From the "People" Archives:

by Anthony Kaufman

(indieWIRE: 07.11.02) -- Spanish director Julio Medem was so touched by the tragic fate of Ana, one of the protagonists in his last film "The Lovers of the Arctic Circle," that he decided to make another movie to give her spirit a second chance. The result, "Sex and Lucia" (opening Friday from Palm Pictures), tells the story of Lucia, a woman so devastated by the apparent death of her lover that she escapes to an island paradise filled with as much passion as enigma. Another Kieslowskian whirl of love, doubles and twisting fates, Medem also has created a unique look on Hi-Def 24p: overexposed beachscapes and bedrooms, drained of color and evoking a dream-like world where his characters live between fiction and reality (one of the protagonists is a writer, creating perhaps half of what we see.)

With his fifth feature since 1992's "Cows," the Basque filmmaker took his story through eight drafts, spent five months in rehearsal, and discovered a new Spanish starlet in Paz Vega as the luminescent Lucia (soon appearing in Almodovar's upcoming gem "Talk To Her"). On a brief trip to Manhattan, Medem spoke with Anthony Kaufman about light and grain, searches, and circularity.

"Every story, in a sense, is a search. You're searching for the reason for that story to exist. There's always a destiny."

indieWIRE: One of the things that sticks in my mind most about the film is the light, this overexposed quality. First, how was that accomplished technically and why?

Julio Medem: First, the movie was shot using CineAlta Hi-Definition 24p. It was incredible. This was the third movie in the world using this format. Since Lucia was escaping from a tragedy, she escapes that beautiful island that she steps on. And suddenly those characters have the right to do with that island whatever they want; for example, with the light. Also, when I went to the island with the camera, I forced the light. This overexposed light that almost blinds you, it's like the characters erasing themselves and starting from zero, so they can start again. That's the idea I had when I was shooting with my small camera when I first went to the island.

iW: Was the look achieved in post or during shooting?

Medem: Both. During filming, a little bit. We did a very cool white balance, and also overexposed a little bit. We did some testing and we first dealt with the whites and the blacks and the contrasts between the two. The chromatic levels were lowered, so it takes out the colors a little bit. Also, when you increase the light level, you take away the saturation of the color.

iW: Did it come out the way you wanted, visually?

Medem: When it's projected digitally, that's when it comes out the way I wanted.

iW: And projected on film?

Medem: It gives it a film texture, with the grain. Sometimes, I like the grain, but I wanted it to be completely transparent with no grain at all. If you see the hi-definition version, itıs very impressive on a big screen.

iW: Honestly, I liked the grain. Why did you want it "transparent"?

Medem: Because I wanted to tell the story of this place where the characters are going is different from where they were before.

iW: You mentioned Lucia having this lightness. Originally, you were going to cast the actress [Najwa Nimri] from "Lovers of the Article Circle," but you went with Paz Vega instead. What did you see in Paz that made you think of this lightness?

Medem: Actually, the first thing I noticed about her was there was no guilty feeling on her. Nothing bad could happen in her world; nothing bad could be attributed to her. You can also see in her a determined energy to do whatever she wants to do. For example, she's in love with this writer and goes to him and tells him, "I want to live with you." And that's what it needed to be. Lucia needed to be the light of the film.

iW: You did an extensive rehearsal process.

Medem: We rehearsed for about five months. It was planned to be a month and a half of rehearsal, but we kept postponing the starting date, so that's how we ended up rehearsing for five months.

iW: Do you think the movie would have been different if you only had that month and a half?

Medem: Of course. There was a whole new version of the script. The actors came up with their own past. We also rehearsed the sex scenes a lot. The last day of the rehearsal, actually, I asked my actors to go to a psychiatrist as their characters. 45 minutes each, but the psychiatrist was me. So each of the actors came to me, and they had 45 minutes to talk to me. And it was incredible what they told me and how they lived it and suffered it. I had the sensation that I was visited by my real characters. And that was the last day of rehearsal. I donıt think with a month and a half of rehearsals, we would have reached that level of intensity.

iW: I also heard you shot in sequence.

Medem: In the section of the movie that is the past, we shot the whole sequence in a week and in order. It helped a lot. The scene in which she declares her love to Lorenzo, however, we had to shoot after that. I was a little bit afraid, because we did that scene where she finds out that he's dead and she is devastated out of order. So the following day after that breakdown, she was there to declare her love to him. It might have been difficult, but I think that scene turned out better. We never had rehearsed it that way, so I'm convinced that it was actually positive that the day before she had to act like he was dead. There's this kind of melancholy feeling.

iW: How was it shooting DV on set?

Medem: With this camera, I was able to take less space with the actors and was able to have a more intimate relationship with the actors. I also had the opportunity to tape in the same way as I did in the rehearsal process. And of course, I could shoot as much as I wanted, because the tape is so inexpensive. And I'm filming and I'm asking them things and I give them directions. You gain a lot in terms of this relationship, with this camera, especially in this kind of movie where the actors had to give a lot of themselves.

"This overexposed light that almost blinds you, it's like the characters erasing themselves and starting from zero, so they can start again."

iW: Can you talk about the way your movie plays with time and fate? How do you see these themes relating to film?

Medem: It's very essential for stories on film. Every story, in a sense, is a search. You're searching for the reason for that story to exist. There's always a destiny. When you manipulate that destiny, you're forced into it. So there's a challenge and it's a delicate thing to know how to deal with that. You have to find the natural course of that story, or what seems obvious to you in dealing with that story, and find a way that it will lead to the story's authentic destiny.

iW: Why do you prefer telling things in a circular way rather than a linear way?

Medem: If somebody is running away from something, I adapt to that sensation, where you're protecting yourself, and when I'm in that state, I don't want to know about the past. If when Lucia, for example, arrives at a place, it's an opening. There's the hole, for example, and she can see the ocean through that opening and she is tempted to question her past. In real life, you get to the present or what's happening to you in a way that's not constant; it comes and goes. Some things remind you of the past and some things don't. Maybe in one instance, you're in the past, and in the next step, you're planning about the future. And in that regard, our lives are not linear. Of course, there are some stories that need to be told in a linear way, and that's fine, but in this movie, like in "Lovers of the Arctic Circle," I thought the story was subjective.

iW: Can you talk about how you developed the script for "Lucia"? Was there a book?

Medem: When I was writing the script, I wrote the present of the story on the island. Then I wrote the past of the characters in the shape of a novel, because I wanted to learn about the past of these characters. But it's a novel I never thought of publishing; it was just an exercise. From that novel, I adapted a script, so I had two scripts: "Lucia, Ray of Light" and "Sex Before the Sun," and when I put them together, that's "Sex and Lucia."

iW: Is the name Lucia intentional? As in light and luz?

Medem: Yes.

iW: Why did you call it "Sex and Lucia"?

Medem: To clarify, in Spanish, the title is "Lucia and El Sexo," because Lucia is that energy, that present, that escape, and the sex part is the past, so that's why it's in that order.

iW: What are you doing next?

Medem: I'm working on a movie about the Basque conflict in Spain. We'll talk about the ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom], but the message of the movie isn't about terrorists, it's against violence. But the movie also says one of the reasons there's terrorism in that area is because of the way the government treats that area of Spain. There's a tension between those two worlds.

iW: And I suspect it's also a love story?

Medem: Yes, between parents and children. And men and women.