Catalan director Albert Serra, whose sublime Birdsong screens at the New Zealand International Film Festival this July, reveals his filmmaking methods to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM. He’s accompanied by Canadian film critic Mark Peranson, whose documentary Waiting for Sancho shadows the making of Serra’s film.


ALBERT SERRA and Mark Peranson have made two of the more interesting films at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. In Birdsong, Catalan filmmaker Serra re-imagines the Magi, the tale of the Three Kings in the Nativity Tale, by making it seem as if it was occurring in the “present”. The audience watches the three kings struggle to find proof of their faith in the most ‘realistic’ manner possible. Watching from the sidelines was Peranson, a Canadian film critic, who was also cast as Joseph in the film. His resulting documentary, Waiting for Sancho, captures creativity in action, and looks at life on a rather unique film-set. While the documentary is not specifically tied to Birdsong (it stands alone as a general examination of creativity), the two films form a complementary pair.

Serra arrived at film by chance. “Now I’ve had a bit of success so now I have to keep on.” His 2006 film, Honour of the Knights reworked Don Quixote and gained some coverage on the festival circuit, while the idiosyncratic Birdsong is gaining some high praise. But Serra says, while being a cinephile, “I would prefer to do the same thing without shooting films. To be with friends, being a millionaire, everybody going to Las Vegas, all the actors and technicians, without the pressure of making a film, it’d be real fun.”

What was evident from Peranson’s documentary is that Serra seeks to find a film while he shoots – he allows for the happy accidents, the improvisation by the actors, the little moments to provide inspiration. Serra says “you never know what might happen. You could have a lot of money and it’d look shit. You could have few dollars and make a masterpiece. You could have a lot of money and make a masterpiece. If you have no money and make bullshit. You never know. Don’t worry about the budget or the conditions. I am talking about some kind of films where preparing the film doesn’t mean having a better film at the end. Most of the films, preparing for the film means a better film. There are a few films which are so mysterious, that preparing the film is not necessarily having a better film. I am in this kind of film.”

His rather unconventional filmmaking methods (a euphemism for being a producer’s worst nightmare, but allowing him considerable freedom with his aesthetic imagination), has led to him being invited to numerous film schools to discuss the filmmaking process. Serra says “everybody goes to Film School nowadays. At the time of Ford and Godard, in the 60s and the 70s there were no film schools. Art school perhaps, but it was working in the industry and perhaps you can arrive to be a filmmaker, or coming from the underground. There was not this idea of being a professional filmmaker which is being taught in school. I don’t know why people keep inviting me. I always do the opposite of all the other teachers, the spirit, the concept of the teaching.”

Serra’s last two films have taken on foundational texts for their narratives – Don Quixote and the Nativity. Serra suggests that this provides more freedom in his filmmaking. “It’s the main reason having a story that everybody knows, you don’t have to use your time. You have to explain something that you’re not interested in. From the conventional point of view people have to understand what is happening. This is boring. It’s a mix of thinking the film would be better by having a known story. The other reason is I love to concentrate on other things. If you make a film with only visual things, without knowing the story, what happens? I don’t know, I’m not an experimental filmmaker.” Peranson says “the films are almost as if, instead of being about Don Quixote, they’re about the people that Don Quixote is based on. Instead of being about the Three Kings, it’s about the people that the Three Kings in the Bible are based on.”

Serra continually denies that he is an experimental filmmaker throughout the interview – but he’s radically recontextualising the past by making it seem present. (Peranson mentions Rohmer’s brilliant Perceval le Gallois as a film where “nobody has any actual knowledge of what the Middle Ages were like. Visually in that way, you can take things as you wish.”) Serra says “we accept that the past is already representation, it’s a fiction. We don’t know how it was in the past. This idea of going to the past, it was Rosselini’s idea. It’s looking for which is “the present” in the past. It’s the opposite of the Hollywood films about the past. First of all, they do not accept that they are already a fiction or a representation. They try to reproduce it as they think it was. They do not accept that all they will do is a fiction. At the same time, they put things that can be connected with ‘our war’, or with political problems. You see the criticism of the films – ‘the Roman Empire is about Bush’. They always try to comment on problems that can be translated to the present. They are not looking for the ‘present’ of the past. They are looking for our present.”

In effect, through this process, a story which is considered highly important in Christianity becomes a personal journey for the filmmaker. I ask if this is controversial in some respects. Serra says, “this film is respectful. It has this profane side mixing with the sacred. We show it in the spiritual film festivals, to the bishops. No problem. The film is so formalist, we never touch the subject in a violent way. The subject is always there, but in a strict way.”


Another thing notable about the film was how little ‘direction’ Serra gave to his actors. In some respects, the actors appear like Bressonian models, a blank canvas for the imagery. Serra says “model is a good word. There’s another French word, incarnations. Put “in meat”, without the structure. In Bresson, it was more definite, more sophisticated in the way. Perhaps he took more profit in the aesthetic side of the actors.” Peranson suggests that Serra was “much more interested in the theatrical, the personal side of the actors”, and Serra agrees. “For me, they are moral models”. Peranson suggests that Warhol might be a better comparison than Bresson to way that actors are conceived in Birdsong – the personality of the actors come through as much as the focus on the body in space. Peranson says that while he was acting “we pretty much had no direction at all. The first thing I did was two hours long, and nothing, he didn’t say anything. All he did was something I did, he said ‘don’t do that’. I’m not sure he was even paying attention.” Serra suggests that this lack of intervention “is a good thing. You’re not conscious of things.” He didn’t rehearse with the actors either. “Most people have rehearsals because they don’t know the actors. If not, it will be a mess. Because they’re not sure. I don’t need to have rehearsals because I already know them. For me, even if it’s not in my mind before, it’s there, because it’s like a factory. You don’t have to tell the workers everyday what they have to do, because they know when they’re in a factory. Unless they’re stupid, you may have remind them more often. “

Peranson made his documentary by chance. He became a film critic almost by accident, and certainly never planned to become a filmmaker. “I never studied film, I never went to a film class, I never grew up wanting to make films. I’ve always been writing, but not necessarily about films. The first time I ever shot anything was on the Birdsong set.” However, while he was shooting, “there was all this unconscious framing, unconscious idea of how to hold shots, all of it was informed by watching lots and lots of movies. If I had gone to film school and learned how to ‘make a movie’ I would have done it completely differently, I’d be very conscious of certain things that they teach you.”

When he invited to participate on the shoot Peranson admits that initially “I wasn’t planning on making a documentary. I started shooting stuff. Not because it was boring. It was fascinating being on a film set. They had been shooting for ten days before I got there, and by that stage everyone was aware of their place. I knew it would be a very interesting set, and I had a rough idea of how he makes the films. I knew it’d be interesting to see a certain kind of filmmaking that’s not very common today.” (He compares and distinguishes Serra’s approach to contemporaries, Lisandro Alonso or Miguel Gomes.)

But like Serra’s film, Peranson’s documentary was full of happy accidents, and little moments where creativity appears out of nowhere. “I realised in the film there were a number of different stages. One, when I realised that he was filming in black and white, which I didn’t realise until the third or fourth day, so the idea of colour versus black and white was interesting. I happened to luck out and be in certain places at the right time. I didn’t shoot much footage. I wasn’t prepared at all. I didn’t know what I was doing. I only bought a certain number of tapes.” (Serra suggests more shots could have been included of lunches and dinners). Peranson adds, “everybody spoke Catalan. I had no idea what anybody was saying. I was editing it without knowing what anybody was saying. And I was editing it without having seen Birdsong. Certain scenes I knew I really liked – the scene in the fog I felt was really nice in the way it worked out. Once I cut the footage, I felt there was roughly a very traditional three act structure to what went on roughly chronologically.” The documentary acted as a witness for people “who would not be as privileged as myself” to be on a film-set. Peranson admits that “it could easily have had a voiceover – some people told me to put a voiceover, make shorter takes, But I tried to make it feel like you were on the set of a film which was something I had never seen in other films.”

In the process, Peranson shows creativity springing from the banal. “I didn’t really notice it when I was filming it. Sometimes I would watch afterwards, my favourite moment in a way is near the end there was a scene where the improvising was not going very good and all of a sudden it starts going good. You can see creativity.” Critic Kent Jones told Peranson that “what was fascinating for him was watching people make the film, the way people move when they make a film. The movements, the very small movements, the interactions.”

Both Peranson and Serra were surprised by how shooting the same action in two different ways made the scene appear so different in the two films. Serra says “it’s very strange to see how different you feel the meaning of the image is. This is something I cannot understand. I thought this when I saw his film for the first time. I could not recognise. You think ‘this is not what happened’. It feels like the ‘reality’ is: my film. In a way his film is more fictional than mine. His reality is my film. It reminds me of a very beautiful sentence of Walter Benjamin. Art work changes with all the gazes that have been put over the work. All the people looking at it, changes it over the time.”

But despite this the two films aren’t the same. While complementary, the films individually illuminate something unique about spirituality and creativity. Birdsong is a idiosyncratic film which succeeds in showing the physicality of a well-known story. Both filmmakers also suggest that Waiting for Sancho stands alone as a documentary about creativity in general. Serra says “it’s a documentary about the making of film, rather than making a film. It’s more general than just being Birdsong.” Peranson says however, “everywhere the film has shown, more than twice as many people will go see the feature than will go see the documentary. Films about filmmaking - nobody goes to see. For so many people who want to be filmmakers, it’s amazing how few people go to see films about filmmaking. You could actually learn something from a film about filmmaking.”