Interview with Fernando Pérez

January 26, 2020

We reproduce the interview published on the digital site La trinchera conducted by journalist Sender Escobar.

Sender Escobar: As a viewer, what were your first cinematographic impressions?

Fernando Pérez: The first film I saw was, at age six, El indio Gerónimo, a black and white western. I remember vividly many of its images and the emotion it caused me to see a movie. From then on, I have lived as many lives as films I have seen. I consider myself a cinephile filmmaker, because even though I already know cinema from the inside, I continue to feel the same emotions as an ordinary viewer.

SE. When did you feel the need to dedicate yourself to the audiovisual world?

FP. My father Alfonso was a lover of knowledge. He was passionate about astronomy, geography, the internal movements of our planet and our universe. His bedside book was the Navigation Diary of Christopher Columbus.

But my father never traveled, never sailed, never saw the sky and clouds and earth from the air. Life only allowed him to be a mailman.
My father was also a lover of cinema and I remember that he took me at least three times a week to the Carral and Ensueño cinemas (the two cinemas of Guanabacoa, the town where I was born and lived my entire childhood and adolescence).
One day in 1958 we saw together The Bridge on the River Kwai, by David Lean. The film moved us greatly and upon leaving, my dad commented: This film is very well directed. It was the first time I heard that film directors existed. I was thirteen years old and from that moment I felt (although I didn't have a very clear understanding of what their functions were) that what I would like to be in life was a film director.
A year later, with the creation of the ICAIC in March 1959, that dream took on the appearance of reality. And in October 1962 I began working in the film industry as Production Assistant C – which was nothing more than being a messenger. Today I know what it is to make a film. But I remain convinced that what awakened in me the passion for the seventh art is being able to live in a movie theater as many lives as films I have seen. That is why I try to make films that provoke in the viewer the emotions that other directors have awakened in me with their films.

SE. From the recordings of the ICAIC Newsreel, could you tell us a specific anecdote about Santiago Álvarez and yourself?

FP. What always stays with me is the possibility that Santiago gave all of us who were in the Newsreel to express ourselves in the language that we considered was the language of the moment. There are three periods of my life at the ICAIC that I remember with the most affection: one is the Newsreel, another when the Creation Groups were formed – I was in Manolito Pérez's creation group – and then, more recently, when I was in the Young Film Festival. I feel that the affection for these three periods stems from a feeling that was the same in all of them: I felt very free to do everything I wanted to do. Since Santiago was the first, that is why I have always said that Santiago was my cinematographic father because, beyond his strong overwhelming personality, I remember that Santiago was always on the side of each one of us.
I must also confess that Santiago was the only one who prohibited a Newsreel to me, the only one, because afterwards I haven't had to be subject to prohibitions. I remember it was a Newsreel that I loved dearly, which was a parallel montage between the effort of ballet dancers and the effort of miners in the mines of Matahambre and, in that association, it was always left hanging what was harder. I remember that Santiago arrived at four in the morning, when we had already prepared the Newsreel, finished watching it, and stood up and told me: That cannot come out like that. Then we started to discuss it and he concluded to me: Listen, Fernando, the miner is the one who lives the hardest life, and I know it because I was a miner. Santiago then told me his entire story in the south of the United States, and for me that was totally convincing.

SE. From the years that have passed and many films to your credit, how do you appreciate your debut film Clandestinos?

FP. I recognize myself in all of them, even though today there are things I would do differently. Sentimentally, Clandestinos holds an important place because it was the first. Suite Habana has been very moving because of the identification it provoked in the Cuban public. I love Madrigal dearly because almost nobody has liked it and it is like a helpless child who only has my support and affection.

SE. In my opinion, Suite Habana represents a before and after in Cuban cinematography. How did the idea for the film come about? What do you think were the main obstacles during the time the film was being made?

FP. Actually, Suite Habana was a commission. I have always preferred fiction because I don't consider myself a good documentarian. But I approached the filmmaking process as a challenge and over time I believe that the emotion of jumping into the void was what made the entire process of preparation, production, editing and finishing flow like a tranquil and crystalline spring.
Before its release I knew that Suite Habana was going to be a film for a smaller audience and suddenly the film exceeded those expectations I had. It was a lesson.
I also think that circumstance determined much. It was Suite Habana but it was also the moment. It could have been a play, a song or anything else. But it was the film that appeared at that moment and it was in sync with what people and the universe felt.

SE. Were you aware of the reaction of the protagonists when they were able to see their realities on the big screen?

FP. Of course: they were the first to see it in a special screening. What moved me most is that when the screening ended, everyone was talking about the stories of the others and not their own. The film also caused an indelible friendship to arise between us and the protagonists.

SE. You are considered by many as the most important Cuban filmmaker of today. Do you handle this as a burden, with humor, or as a gauge for how your work should turn out?

FP. It is a gauge (as subjective as any artistic evaluation can be) of how my work has been. But I am always accompanied by the certainty of being a filmmaker who, when beginning a new film, goes with the same unease, doubts and emotions that the risk of filmmaking creates. The fact that I am a batter who has "gotten on base" several times does not make me infallible: I can always strike out because, in cinema as in baseball, when it's time to bat we are all equal.

SE. José Martí: The Eye of the Canary, above all had the merit of bringing to the current world an aspect of the Apostle that Cubans never imagined they could perceive. Portraying the National Hero of Cuba as a human being, with passions, feelings and the discovery of sexuality. What is your perception about the deification that subjects official thinking to the heroes of the past?

FP. A challenge. I never thought of making a film about José Martí, because Martí is an immense, intricate and leafy forest very difficult to penetrate – much less in a film. That is why I chose childhood and adolescence not only because it is the least known stage of his life, but because I believe that in that stage everything that we will be later is concentrated and foreshadowed. José Martí: The Eye of the Canary attempts to be, therefore, the spiritual itinerary, the formation of the character of a child who later became exceptional – more so than the historical biography of the great man (although 95% of the facts narrated are historically verifiable). The gaze focuses more on the human traits of the character (and his family) than on his historical transcendence. Many times we convert our great figures into statues, into lives of marble, cold and perfect. My film aspires to show a Martí who is not immobile on a pedestal, but who walks on the earth.

SE. What projects are you currently immersed in, Fernando Pérez?

FP. I begin the pre-production of Riquimbili or The World According to Nelsito on February 3rd, although we are already advancing on our own some aspects of casting, location scouting, composition of the creative team. A new risk that plays with narrative structures and dark humor: a path I have not traveled before and that motivates me.