Madrid-based Álvaro Brechner, “one of the leading South American screen talents to emerge in the last decade,” Variety wrote in a review of his Venice-selected “A Twelve-Year Night,” is attached to direct “Mägo de Oz, La Película” a big-scale bio of the Spanish folk metal band.
Behind Cannes Critics’ Week player “Bad Day to Go Fishing,” sales hit “Mr Kaplan” and the Venice-selected “A Twelve-Year Night,” all Oscar entries from Uruguay, Brechner will initiate principal photography on March 17. He will shoot in Madrid, the Canary Island of Gran Canaria and Mexico City with an international Spanish-language cast including Spain’s Adrián Lastra (“Velvet”) and Roberto Álamo (“Riot Police”) and Mexico’s Michelle Renaud (“Malvada”) and Michael Ronda (“Cuando sea joven”).
The movie is produced by on-the-rise Spanish outfit Eterno Island Pictures, a subsidiary of El Sueño Eterno Pictures (“El Largo Viaje”). It is written by Sofía Cuenca, a co-scribe on “My Fault,” proclaimed by Prime Video soon after its launch in 2023 as the service’s most popular non-English language movie ever.
Mägo de Oz has published over 20 albums, selling north of 2 million copies and scoring a Latin Grammy nomination.
“From its humble beginnings in the ‘80s to international consecration, the film delves into the creative tensions, victories, polemics and defeats which forged its essence,” the synopsis says. “Also, it will plumb the group’s internal dynamics, its fans’ unbreakable devotion, showing how its music impacted whole generations,” it added.
Founded by drummer Txus de Fellatio (played by Lastra) in 1988, Mägo de Oz the band stands out for its fusion of heavy and power metal and Celtic folk, violinist Mohamed “Moha” (the musician Guillermo Furiase) joining in 1992 and Fernando Ponce de León (Marc Parejo, “Acacias 38”) boarding in 1999 to play flute, whistles, gaita and bagpipes.
Also remarkable is the huge number of musicians who have passed through the bands ranks. A written statement issued Tuesday lists 10 key cast actors. Álamo plays Spain-based Chilean producer and musician Big Simon, a crucial influence on Mägo de Oz in its early years; Rennaud limns Patricia Tapia, its biggest female vocalist; Ronda will take on the role of Frank, “whose creativity was crucial for the distinctive sound,” the statement said.
“The project marks a before and after for us,” said producer Patricia González, also CEO of El Sueño Eterno Pictures. “This feature is the fruit of an exhaustive immersion in the band’s world, trying to capture and bring to the big screen its legendary music and the essence of the band members,” she added.
Prep took in “careful interviews with group members, a deep study of its publisher and the band’s artistic development and a meticulous production design,” said González.
The film’s soundtrack will be composed by Txus di Fellatio and Mohamed who will also create original tracks for the film and supervise the inclusion on the soundtrack of the band’s greatest hits.
Pedro Díaz “Peri” serves as executive producer. “As a member of the Mago de Oz’s big family, it’s always been a matter of pride for me to be able to help propagate rock culture to half the world,” he said.
Variety talked to Brechner about “Mägo de Oz, La Película.”
What attracted you to “Mägo de Oz”?
The challenge. It’s a big project taking in many things and is the first film from a screenplay I didn’t write, raising the question of how I could integrate my own sensibility, sense of drama and humor. And the group’s energy took me back – the nostalgia gave me goose-pimples, was stomach-churning – to my 15 year-old-self, a heavy rock fan, to a world where I played music at full volume, proving my parents’ patience.
The band saw multiple iterations, conflicts….
Yes, apart from capturing its energy, what attracts me most is the scale of its characters who are deeply human, very singular, complex. Each band member fought their own battle, with passion and a sense of vulnerability. [The film will show] their ambitions and defeats and a search for fame, friendship and redemption.
Mexican writer-director Guillermo Arriaga once said that you should be able to sum up in a few words what your work is about.
It’s about a group of people who have a dream which becomes reality, meaning they’re on the point of losing everything and have to reinvent themselves. It asks how you go on when you achieve a dream, even if it means losing everything. How do you keep the essence of who you are? Any band that’s successful opens the door to excess, self-destruction. Often our dreams’ biggest enemy is ourselves. Mägo de Oz’s story is particularly singular in unfolding in a Hispanic context in Spain, where the band lives its day-to-day life in Madrid. It’s as if it marks us apart from U.S. and U.K. bands.
Is there something about bands which creates internal conflict? Maybe the limited opportunities to express one’s own creativity?
It’s something that fascinates me. How an entity can achieve a creativity and a sense of its own, while being made up of various band members. It’s not a case of one plus one or a sum of its parts. Its parts, the band members, are integrated. Mägo de Oz’s members keep on changing, musicians come and go, but the band’s identity survived, achieving a kind of independence in itself…..
In what way would you sense that this will be a film by Álvaro Brechner?
It’s pretty well impossible for a director not to give off a sense of his own vision, in my case a sense of humor, of drama and love, and other elements such as fantasy: the difference between what we dream, what we want to be or believe we are and what we are.
You said it’s a big film…..
Because of its numerous cast, the years it covers, the big heart the film has and its big narrative – that says a lot of things during a long time not just about the band but personal things about its members and things about Spain. And have you tried to shoot 10 musicians playing together on a stage? That’s a challenge in itself.
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