To the writer, screenwriter and director Nicolas Melini ((Santa Cruz de La Palma, 1969) he cares about “values”. The values of literary creation and the values of film creation. Of them, of values, “in a culturally decadent moment”, he laments, he came to speak at the end of the course at the UCA Film School, about why we tell stories, and about their incalculable value for human beings.
– Why did you decide to tell stories?
–I think we have to leave a record, but not of who each one of us is, but of the human being of our time. And we writers go a little further, tell the story of our time but also pointing out where there are still aspects that are not clear. In the case of poetry it is very evident. Really, deciding to tell stories is a matter of knowledge and literature is possibly the most profound form of knowledge there is.
–Have letters or images? What do you keep?
–It is curious because writing comes from images but cinema is not yet a language that has surpassed writing. We really would have to make a huge effort to make storytelling in pictures superior to writing. Writing is too advanced a technology and cinema has not quite surpassed it.
– Is the Melini who tells in poetry, stories or novels different from the one who tells in a script?
-Very different. Over time I have realized that as a screenwriter I can only be in favor of what someone wants to tell and, in fact, lately, I am more with literature than with cinema because I am freer and because I do the work I want , and in cinema I can’t aspire to do a play just from writing the script, I would have to direct.
-But you have directed
– Yes, but it is not my vocation. And since I can’t do everything, I have opted for my primary vocation, which is literary. And as a screenwriter, the best you can be is a technician who helps the producer and director have the story they want. And that is a problem for me because I believe that cinema is a language that is under-explored.
-Why?
–Especially because the fact that it takes so much money to make films usually means that the values of capital predominate over the values of experimentation with language, of exploring things that are not said with that language. With rare exceptions, cinema is an under-explored language, it is explored as exploitation, to tell stories that also have an economic return to recover a very strong investment.
“Is that what you were trying to do in your shorts?” Explore in language?
– What I have tried in my shorts is that the creative process did not stop at the script. In the cinema, once you have the script, you work to put on screen what is on paper. When that doesn’t have to be this way. With the search for locations, the choice of actors, in the filming itself, in the editing … With all these phases you can continue walking in a direction that is not what is on the paper, even that moves away from it.
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-But a producer needs certainties …
–Of course, that’s why industrial cinema prevents it, but in the case of shorts one, at least, can rehearse that kind of thing and realize to what extent cinematographic language is subject to the necessary funding.
–’La raya ‘, of which you are a screenwriter, is a short that had great media impact. Did it help you to continue creating?
-Yes. Let’s see, La raya it is, in quotation marks, conventional cinema. It is a cinema to obtain a success, which actually occurred, through telling a good story. And it allowed me, the director, the producers, to develop a career although it is true that I immediately, with my shorts, it was as if I shot myself in the foot because I went in the opposite direction.
-In literature it also happens. He likes to do projects that are very different from each other
-Yes, my first novel, The killer footballer, which I wrote when I was 25 years old and they still remember me for it, it was a genre novel. And they keep telling me why didn’t I continue around or why didn’t I make a saga. But I think that literature does not go there. I think that if you stop looking, if you seem to have already found you are more in the part of the economic system. Because the reason why a novelist makes a crime novel series is for an economic issue and for the publishing world. For me to stop thinking about literature and dedicate myself to repeating a series of formulas that have worked for me is paying a very high price.
– Was it difficult to carry out the Hispanic American Writers Festival, which you direct, last year?
-It was a terrible suffering because, imagine, if the pandemic has already increased the uncertainty, when, in addition, you are trying to build something that requires the help of so many people … Until three days before we did not know if it was canceled or not … In other words, an unbearable level of uncertainty and my health took its toll … It was epic, because we knew we had to resist, but it was costly.
– He has just published ‘El talón’. 17 stories, 17 weaknesses …
– Yes, and I realized that at the end, looking for another title than the one in the manuscript, I realized that all the stories had to do with some kind of failure. The heel culturally refers us to the Achilles heel, so there is no need to be more explicit. And it also refers to the heel of a person who lives on the street, because in this book there are several people who are homeless since in Spain there are 40,000 people living on the street, it is a real outrage, and we do not look there. There are also stories about the body, about old age, about non-places … It is a book that tells us about how we are today but from the margins.
– I cannot end this conversation without asking him about his football past, which somehow led to his literary christening
–The killer footballer it was an exorcism of what I had been until then. I was a footballer between the ages of 10 and 24 who also had a tumor in one leg at the age of 13, and that marked my literary vocation. The existential fact that causes a situation of this type and, in my case, in a very particular way because I did not know it until shortly before I left football. They hid it from me. And that, which I have told in my next novel, greatly influenced my literary vocation. Because all writers have a wound. A wound that makes him a writer. And mine comes from there.
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