Carlos Marques-Marcet is director of the new film "10,000 Km," about a couple navigating a long distance relationship between Barcelona and Los Angeles. The couple tries to make up for distance through various technological platforms, only to discover it's not as easy as it seems.
The movie, which premiered at this year's SxSW Film Festival, is out July 10.
Marques-Marcet met with the Frame's John Horn to discuss the film.
Interview Highlights
This is a movie that is really only about two characters. It's about a separation between two people. Filmmakers tend to be separated from their families, the people they love, the people they know — was that part of its inspiration?
Yeah, of course. For filmmakers, that is the essence of their profession. You're constantly traveling. But I feel it's not just filmmakers, it's everybody. It's globalization. How economic structures work and function. It makes us move. Even all special classes from all over the world, you know? Even from Latin America to Asia to Europe to America — everywhere.
This is your feature debut, but you've made a lot of short films. You have two actors in this film. Is part of the inspiration for making this story with just these two characters to make it film-able? You can do it on a limited budget, you don't have a lot of extras, you don't have a lot of locations, and you basically just have people in their apartments.
Yes and no. The original script wasn't like that at all. It was something we arrived at in development. We have a company in Los Angeles and one in Barcelona so it wasn't that difficult to shoot exteriors. It was more in the process of writing that we realized that actually all the exteriors and secondary characters were superfluous. They were not necessary. The most interesting scenes were happening in the scenes between them.
After two years into writing we did another complete rewrite from scratch and we just focused on them. Suddenly the script was so much better. It was also mostly an aesthetic decision — much more of a touching and powerful movie.
Did you initially try to make a movie about technology, about love, or was it always about those two things at the same time?
Basically I wouldn't say it's about love. I would say it's about relationships. Of course, love is part of relationships but it's not the only thing involved in relationships. It would be very easy if not. I think the movie is obviously about relationships and about how people connect and relate to each other, but also how technology influences that. So I would say it's like relationships were the meaning, but technology was the tool I wanted to explore.
David Verdaguer stars as Sergi in Carlos Marques-Marcet's film, "10,000 Km" (photo courtesy of Broad Green Pictures)
The character played by Natalia Tena, Alex, is a photographer. In the course of the film she travels to Silicon Valley and she photographs the headquarters of companies like Twitter, Google and Yahoo. The way she photographs them makes them look almost like prisons. Was that part of your intention?
No! We just arrived there — in Silicon Valley — and it was like a Sunday and everything was empty. It just looked like that. It just looked like this place without people. It was not that important to be a prison, but a physical space. It's actually how it looks. I didn't even invent it! But to me there is something about it that is the physicality of the Internet because the Internet is kind of abstract.
Well isn't that kind of the point of the movie, right? That you can't really photograph the Internet it doesn't exist and yet you're trying to make what is intangible tangible.
To me, after thinking about it, that was one of the challenges of the movie. You cannot shoot the Internet. For me, the Internet is a mental process. At the end it has to do with what is off-screen. So when you see a Facebook page, there is somebody that has put this post in there with an intention, and that is all off-screen space. The Internet is a big off-screen space where people are doing things not necessarily with good intentions. There are symbolic worlds happening where you can construct and build narratives.
Natalia Tena stars as Alex in Carlos Marques-Marcet's new film, "10,000 Km" (photo courtesy of Broad Green Pictures)
Did you use your imagination or is it an actual experience that you base the Skype sex scene on?
Actually, I've never done it! It's funny because we didn't use [Skype] because they told us, "Nobody uses Skype for sex." They didn't want to relate their image with sex.
Did Google and Skype have approval over how they were shown in the movie?
Actually we didn't use Skype, we had to use something else because they didn't allow us or give us the permit. More than anything I was interested in the sound of Skype. You hear this sound and your skin will react to it. But we couldn't use it, they didn't let us.
Google was really funny because there was no way we could get a hold of them during the movie. That is what I learned about Google — you cannot reach Google, Google reaches you. Basically, once we had the movie edited, then we could ask for permits. They said, "Oh, it's totally fine." So we just went there and took the pictures without any permits and then they gave us the OK. They wanted control, but they didn't want to have to deal with it beforehand.