When everyone was going a bit mad as the world went into lockdown, David Hebrero tried to harness his own wild mood swings into something productive.
“It came about feeling very sad during COVID and needing full-blown hardcore entertainment that was just a little unapologetic,” Hebrero says of his second feature “Everyone Will Burn.” “I was really like, ‘Man, I don’t want to watch another drama right now. I just really want to watch a fun, bonkers campy movie. And that’s how we started building it.”
If Hebrero wanted to provide escapism, “Everyone Will Burn” couldn’t be any more satisfying on that front, settling into a Spanish town that’s long suspected to be cursed, though that isn’t exactly why María José (Macarena Gómez) can be found at its start, standing on the edge of a bridge ready to take her own life. A decade has passed since her son killed himself as a result of relentless bullying, but the pain remains fresh and no longer believing in God, she’s an outcast in the village where the church has taken an outsized role in the community after it’s thought they can provide a shield from the curse. However, María José is lured off the precipice when she sees the young woman who looks even more distraught than she is in Lucia (Sofía García), introduced completely covered in dirt and all but despondent. Lucia may not speak, but she has a funny way to expressing herself, gradually appearing to have telekinetic powers and while María José may have thought she had a new child to take care of, she ends up being more of an equal to Lucia when both have uncontrollable impulses and find themselves at odds with a place that wants no part of them.
Whereas the quiet community of Leon may want order, Hebrero knows a crowdpleaser can be born out of chaos, having all hell break loose as Lucia and María José grow to have faith in one another in a town full of believers that sees them as heretics and with his background in cinematography, Hebrero offers up their deliverance with style, painting a colorful world outside the church that only sees things in black-and-white. After the film began its hair-raising run at Sitges Film Festival and continued to make waves at festivals such as Fantastic Fest and Screamfest, “Everyone Will Burn” is opening in Alamo Drafthouses in Los Angeles, Austin and New York this weekend before it becomes a midnight movie that can be enjoyed in your own living room next week and Hebrero spoke about how he made a heck of a homecoming himself with the pitch black horror comedy, having to reimagine the film on the fly when its original locations fell out and locking in the right cast.
Was there actually any real folklore that inspired this?
Spanish folklore is so wide and so unexplored that it’s not based on any specific legend, but we did do our research on small-town folklore, especially the religious orders that were around a few hundred years ago here and we built it all around the orders, the things they feared and all the little documents they kept and their little prophecies, and then we built our own from that.
I also heard musicals were an inspiration, as unexpected as that sounds.
That was after we wrote the script. I work as a cinematographer a lot, so I [thought], how can we make this movie different and cut through the noise, so it’s not just another horror movie? Because a lot of horror movies tend to look the same. I have a very methodical way of approaching films [where] I’m always floor planning and just building that visual language, and I’m always trying to find a cool way of engaging the audience, especially now where it’s so hard to really catch somebody’s attention. So I remember I was watching “Funny Face,” with Audrey Hepburn, and I was like, “How funny would it be if our horror movie looked like this?” And that joke grew into, what if we shoot our horror movie like a 1950s musical? And that’s how it all came together.
You’ve got these great actors in Macarena and Sofia. How did they come into the mix?
Macarena is an icon here [in Spain], both in the comedy and the horror world, and I had a friend who knew her, so I [said] “Let me just call her on a whim. I have this movie. Could you tell her about it, please?” And then she called me the day after, like she knew me for her whole life and she’s like, “Hey, I heard about your movie. I like the idea. Just send me the script and I’ll call you.” Then she read it and she said, “Find me a good actress for Lucia and I’ll do the movie.” That was her condition. And when we wrote the script, we sent it to the association for little people [in Spain], [really] because we wanted to get their notes and to see how they felt about it and then they really liked it, which was great, so they helped us with the casting [of Lucia].
They put casting calls [out] amongst all their members and they just started sending us videos. And Lucia had never ever done anything remotely related to acting [before], but I brought [Germán Torres] the actor that plays Padre Abelino, who’s a good friend of mine, to our office and we had an improv session with him [and Lucia] and I was like, “Let’s see how this plays out.” He didn’t even know he was going to be in the movie yet. That was just a favor [to me], but they just started playing off of each other and she was so natural. We all looked at each other like, “Yeah, it’s her.” And we told her right then and there.
What was it like when you got her in the room with Macarena?
Macarena really turned herself into a teacher for Lucia because she had to learn how movies work, which was a big thing [in itself], but then she had to learn how to act — and then she had to learn how to play her part. So it was a lot of work. It was three months of rehearsal. And Macarena really took it upon herself to teach her a lot of that, so we were building the characters as we were teaching her how to do the thing and [everything] was feeding each other all the time. And Macarena will ask every single question she can think of right until you say action because she really wants to make sure she understands like every single little thing. Once you get Macarena, you get all of Macarena, and you really want to push that personality she naturally has. That’s what we did that wasn’t really originally in the script. The script was a little more tame. And then once she came into the picture, all the stakes really rose.
I have a feeling that that, that the script might’ve not been too tame when you started because the production design has such personality built in. What was that like to develop Maria’s house?
One of our rules for the house was that it had to be the garden of Eden and Macarena represented the snake. And as the movie evolved, the house had to evolve from green to red, so there was a lot of pre-visualization. There was a lot of arguing about which wallpaper was best. That was probably the biggest fight, just finding the wallpaper on the floors to put on that house, but it’s not a set. It’s all real locations. And I think we spent a week completely shifting this house we found into what it is [in the film].
Where you end up filming appeared to be quite versatile in terms of locations. Was it in mind from the start?
Originally, we worked with a location for almost six months, but then two weeks before the shoot, the permits didn’t come in. There was a new government coming in and they didn’t want filming at the time we were [planning to shoot]. So two weeks before principal photography, we didn’t have a house at all, and we had prepped everything. We cried a lot. But we found this house on Airbnb, and I called the lady [that owned it] and I [said], can I come over, have some coffee and can we just talk?” And she was really receptive and I said, “We’re going to bring almost a hundred people here for a month. Are you down?” And surprisingly she was. And it took two weeks to readapt the entire movie into this house.
Wow. During filminess was there anything that happened that you may not have anticipated, but made it into the film and you now really like about it?
Oh, yes. A lot of the physicality on the movie is [from] take one because a lot of the movie was very heavily choreographed and there’s a lot of very long shots. We were always rehearsing for a few hours [before a scene] and once we were about to shoot, I would just go to every actor and just tell them to do something that the other actor didn’t know. Some people might think that’s bad, but we’re making movies, we’re not saving lives, so it’s okay. And I would tell [one actor] “Maybe get a little more aggressive with him” or “do this or that,” and the other actor had different notes that they didn’t know that the other person had. In the fight between the Macarena and Rodolfo around the kitchen, for instance, that’s one take and that’s all we have. Because after that take, we all looked at each other like, “That’s it. We’re not going to ask them to do another because it might end up really badly.” But that was really cool because it’s all very organic and it put everybody on their toes.
This also has a fantastic score. Was that a fun process for you?
That was incredible. I think Joan [Vilà] is one of the greatest composers of the next generation, and we wrote the main track of the movie six or seven months before we started shooting. And we knew we needed that because you’re telling the actors, “Hey, we’re going to shoot this horror movie as a 1950s musical,” so there was something about the tone that didn’t click [initially] with a lot of the actors and a lot of the crew. They were like, “What are we doing? What is this?” But I remember on the first day when we played the music — and we started by shooting the ending, so you’re surrounded by red in this square and a lot of shadows and hard light — and you play those violins and everybody was like, “Ah, okay, I get it.” So before we even had wrapped the script, we were already working on the music and I sent Joan [a clip of] myself, just singing a little tune and then he turned that into a gigantic, incredible score. A lot of the other songs came about later, and we knew we wanted a song for every side of the story. We knew Macarena had her song. We knew the town had a song, and we knew the prophecy had its song, so those were the three main motifs we played around with.
What’s it been like to see this get out into the world, particularly when you developed in lockdown?
It’s really exciting to travel. And I left Spain when I was 19 and I came back to shoot this movie and I hadn’t really worked here at all [in between], so I remember when I made this movie. I felt that I’m torn always between Spain and the States because of my background and when we were in Fantastic Fest in Austin, we were really terrified about how this was going to come across. We were like, “Maybe people want straight up horror, you know?” And it’s two hours of Spanish. So to see a Spanish language movie premiere there at one of the meccas of horror fantasy films and just have everyone feel it and understand it, it was really beautiful to just see the reception. People responded to the whole musical horror movie [idea] — even though there’s no [typical] songs, just the approach and the big lighting and the campiness of it all — it was honestly really exciting because we didn’t know.
“Everybody Will Burn” opens on December 1st at the Alamo Drafthouse in New York and Austin and at the Lumiere Cinema and the Alamo Drafthouse DTLA in Los Angeles and will be available on digital December 5th.
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