Although the hole It had been released in theaters before the pandemic arrived, it was those months confined at home and the explosion of platforms that turned Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s film into an almost unprecedented phenomenon. Its data remains astronomical. In the list of the most viewed films in the history of Netflix, it continues to be in fifth place in the top ten of films not spoken in English with more than 82 million views worldwide. A surprise that placed a hitherto unknown director in the spotlight, thanks to the particular universe he had created. One that was nothing more than a metaphor for inequality and class struggle in the form of an infinite hole where those at the top always have a better chance of surviving and bitching at those at the bottom.
The sequel seemed obvious, but despite this, four years have passed until the director has released, also on Netflix since last October 4, The 2nd holea film with which he continues to raise questions about today’s world thanks to this elevating tray loaded with food. A film whose fit into the timeline of the universe is revealed at the end, but which also poses a kind of commandments on the rules that prevailed in the previous film and that were already established. In this case it is Milena Smit and Hovic Keuchkerian who discover them.
What this sequel has is a bigger budget, and therefore there is also a more spectacular staging that makes one wonder how certain moments were filmed. Is the hole real? How much visual effects does what you see on the screen have?… Questions that the filmmaker himself has answered by analyzing in depth four scenes of The 2nd hole and revealing (be careful, with SPOILERS) all its secrets.
The hardness of ‘The Hole’
A question that runs through the entire film is how much of the hole is real and how much is not. Galder Gaztelu Urrutia begins by revealing it. The three levels of the vertical structure were built in Barakaldo, at the Bilbao Exhibition Center, and everything up and down those levels is a construction with visual effects. That that structure existed physically is key, and it also delimited the order in which the entire film was shot.
Another question that fans of the film usually ask is what happens with the platform that goes up and down and conditions all the actions on each level? Well in the hole Whenever something can be real (and be solved with a practical effect) it will be, that is why this platform is “the typical platform that all the works in the world use, the simplest that you can find, on which we put our real platform with food.” Of course, later the bottom part was eliminated and sometimes it was also generated “entirely in 3D”. The design of a scene like this has prior work, in fact the director drew all the plants and the choreographies of the actors and actresses, each camera movement, so that an action scene like this seems easy even if it is a choreography in There is also another trick, making the stunt doubles not be noticed.
Zamyatin’s suicide
The physical scenes are not always the most difficult, but often the dramatic intensity provides more complexity. This is what happened in what Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia defines as “one of the hardest even though there is hardly any action.” It was “because of what is transmitted in the scene and because of the intensity with which Hovic interpreted it and with which Milena lives this moment, which is the end of her partner, with whom she has empathized so much in the first month.”
In this scene you can also see the fourth set of the film, the only one that was not built and which is located on a pediment in Bilbao. But beyond these details, the filmmaker believes that the key is the performance of his leading actor. To this we must add several tricks, among them those performed by a specialist who “became a bonze and jumped into the wired hole.” The fire is real at almost every moment, and yet one could play a game of guessing which of the burning objects falling through the hole are real and which are digitally created.
The sacrifice of the protagonists
Another “very intense” scene where the choreography of the actors is essential and where, to complicate everything, there is “a lot of dialogue.” Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia says that the filming was logistically simple, but “hard for those of us who were stuck in that hole for 54 days, this sequence is a good example of that.” Two entire days of filming were dedicated to those minutes of film. If it was hard for everyone, it was even more so for Óscar Jaenada, who acts with a blindfold and without “the most important means of expression for an actor, his eyes.” A mix of practical and digital effects solve the moment in which the character shows what is behind that blindfold.
For this reason, “the intensity with which all the actresses and actors arrive” stands out, something that he believes has to do with the space itself, that 9×6 meter square that also psychologically affects the technical team. “After a long time in here you come out a little shaken,” says the filmmaker with resignation, who also explains the tricks for using light as fill and how one of the bloodiest and most violent moments in the film was made. For the curious, a detail, a cameo that no one knows in the shape of a hand…
The green sequence
The director of The 2nd hole Even the number of each scene is known, which they called “the green sequence” corresponds to the number 81 and the viewer’s sensation coincides with what its creation was. It is, without a doubt, one of the most visually spectacular moments of the film, a scene of less than five minutes where Milena Smit is moved in zero gravity in the middle of a block of people with a striking green light.
Within the set, they called that block “human kebab, txorongo or zurullo”, and to recreate that sensation of floating, some U-shaped horizontal levels were used, with removable walls and a network of cables that held the actors to go. moving them giving that effect of flying. “A scene like this you have to have it very planned to know exactly the shots you need. “This sequence was drawn about nine or ten months before filming,” says the director and confesses that at first he had no idea how he was going to film this scene, which has another of those secrets that cannot be seen with the naked eye: a doll. which replaces the character of Malik to compensate for the risk of filming with children and not subjecting them to the usual long days of recording.
