MEXICO CITY.— Translating a publishing success with 250 million admissions on the wattpad social network to the cinema… is not just anything.
That is why director Marçal Forès (“Animals”) worked meticulously with screenwriter Eduard Sola and writer sensation Ariana Godoy to put into images the youthful adventure of Raquel and Ares in “Through my window”, which premiered in Netflix.
The Spanish feature film is the tip of the iceberg of a literary saga that has earned Godoy an unusual celebrity after he captivated many, for free, with his stories, which are now beginning to lead lists as best-selling books.
Starring two new faces of acting, Clara Galle and Julio Peña, the film goes beyond the lyrics in search of new viewers who are not familiar with the mythology created by Godoy in his so-called “Hidalgo brothers trilogy”, whose characters are , in each adventure, Ares, Artemis and Apollo.
So the basic approach of the text, the stubbornness of Raquel, a middle class who seeks to seduce Ares, her millionaire neighbor who steals her Wi-Fi connection from her patio is, in Forès’s visual setting, a kind of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, but youthful.
“What we always worked with Eduard Sola was that the seed was as faithful as possible to the novel, because basically the conjunctural that it narrated was what we all liked.
“Obviously, what we were looking for was a format to give the climax of a movie, which allowed us to play with key scenes from the book and give it that push for surprising sequences on the screen,” said the director in an interview for Reforma.
For Godoy, a 32-year-old Venezuelan living in the United States, the film is a dream come true, since she never imagined that her texts, which she uploaded to a social platform, would attract, first, international publishers, and then, that the industry from the cinema called her to advise what is her debut as a screenwriter.
“Like any adaptation, there are many things in the film that were not in the book, but it seems so nice to me to see that process of change, of how a novel is adapted to another format.
“Eduard Sola and Marçal did a great job, they achieved something that I was happy to see. Because I’ve seen the movie like 30 times!” Shared the also author of “Through you” and “Through the rain”.
Although for Marçal Forès this film that sees the light today is a snowball that has grown a lot, for Ariana Godoy it is the hope that the audience success will encourage the platform to produce the other stories.
Both are aware that the coin is in the air and, like the entire team that made “Through My Window”, they long to reunite on a set.
The process
According to the production, in adapting a 500-page book, there are inevitably going to be cuts. That love story has to be condensed into an hour and a half or two hours, so it can’t be transferred to the screen lightly.
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