At the end of June LFS had the pleasure of welcoming back filmmaking alumnus, Miguel Faus, to share some of his professional knowledge with our Term 6 students and soon to be grads. Miguel’s first feature film, Calladita (The Quiet Maid), was adapted from his grad film and has received abundant success. Calladita had its world premiere at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in the First Feature Competition and recently had its UK premiere with a Q&A at Raindance Film Festival. Interestingly, Calladita is the first European film (ever!) to be entirely funded by NFTs. This was the new door Miguel built when the ones he knocked on wouldn’t open – he refused to take no for an answer. Continue reading to learn about the route Miguel took to make his dreams a reality.
Congratulations on Calladita’s UK premiere at Raindance Film Festival! How did it go?
The screening in Raindance was very special because even though the film has travelled a lot already, this was the UK Premiere, and at an iconic London cinema like the Prince Charles, where I watched and re-watched so many amazing movies while I was studying at LFS. In 2017 I was a kid who went to London with a dream, and now 7 years later to see my first featured screened there seemed like the closing of a circle and made me feel honoured and grateful.
It’s a pleasure to see how you have developed your grad film into an incredibly successful feature film. Can you share what that experience was like? Did you always have a feature length story in mind when creating your grad film or was it something you developed after?
At the Term 6 class, I spent three hours answering this question, but the short version is yes, I always had Calladita in mind to be a feature film. At that time, I had to concentrate on making it the best short I could for my grad film. This is clear when you watch the short version that it was a reduction of something much larger. I always knew I wanted this film to be my first feature.
It was more of a process reducing the story from a feature to a short rather than developing the film from a short to a feature. The project to make Calladita a feature got into some really great development programs in US and Spain in the fall of 2019 when the grad film had just been produced and not yet screened anywhere. I had also begun the process of writing the feature length screenplay during process of making it a short film.
Please can you share your inspirations and motivations behind the story and visual style of Calladita?
There was a link with the visual style and the story because I was most interested in presenting the satirical side of “boujie”, middle class Spanish people through the eyes of a maid who lives in the same house. Live-in maids are quite common in these types of environments in Spain, and I was intrigued to tell the story of someone who is in this world who knows and hears everything, and is in the centre of this world, but doesn’t have access to the wealth and luxury, and is required to be very quiet and discreet, almost invisible. Yet they must be incredibly dedicated to the job, so everything is spot on and perfect but has to remain invisible.
The colours had to do with the setting in the summer. A lot of domestic workers work throughout the summer holidays as a lot of families will take a long holiday in August. They mentioned August was the hardest and the most demanding time and the biggest contrast of their life experiences. With Calladita, I wanted to show a lavish summer vibe, the heat and the sensuality that arises in the summer. The super saturated colour palette helped portray the shallowness and hypocrisy of the rich family, like using an Instagram filter or makeup to mask who they really are.
What was your favourite and most challenging aspect about making Calladita?
The most challenging part by far was getting it made and financed. The hardest thing was finding permission, and I never really did find the permission. I knocked on all the doors that could potentially finance a film like this, but they were all closed for the project. Rather than giving up and accepting this “defeat”, or the message from the traditional institutions that Calladita didn’t deserve to exist, I chose not to believe them, and it became my determination to make it however I could. I then found an open window through Web3 and NFTs. I found the way to make it by giving myself the permission. There wasn’t an external entity that gave me the permission, but it was over 600 people who bought the NFTs which were stills from the film. Similar to crowdfunding but with NFTs.
My favourite part about making Calladita was everything else, making the film.
How would you define the qualities needed to be a successful filmmaker?
Resilience. Loads of craziness and an absurdly optimistic spirit. When everyone says no, you need to keep going and continue to foolishly believe that you can do it.
Would you like to share some final words of wisdom to aspiring filmmakers?
That resilience is key. Resilience is the most important quality for an aspiring filmmaker, and we are all aspiring filmmakers because the fight to get your film greenlit and funded never stops. Even Directors of major Hollywood films have experienced this like Francis Ford Coppola. There is also a level of foolish self-confidence that is needed. I would urge aspiring filmmakers that if they are sure they want to do this, they must be twice as sure and fight for it because we need films from passionate, crazy fools that want to tell them, so keep going because we want to see them.
Photo credit:
Calladita (The Quiet Maid), writer-director: Miguel Faus