Tribeca ‘09 Interview: “The Fish Child” Director Lucia Puenzo (World Narrat. Compet.)

What prompted the idea for your film?

“El nino pez” is an adaptation of my first novel, which I wrote when I was 23 and published in 2004. While I was editing “XXY,” my first film, I began to write an adaptation thinking some other director would like to take it to screen… The material changed so drastically from the novel to the script (basically because the novel’s narrator is a dog, a very punk and trashy dog, humorous, cynical and passionately in love with his owner) that in the end I decided it would be my second film.

Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making your film.

After working in the script for 7 months, I spent another year finding the producers, cast and team who were willing to tell the legend of “El nino pez.” The situation of cinema in Argentina is tough these days, so the pre-production was stopped 3 times, but we finally made it. 

I always begin my films in the same way: finding the characters in a casting that usually takes a long time. I began looking for Lala and Guayi and it took me 7 months to find them. Once the whole cast was ready, we rehearsed for 5 weeks, while I was travelling to Paraguay to look for some locations, together with the outskirts of Buenos Aires. 

The shooting took 6 weeks and the editing 2 months.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in developing the project?

“El nino pez” is a films that intertwines several genres, and that was one of the biggest challenges: how to weave together different genres   while having at the same time a narration that would be common to the whole film, a tone and rhythm that would give it an identity. I worked on that on the script and while we were shooting, but mostly during the editing. This film had many challenges: an action scene with one only day to shoot it and extremely limited resources, 2 only days to shoot in Paraguay with a team of only 4 people, including the actress… But sometimes that adrenaline makes things work even better.

How do you define success as a filmmaker, and what are your personal goals?

Success for any artist is having a personal world that can be seen or felt in whatever they do: book, painting, film… Artists like Cassavettes, Nabokov, Haneke, Picasso, Borges, Aira… You can watch a painting or a film or read a book of them and you’ll know it is theirs, that it can not belong to anyone else. For me, that is success. My personal goal is to be able to keep telling whatever story I want with no speculations but my own desire.

What are your future projects?

I’m finishing a new novel called “La furia de la langosta” (“The Lobster’s Fury”) and have some projects to direct, hopefully soon: “The Merciful Women,” from producer Richard Rubinstein; “Satori,” a story of 2 rival karate-girls; “Ishtar,” a true story of a very peculiar relationship of a hermit-“guardafauna” and the last 22 killer whales of Patagonia.