On hand for the Málaga Film Festival’s retrospective of Argentine filmmakers Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, Andrés Duprat spoke at length on Tuesday about his unconventional career as a screenwriter and advised young filmmakers to embrace the popular language of cinema while drawing clear parallels between architecture and making movies.
The Málaga retrospective is showcasing four films written by Andrés Duprat and directed by brother Gastón and Cohn: “The Man Next Door”; “The Distinguished Citizen”; “Official Competition,” starring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas; and “Homo Argentum.”
Andrés Duprat, himself an architect and also the current director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, has worked closely with his brother and Cohn in the making of their signature high-brow satiric comedies that also include “The Artist”; “My Masterpiece” and the TV series “Bellas Artes.”
Describing himself as “a rare bird in this field,” Duprat said he did not study film but rather architecture and has long worked in cultural management. He noted that his daughter did study film and knows much more about cinema than he, but pointed out that both paths have advantages and disadvantages.
“The academic path is very interesting because you end up with a solid foundation that makes any career you choose worthwhile. Someone who studied at a film school, well, they’ve seen the essential films, the main ones, the different trends, they’ve studied in an academic way. That’s fantastic.
“The risk of that is that the academic structure also gives you a somewhat pre-formatted point of view. I’m not against academia; in fact, I’m quite academic myself, but that’s what we have to deal with as creators. It’s about stepping back a bit to have a more personal perspective, because otherwise everyone ends up looking through the same lens.”
At the same time, “the non-academic approach has many disadvantages because you have huge gaps in your education,” he added.
Indeed, Duprat had to learn screenwriting from scratch when he decided to turn a critical essay on contemporary art that he had written into the basis for a film project – which became 2008’s “The Artist,” Cohn and Duprat’s first narrative feature film.
Following the movie’s success, Duprat was hard-pressed to write a new screenplay for a next project, but was finding it difficult to do so, plagued by a domestic issue: an unruly neighbor had made a hole in a dividing wall in Duprat’s large Buenos Aires home without a building permit. Distraught, he recounted the incident to his brother and Cohn, who immediately lit up. “That’s a spectacular story!” they said.
That became the team’s second feature, 2009’s “The Man Next Door.”
Returning to his “unorthodox path” as a screenwriter, Duprat stressed that many of the filmmakers he admires “didn’t actually study film. Well, in fact, Gastón and Mariano weren’t film students either, you know? Borges didn’t have a degree in literature. Le Corbusier, who’s my idol among architects, wasn’t an architect.”
For Duprat, being an architect himself has, however, facilitated his work as a screenwriter.
“One thing I also had to learn, for those who write, is that writing literature is very different from writing a screenplay. A screenplay is a guide; it’s not meant to be read by everyone. It doesn’t need to have style or syntactic erudition, nothing like that; it just needs to be useful. It has to be important, well-structured, because it’s going to be read not only by the directors, but also by the actors, the art director, the cinematographer. Everyone is going to contribute their expertise.”
In that way, a screenplay is very similar to an architectural plan, he noted.
“Someone at some point made a plan of this room. That plan is a draft. The builders and the architects saw the plan. Then the air conditioning expert comes along and changes it a bit. He says, ‘No, no, because the pipes run over there, the boiler is over there. So it has to be like this.’ … And the same goes for the plumbing. And the same goes for the wood or marble cladding. So it’s very similar work.”
Duprat added: “If you have a solid structure, a good idea, then the details – like the lighting fixtures or the wood paneling – can be secondary, they can be better or worse. And I think the screenplays Gastón, Mariano and I write are based on very solid stories.”
“Our stories have structure … these are stories that have a conflict, a development, and they’re intelligently constructed — they’re not video art. And that’s also where the comparison with the structure of architecture lies. When films have a very solid structure, it allows you to play with the more superficial things.”
English (US) ·