Great films eschew formula. Granted.
But if any filmmaker wants to learn the secrets of making an internationally acclaimed hit, Juan José Campanella's Oscar winner, The Secret in their Eyes, would suggest a few approaches. Campanella won the Academy Award this year for the Argentine thriller, and now finds himself among the top ranks of directors. Even he was surprised by the complexity of the film which emerged as the production unfolded. "When we were working on it, we realized that we were dealing with a multithematic and a multitonal piece. It's not something that we set out to do," he says. Still, some lessons can be drawn.
Secret 1: Establish the story cerebrally, then go for the gut
Campanella accomplishes this midway through the film in a scene that could possibly go down as one of the most memorable tracking shots in movie history. It's possibly what pushed Academy members to give The Secret in their Eyes the Oscar over such favourites as German director Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.
In the scene, Campanella's camera hovers over a packed Buenos Aires soccer stadium, a giant bowl of humanity under the white glow of stadium lights. The camera falls down into the crowd, as if Superman was the director of photography, eventually landing next to the film's lead character.
The man is a clerk in a criminal court and he is accompanied by a colleague. It would give away too much to say why the two characters are at the stadium, save that they are trying to close a murder case. What then unfolds is a chase scene, which took a year to plan and eight to nine months to edit, Campanella says, laughing over the phone from Buenos Aires.
"At that point, we were having a cerebral movie, taking place in closed [buildings] and it was more about talking and thinking. And at the moment, like in a symphony, sometimes you need an allegro. You need something physical and adrenalin pumping [that]involves the audience in a more personal way.
"All I had to do was a foot-chase scene, the likes of which we've seen a thousand times," he adds. "So in trying to think how I could make it really exciting, I thought of [the audience]flying in, like on a delta wing."
The sequence feels like one take. But it's actually many, as the camera mingles with the shoulder-to-shoulder soccer fans boisterously cheering for their team, then follows a pursuit through the stadium's concrete corridors. But what makes everything so seamless is the editing, which Campanella did himself.
2. Use the biggest stars, but don't be afraid to take them out of their element
The criminal court clerk is veteran Argentine leading man Ricardo Darin. His bumbling, but clever sidekick is played by Guillermo Francella, a hugely popular comedic actor in the country. But with his customary mustache shaved off, director Campanella has rendered Francella unrecognizable.
Secret no. 3: Don't shy away from complexity
The film is based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, who is known more as a short-story writer. The novel's sales were initially so-so. "I was more intrigued with the characters than with the story itself," Campanella says.
The female lead (Soledad Villamil), who is the court clerk's boss, is a more distant character in the novel. The director, who co-wrote the screenplay, brought her much closer to the action as she becomes part of the murder investigation with the clerk. Campanella has carved out a successful career shooting U.S. television shows, from House M.D. to Law And Order: Special Victims Unit: He could have gone for a more straight linear narrative. He chose the opposite.
He realized early on, he says, that he needed to turn the story of the murder investigation into a fuller tale of unrequited love pulling the two leads together and yet keeping them apart. That complexity created far more room for more elaborate direction. Flashbacks, camera effects and nuanced acting were part of Campanella's tool kit. This pushed the film on to a grander scale than the director originally envisioned, he says.
Secret no. 4: There's no such thing as too small a detail
In one scene, Villamil is in a deadly serious meeting, but in which her clothes and hairstyle look straight-out of latter-day Brady Bunch. Her hair is pulled back off her forehead, with the sides hanging straight down. It's a look circa 1974, never to be seen since. Did Campanella assemble the best of the best art directors in Buenos Aires to get the look of the film so precisely?
"I have to say that the costume designer is the best - and she's my wife!" Cecilia Monti has worked on all of her husband's films and was costume designer for Francis Ford Coppola's 2009 film Tetro.
"She canvassed Buenos Aires to find rolls of fabric from that time, that aren't made any more. She found some places that had forgotten rolls of fabric. It was a miracle they were not eaten by moths," Campanella says.
Yet for all these intricate details which may seem so Argentine, from the Latin flare of those mid-1970s shirt collars to the fanatical atmosphere at the soccer game, Campanella doesn't describe the look of the film as particularly Argentine.
Nor have Argentine audiences flocked to it because of national pride, the director argues. The Secret in their Eyes has become the second most popular Argentine film in its home country's history, Campanella says. (And as he explains, box-office popularity in Argentina isn't based on money earned, because inflation over the years makes those comparisons difficult. Instead, the tally is based on the number of people who have seen the film in theatres.)
"The people here, when they saw it, they weren't saying, 'This is so Argentinian.'" Thus ...
Secret no. 5: Don't focus on making the film feel homegrown, or epic, or an Oscar winner from the start. Simply make a film that's true to the story.
"I never set out to make an 'important film.' You start with a story … And then when you start pulling the string, the ball of yarn, all of these other elements start coming out."
The Secret in Their Eyes opened yesterday in Vancouver and Toronto.