In the context of a comedy film, anything is possible. Sometimes it brings out the best in us, and sometimes the worst. What does meeting someone completely different to ourselves tend to bring out in people? I do, I really enjoy working with my own little family. Javier Cámara, Alberto San Juan, Jorge Drexler - do you like always working with your own “gang”? More importantly, he was just a terrific guy. Since then, he was always happy to give us his opinion and help out with whatever we were working on. Jose María Riba was in some ways the first person in the industry to spot something in me, when he selected Krámpack for Cannes Critics’ Week twenty years ago. Do you think he would have been excited to watch your film at the festival? The People Upstairs is dedicated to someone with very close ties to the San Sebastián International Film Festival. For this film I had in mind the sort of pacing and dialogue you find in screwball comedies. Those two, definitely, and there are also a lot of American comedies from the 1940s and 1950s. What comparisons with other films based on couples stuck in a house together would you like us to make? It’s not something I usually do, and as a director I really enjoyed it.Ĭarnage, by Roman Polanski, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Mike Nichols. We built a set that way we could design everything and have more control over the filming process. I didn't want to use either the Barcelona or the Madrid cast, because working with new actors is always an incentive to rethink the whole premise.ĭid you build a set, or is that really a huge and gorgeous flat? The idea was to start again from scratch. Is the cast the same as in the stage version? I seem to remember different names. In this case, when I wrote the text I had one foot in each camp, so it wasn’t too difficult. There are a lot of similarities between the theatre and the cinema, but there also a lot of differences. Some things work really well on film, and others don’t. Cineuropa: First, the obligatory and cringingly obvious question, given that you adapted The People Upstairs from your own play: Why did you decide to do it, and what did you have to change, drop or improve?Ĭesc Gay: In any adaptation, whether it’s a play or a novel, you always have to decide what to keep and what to leave out.