to do an audition like a game — and I realized, “Okay, I have the leads but it’s going to be hard because I have to speak in a very different way to one and to the other and perhaps not even telling [them] things together because they have a different understanding of the same sentence.” So it wasn’t like, “Oh my God, I found them. They are perfect. Let’s just put them together.” Together we had to figure out how to make this work.
You bring a goat into the mix too, as if it to stack the deck.
I had high expectations with the goat, and little by little, I realized that I just had to work with what I had. I was hoping to find a goat that was trained and actually came from the Roma people, but that tradition already vanished and no longer existed in Spain, so it was very difficult also to tap into that community and to have them open themselves up and tell me stories. So that was complicated. We had to actually find j an animal trainer and he never trained in goats before and goats are not easy to train, but then the goat did mostly what she wanted to.
What was it like getting up close with a camera in general? Like “Most Beautiful Island,” you film stay quite close to the main character and really capture the energy of being around this young girl, but that seems like it had to be a challenge here.
For the camera operator, it was a nightmare. It was an exciting challenge the first few days. By the end of the shoot, the poor guy’s back hurt because the camera always had to be at her eye level. There are devices [to help with that], but everything is very awkward and uncomfortable and you’re compensating with your body, so there was a lot of physical work on his part. But it was always conceived this way and for me, it was crucial to observe the world through her height and her perspective, too.
You find a great apartment to film in for Elena’s home where every room has a different kind of wallpaper. What was it like to recreate this look from the 1980s?
We had a limited budget and at some point, we considered all different options, but we started looking for houses and apartments that are for sale that were very old and they hadn’t been updated. We found this apartment that had been locked since the ’70s because of a dispute on the will and they suddenly opened it up. There was no electricity, no running water. The outlets were literally from the ’70s and the wallpaper was original, so the production designer was like, “Oh my God, this is gold because when you reproduce this, you can tell.” For us, all the details were so important — the windows, the — and we modified the furniture a little bit, but a lot of what was there was used. We were very careful to use everything period. The same thing with the clothing for kids. Nothing was imitating the ’80s, it was purely from the ’80s.
It also overlooks this central courtyard, where Serezade’s family sets up to play for tips. I was fascinated to see this practice of dropping the change in socks. Was that something you actually saw yourself in your youth?
I had that memory of my childhood because what happened is you would throw the coins from the windows and balconies and then these people had to be looking for the coins. In the case of my apartment building, there was this dirt in the plaza and the coins could be buried under the dirt and it felt so disrespectful, in a way. Some people I remember used tinfoil, so they will wrap the coin and throw it, but I remember doing the sock and I thought that was a cute detail to then show in the movie that there was some care and tenderness. You’re not just throwing money to someone doing a show on the street, but there something there and they’re picking up your sock in some way and giving it back to you.
It was such an amazing detail because it shows also there’s a different experience for the adults than the kids. And I usually ask about a crazy day on set, but asking your lead actress to cut her bangs on camera seems like it might’ve been it. What was that like?
It was the only day that Alessandra was nervous. Every other day she was very playful and very relaxed, but that day, oh my God, we actually had to call her mom on set, and she never wanted her mom. She was very independent, but that day she needed her because she knew it was one take and she felt the responsibility. She was very self-conscious about the responsibility all throughout the film, but that particular scene, she was just so worried, like “Please, I can’t mess this up. I I have to do it perfect.” And we’d practice with fake hair and then when it was the time, she did it, but for her was the most tense day.
It all ultimately came out beautifully. What’s it been like starting to see the film get out there into the world?
It’s been fun and it’s been interesting because there’s been a lot of men of a certain age that have been coming out of the movie theater with watery eyes and telling me I’ve been so moved by what I said, and I was not expecting that. And then the film was more categorized for the younger audience, so we invited children to see the film. We played at children film festivals in Europe and it’s strange because certain people respond to this movie in a very particular way, but it doesn’t depend so much on the age or the gender. There is something more about the sensibility and how closely connected your are with your childhood or your inner child.
“Goat Girl” opens on June 19th in New York at Cinema Village.