On
a typical humid New York afternoon in August, I swam through the air to the
Essex House on Central Park South to talk to Spanish director Emilio Martinez-Lazaro
and actress Natalia Verbeke about their new film The Other Side of the Bed.
The picture is being released as part of the Sundance Film Series after a
successful international run last year. The Other Side of the Bed is a
comedy-musical about contemporary young couples all cheating on each other with
each other.
Upon arriving to their air-conditioned hotel room, I recognized Emilio, who’s
been directing for the last three decades, from some promo spots he did for The
Sundance Channel. Natalia on the other hand was a genuine surprise – I had
been expecting the blonde bombshell I’d seen in the movie, but was greeted by
a dark-haired Mediterranean beauty. No complaints.
Apparently, there have been more than a few surprises surrounding the film.
Emilio, an animated talker, switching between a Spanish interpreter and patches
of English, explained, “The best thing about all of this is that I found out
on the internet that the movie was being picked up by the Sundance Film Series.
Lions Gate is the distributor, and I didn’t know about it until I was surfing
the net. That’s how I found out.”
In typical fashion, he went with the flow. “He was the youngest of all of
us,” said Natalia.
Emilio quickly responded, “Just as Natalia said, I’m young – if not in
age, then definitely in spirit. It’s the same style as a film I might have
made in 1991.”
“What came first was the idea for the comedy. As it developed further I felt
that bringing music into the movie would help tell the story. It’s not that I
planned to do a musical, that’s just how it developed. I was just going to do
a film and this is what came about.”
Emilio’s openness to ideas, I learned, is the reason for Natalia’s long,
curly locks in the movie. It was apparently all her idea. “I remember speaking
with Emilio and trying to convince him that Paula had to be blonde. I took him
to my house and I showed him a tape with blonde hair. Maybe it sounds stupid to
people, but it helps me. The color, the length, helps me a lot. Being blonde,
being red, being dark is not the same for me. It’s like going to a party with
either jogging shoes or high heels. The type of the hair, the wardrobe, was
bought by me, not the costume people. I went shopping. I bought all my
costumes.”
Emilio threw in, “Every time she finds herself good-looking in a movie she
changes herself.”
The director openly encouraged the actors, all of which are good friends in real
life, to improvise during rehearsals. According to Natalia, “A lot of things
changed while we were in rehearsal. A lot of things came out better.”
Emilio quickly offered one example: “The sex scene in the bed with Natalia. We
did the rehearsal for that in my own bed.” (Talk about personal filmmaking!)
One area where rehearsal and shooting collided was the musical numbers. The
dance sequences were choreographed by Pedro Berdayes, whose background is in
theater. Hands waving, Emilio explained, “The choreographer first did the
choreography for the music, and then he’d show it to me. I’d say, ‘Okay.
Great. But that’s not going to work.’ So I then ended up having to cut the
dances up – lengthen some pieces, shorten some pieces. I asked the
choreographer to come back and make this work with this angle. The process was
layered.”
He continued, “He doesn’t know the tempo of the movie or how it cuts. He was
very worried, so I said, ‘I cut in the directing.’ We were in a hurry to
shoot everything, so I wasn’t as concerned as the choreographer about maybe at
that angle somebody messing up the dance, cause I knew I could fix it in
editing. Because of this the choreographer couldn’t see it the way I was
seeing it. When the choreographer finally saw the movie he was so pleased with
how it was put together that he gave me a big hug and called all the time to say
how much he loved it.”
All of the songs in the movie, except for one, were well-known pop tunes in
Spain. I asked Natalia if she had any reservations about being compared to
professional singers. With the same confidence she had about changing her
appearance, she told me, “No, I never thought about it. I was really
unconscious about singing. In fact, the song I sing at the table – somebody
called Emilio to say it was the best interpretation of the song they’d ever
heard. It was the guy who wrote the song!”
As our time wound down, I wondered what Emilio’s feelings were on musicals and
how they seem to be making a comeback. While it wasn’t his intention to direct
a musical, he certainly had an opinion about them, “I feel like there’s two
different styles of musicals. There’s the traditional style of what I think is
a great musical like Singin’ in the Rain, then there’s also the
modern video-clip version of something like Moulin Rouge! or Dancer in
the Dark. They have a very modernized approach. I prefer the first style
because it allows the story to unfold using the storyline with the music and the
dance – it lets the story be told. Whereas something that’s more influenced
by a video-clip is just so flashy that it seems like a commercial. You don’t
know what you’re watching. I prefer to tell the story in the original
format.”
I took some pictures, and then it was time for me to leave and go do the
backstroke down Fifth Avenue...
-Copyright
2003 by Jamie
Stuart