Alicia G. Arribas.
“Big Bad Wolf”, a suffocating thriller that borders on horror films, manages to turn the tale of Little Red Riding Hood on its head, filling the viewer with doubts. Here, the director of the film, Gustavo Hernández, explains to EFE, “each character goes through a void, and in this game -he affirms- everyone can be the ferocious wolf”.
With a script by the director himself, along with Juma Fodde and Conchi del Río, the film is a review of the Israeli film ‘Big Bad Wolves’ (Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, 2013), famous because Quentin Tarantino said he liked it a lot.
“I was excited because I saw the possibility of giving it my style and to approach the subject of revenge in such a direct way, it was a challenge,” explains Hernández.
Because “Big Bad Wolf” talks about revenge, but also obsessions, pain, injustice, wickedness and filial love.
A policeman capable of competing in cruelty with the criminals he is chasing (Javier Gutiérrez) is convinced that a music teacher (Rubén Ochandiano) is the serial killer of a bunch of girls whom he tortures and mutilates after abusing they. The mother of his latest victim (Adriana Ugarte), who lives on the edge of the law with her father (Antonio Dechent), decides to punish him.
For the director, the original “was a very masculine film and I wanted it to be more choral, more diverse”, and for this he reversed the gender of some protagonists. He did maintain the black humor, because “the story is quite crude and the tension is constant” and these “pearls” serve as an escape “to loosen the viewer a bit.”
And he was left with “a film full of grays where each of his characters goes through a void and in this game -he says- everyone can be the big bad wolf. What we think can be, sometimes it is not. The interesting thing is that the viewer doubt who is the real big bad wolf”.
Hernández spoke by phone with EFE, since he could not travel to Madrid, where his actors were, as he was in the middle of filming a series for Disney that has him “with one foot in Uruguay and the other in Argentina.”
Ugarte tells EFE that he does not know if Matilde, who “is out of her mind and has nothing to lose”, is her “most difficult” role, but it is the one that has cost her the most to build physically and the one that had the most “twisting” emotional”.
“Something I didn’t expect happened to me and that is, when building her body – she says that before each take, she turned into a ‘little zombie’ doing leg, hand, eye exercises and going over the tics to be Matilde -, I had a very big handle. It was so defined that it helped me a lot to focus.”
Ugarte reveals that Elvira Mínguez, who helped him create Matilde, told him that he had “an opportunity to turn the character around and get away from the concept of a rebellious, but beautiful girl, and go to something completely different that had no gender : an animal adrift”, he explains.
Dechent considers that the word that best defines the film is “wound”. “Not only do we physically see many wounds, some quite bleeding, but all the characters have their existential wounds and scars that are open, and continue to ooze.”
“There is a very big tendency -says the Madrid actress- to immediately find the wolf from outside, because you don’t want to see yours”. “And then there are the circumstances – Dechent adds to his side -. I consider myself a victim and I’d rather get out of a fight ‘by legs’ than attack someone. But, what if circumstances force you to be a wolf?”, he wonders. the sevillian.
Also for Ochandiano, “the wolf, the psychopath, can be where you least expect it. Things are not what they seem,” says the Madrid actor, while Gutiérrez goes further:
“We are seeing it in this society in which we have breakfast every day with tremendous cases of violence, also with children, and many times you do not know where this evil comes from, if it is in ourselves, in society -he wonders-, and if we would all be capable of exercising certain violence at certain times”.
Distributed by Filmax, the film opens in theaters this Friday the 27th and will later be seen on Netflix.
“Big Bad Wolf”: when the bad guy in the story is by your side… or inside you