“It’s a way of life,” Oliver Laxe tells me when describing how he came to cast people he would meet at raves in “Sirat,” craving the authenticity of the people he first met from the five years he spent in the desert of Tangier that lived like nomads, moving from one party to another. But there’s more to it than the inference that what real ravers could bring that couldn’t be faked, seeing their that skin hardened to endure any extreme weather that could be thrown at them and their various tattoos and piercings as no mere ornamentation but marks of their survival. His reverence for those that choose such a tough but rewarding existence, able to give themselves over completely to the music when they congregate or to the elements in the time they spend away from one another just trying to stay afloat, radiates from the screen and as Laxe has been fond of saying since the premiere of the film at Cannes when the inevitable question of what he wants people to take away from the film has come up, “Just keep dancing,” when it’s those on the fringes of society seem to know something that those who live with modern comforts don’t.
There wouldn’t seem like there’s even the energy around to power the speakers being set up in the middle of nowhere for the festivities at the beginning of “Sirat” and yet there is an electrical current that can’t be denied well before the infectious beat of Kangding Ray’s “Amber Decay” starts to blast out, making the rocks around tremble and those that turn up for the dance party writhe unconsciously as if all parts of the universe are connected all at once. Yet the rave to end all others actually starts to look like the apocalypse with partiers forced to go their separate ways in their custom-crafted trucks once the authorities come around, leaving one particular father and son, Luis and Esteban (Sergi Lopez and Bruno Núñez Arjona), in greater limbo than when they had entered the premises, not looking for a good time but rather Luis’ teenage daughter who disappeared into the scene some time ago. The less the said about what happens next, the better, but as Luis and Esteban join a caravan of three groups of ravers who scatter to the wind, what can be shared is that Laxe has made one of the most indelible existential dramas of recent memory when its characters, stripped of both any contemporary amenities or connection to the outside world must find the will to carry on.
When Laxe actually trained to be a firefighter for his last film “Fire Will Come” so he could be properly prepared to capture a real conflagration on camera for the film’s climax without putting the production at risk, you can be assured of a palpable sense of danger that runs throughout “Sirat” that makes it most riveting. But while making the desert a most unforgiving place in what it demands physically, the director also movingly envisions it as somewhere acceptance can take root, individually as those that roam around it can make peace with their past when all they have control over is their present and collectively when it becomes a home to outsiders who tend to gravitate towards one another to find a way to forge ahead. Viscerally thrilling and spiritually satisfying, the film is one of the best reasons to make it out to the theater this year and during a recent visit to Los Angeles, Laxe spoke of the evolution of an idea he had nearly two decades ago into what would become a sensation on the Croisette and eventually Spain’s official entry to the Oscars, bringing together a ragtag group in similar fashion as happens in the film to make something transcendent.
From what I understand, this has been in mind for 15 years and it seems so attuned to the times, did the idea change much throughout the years?
Not much. We changed things in the script, but this perception that we are living in a shifting era was since the beginning. One of the characters says “It’s been long time since the end of the world” — the end of an era. I’m not nihilistic. I think that we are [living in] changing times.
You’ve said the desert has certain rules and I know that you’ve lived there for a time. What was it like to make that atmosphere come alive.
Yes, I lived there for 10 years, so in a way I was doing what they do in the film a few times. I had no such big trucks, but I would drive through the mountains there and in a way I experienced the film before [making it] on my own, going to parties. I like this Moroccan landscape. I like to call it a wounded landscape. You can feel the creation of the planet when you are there — the erosion [as well as] the violence over time. In these places, you feel small, you feel you are nothing and I think this is healthy. My grandparents felt when they were living in these landscapes, nature gives you anguish, but in a way it’s important to have this anguish to have less anguish. It’s a kind of contradiction.
Is it true you collected your cast by attending raves?
I did it with Nadia Acimi, a really great friend of mine who makes the clothes for all of my films. But she belongs to this universe. I went to Paris with her a lot and she’s not a casting director, but I gave her the role. Nadia was not the most logical decision because she was not looking for actors, but in a way, art is about accidents. The most beautiful things always come from an accident or a bad decision, and when you do street casting, you look for the people that have the characteristics of what you want to express in the film, but you aren’t looking for actors that have to [act well]. With Nadia, she was like looking for truth and to represent this movement and this culture and she belongs to this [herself], so she wanted to make a good homage and she was looking for good people, but that was easy to find good people in this movement because they are good people with good values.
Besides Sergi Lopez, many of the actors share their characters’ names. Were they bringing ideas to who they’d play on screen?
Always. They are not playing themselves. Jade [Oukid, for instance], she’s not a DJ. Tonin [Janvier] doesn’t play with his [amputated] leg like it was a puppet [as he does in one of the film’s most memorable scenes]. Now, for example, Stefania [Gadda], doesn’t go to parties any more. She’s more stable. Most of them are living in the countryside and at certain point, when you are a certain age, you don’t move from one place as much.
Was it interesting to have Sergi in the mix with nonprofessionals?
From the beginning, it was easy because Sergi is a really normal guy and he’s able to build a mask. He’s this methodological actor that can invent a character, but what I like from him is that he’s able to erase masks. He’s ready to be a zero and he did the work to be more at the level of the non-professional actors and at the same time, he was supporting them all the time, being really generous to them.
At least in the films that have made it to America like “With a Friend Like Harry,” he often seems typecast as a brute. What made you think of him to play this deeply vulnerable father?
At the beginning, I was thinking of another sensibility, someone more with more nostalgia and [Sergi] is really someone who is joking all the time and he has a lot of balance [in his emotions], so I probably was looking for someone a little bit more tortured. But at some point we were thinking that you don’t expect these characters will do something that they do, so we [started] thinking of Sancho Panza that becomes a hero. And we like a lot the anti-heroes, these bodies that you don’t expect that, so Sergi would be more identifiable because he’s a normal guy and at the same time, you connect with him on an emotional level from the beginning because he’s able to express emotions in a really beautiful way.
The rave must have been like an entire production unto itself and from what I understand, it was planned as an actual rave would be. Was that actually at the beginning of the shoot or was that later on?
We were shooting three weeks in Spain and four in Morocco and the logical thing could be to do the rave at the beginning, as it is in the film, but we were really afraid that for us to shoot the rave then would be exhausting, so we decided to do it at the end of the third week and rest between the Spanish shooting to the Moroccan [shoot]. Obviously, we were partying right after the end of the film. We were shooting the first day-and-a-half of the rave and after the rave was continued, it was continuous until the third day. In terms of producing, it was really complicated because we had to make something legal of something that is [typically] illegal. We didn’t want to make it Burning Man, but we really wanted to evoke a free party and we didn’t want it [to appear like] people dressed as punks on the weekend. We wanted real ravers. That’s why we [set] it in Spain, near the border with France. We wanted rivers from all over Europe.
Could you feel like David Lean, standing atop the mountain looking over hundreds of extras like that?
You are in front of your neurosis. You are in front of your craziness. I don’t know. We have a strange way to ask for love.
The caravan of trucks becomes an extension of the characters. How did you decide on the vehicles you have?
That was really important. When I was going to rave, I would take pictures from a lot of cars outside and we wanted something spectacular, but at the same time nothing too expensive. They are pirates, so they can’t pay themselves for a truck like this, and we didn’t want it to be too spectacular. But most of the [characters] know about mechanics and carpentry, so they fix them and can make the trucks themselves, it’s not so expensive. We had to buy three models of each.
That was the most expensive thing in the film to have three of the same vehicle three times because there were explosions and also we wanted to go faster [when we were] shooting. That was a little bit silly because we did this in [such an] order that when we were shooting [the interiors of] one truck, the grips could work on the second truck to prepare it to shoot a new sequence. The problem is that we didn’t have more grips, so we had to wait anyway to prepare the trucks and it was quite slow to shoot. But I love the trucks. We were wondering if we could bring the trucks here to the United States for the [publicity] campaign, but it’s forbidden to drive with them.
Oh, is it?
Yeah, we don’t have the [proper paperwork]. That’s what we wanted to do in Cannes, but they didn’t allow us. We wanted to arrive on the red carpet.
You made quite an arrival anyway. When the idea for this came 15 years ago and you’ve made these increasingly more ambitious films, did the production of the others embolden you to attempt things you may not have when you first had the idea, particularly with the action?
I don’t know. My first feature film, “You Are All Captains,” was a film that I did with €20,000. We were like five people doing it in my neighborhood where I was living in Tangier, so everything was a surprise. I always knew that I could be a filmmaker, but I was really working on the margins, making really underground cinema. “You Are All Captains” was the first time I worked with a [cinematographer]. Before I was like shooting with my Bolex 16mm camera, developing [the negatives] in my toilet. I was really a craft maker. But after 2010 when we got these prizes at Cannes, I said to myself, “Okay, life is telling me that I can make films on a more industrial [level], so I wrote three or four treatments at this time. “Mimosas” was the I wrote [thinking it would] probably will be my next film, and I wrote these trucks [in “Sirat”], so it’s a project that was really related with “Mimosas” but after “Mimosas,” it was still not the moment to do this work.
At the same time, I really needed to come back to the valley where my mom was born. It was an existentialist need. It was not just about making a film, it was just to live in Galicia again and to meet the neighbors of my grandparents. And after being there, things came really organically. “Fire Will Come” was a success in Spain in terms of tickets and awards and that’s when the possibility to make “Sirat” was more realistic. We started to finance the film in France and it was not easy, so we had to look for financing in Spain and for the first time in my career, they trusted me. They gave me freedom and the result is that we did a film that was really, really risky, but it’s been a success in Spain. In cinemas, we did almost half a million spectators and it’s [subsequently been] a success on their platform, so that’s proof that it’s good sometimes from the industry to support authors like me.
“Sirat” opens on November 14th for a one-week Oscar qualifying run on November 14th in Los Angeles at the AMC Burbank 16 and in New York at Film at Lincoln Center.