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| Juan Minujín as Lucio, hard at work in The Substitute |
An Argentinean film which is making waves on the festival circuit around the world, Diego Lerman’s The Substitute follows a teacher, Lucio (Juan Minujín), who finds himself struggling when he moves into a troubled neighbourhood and tests his teaching skills on young people who don’t believe that they have any future worth investing in. Diego has been working hard to promote the film, and is sitting in a café in Madrid when we connect, with the world going by around him. It seems an appropriate setting for a man whose work always has a good deal happening in the background.
This film has a very distinctive visual style, and I ask Diego how important that was in the development of the film and how the story took shape.
“I always think in having an image with layers, different layers,” he says. “I work with my DOP, Wojciech Staron – he and I always work together. This is the third film that we do together. We always have to try to have layers to the image, so in different locations we try all the time to be very aware of how can we add complexity to the image, but at the same time be very, very realistic.”
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| Lucio and his father |
The story itself came from a suggestion made by a producer friend about seven years ago, he says.
“He told me if I could be interested in working about education, and I said ‘Of course,’ and he had done some research. He gave it to me, I read it and I started to research it myself. It was two years more of interviews and going into this school, this area in the suburbs, trying to find a film out there, because there were a lot of possible films to be done.
“My intention was to create a story about a teacher in a very critical moment in his life, in middle age, what we call the crisis of the 40s, and his sense that life suddenly has not a goal. It's because of a lot of things, and one of these is because he stopped teaching in university where he used to, so he started to teach in the suburbs – not as a challenge, just to pass the time and to be out of the university for a while. And also because of his father. And this neighbourhood that is now very hard to be in – there was another reality. When he realised that all his weapons for education, there's no sense for them, there's no place, so he’s trying to reinvent and reconnect, what the meaning of what he's doing, and of course of his life or his new life.
“So this is more or less what I wanted to try to tell in the story and all the topics related to his divorce, and he’s in a new house with a daughter that he wants to go to school. It's a film located in one character that has different windows open and all are linked in a way. The main thing is in the moment, the relationship with his student, Dylan, and how he tried to finally get involved.”
In the course of his research, he says, he found a huge difference between the results achieved by teachers who really got involved in the lives of their students and those who felt that their role was just to teach during school hours and then go home and forget about it all.
“So this was my attempt, also, to show a little bit how it is to teach in these places, because for me, they are like heroes and heroines. To teach, they have to be able to live in the future where there's no sense of future. It's a present, continuous all the time. The expectation of life is not too high. There’s a lot of crime, violence, the possibility of getting involved in drug traffic, it's around and it's an easy option that most of the time ends very bad. The walls of those diverse neighbourhoods are painted with faces of the killed young people. So it was education, and the possibility that the weapon of that education can make something there to believe in. This is what I believe, and what that film believes and tries to express.”
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| Lucio with his class |
I find it interesting because most films about education seem to be about a teacher who's transforming students lives. But this case, it's the teachers own life that's changing at the same time.
“Yeah, I wanted to try to make a film where the change comes from the character of the teacher. He's the one. The students are there and, of course, finally, they changed their relationship with the teacher, but the one that really makes a click and sees the world from a different perspective, and also the one who finds a place, it’s him, it’s Lucio – he is the one that really changed. And I tried to focus on the character, and where he came from and what he finally found.
“Maybe it's something, to say what he learned, but it's not only a question of learning. It's a question of experiencing, and also asking himself what he does. And also because in Latin America, in Argentina, there were a lot of films from Europe talking about education or schools in Europe, the classics, or whatever. But there were not films about what happened in our reality that is dramatically different than that...It's not difficult, but it's really different. So I tried to make a film and now the educational community of Argentina took it from there, and they are using the film, and it's for them, to be used the way they want.”
I say that as someone watching the film in Europe, what really stood out to me was the presence of armed police in the school, where they come looking for drugs.
“It’s prohibited,” he says. “It’s not allowed by law, that the police enter into the school. But it happens a lot. I will say not very often, but for example, when I was promoting the film in Argentina in September, they came into a school where I did the research and the teachers sent me the images that were frankly very, very similar to the images of the film.”
There is a real problem, he says, because students know that if the police are not allowed in schools, they can hide there when they have actually committed crimes.
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| Politics in the background |
“But sometimes, you know, law, at least in Argentina, can be manipulated in a way that there are a lot of exceptions. So these exceptions happened for a reason also, because in the film, there is, behind the plot, a political fight between a narco that wants to be the mayor of the little area. In this political fight there are a lot of favours to be done to to get advantage over political adversaries This is one of them, to try to do something with an impact that maybe changed a little bit the elections.”
I tell him that I find that interesting because it shows how political decisions which sometimes seem quite remote can affect children in school, and their learning process – and also their expectations of what's possible in their lives.
“Yes, yes. And I think also at that age, there’s a kind of line, I saw it a lot with the students that worked on the film, and it also was in a lot of the research. They are very open to receive whatever. In terms of politics, if there is nothing coming to them, it's very easy for them to lose their way. In the meantime, I don't know, there are the ones that are very straight, and then ones in the secondary school learning things, and the others that get loads of violence and crime – but they are [children] at the same time.
“Well, it's this border, right? At that age, 15 to 18-years-old, they are not children, but they are not adults. And what they get at that age, it really good change their lives. All the teachers that work there are so important...I am not talking about only to learn things in the topic that they did, but also about life, about the possibility of future working or experiences. Poetry, or whatever they can show, is what really could change a life in a fragile situation like this.”
It was exactly a year ago that they shot the film, he says. “It was very difficult to find a location. It was very difficult with some locations that we found – we didn't get the permission because it's a school – but finally, after losing two or three locations, we found this. I always was very interested in in having a road nearby because it's like the border of the city, the border between two different social classes, but I never imagined finding a school that has a road over there with a window.
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| Lucio's daughter |
“When I went there to see the location I said ‘Oh, I don't want to watch this, because I will love it and it will be impossible to take sound there.’ I mean, it's impossible. But we were near and I said, ‘Okay, let's have a look.’ Because it's not a box – that is what I was trying to avoid. And then when I opened the window, there was a lot of crowd. And when I closed it, there was nothing.”
Because of the road, he discovered, the school had been required to install really good double glazing.
“So we could film there, and it was great visually speaking. I liked it very much because this concept that I had was also in the school, in the room where the students get get classes. But we shot in two schools: one for the interiors and the other for the exterior. In some parts we had to mix two locations to build one.”
The class works really well as a group. How did he find his young stars?
“Well, we created a group. I wanted to use, non-actors or inexperienced actors and actresses. So we made a very open casting in this neighbourhood, like in the film. They sent videos of themselves, we called some of them and then some auditioned. And then I tried to meet most of the ones we selected, to talk a lot. And then I prayed.” He laughs. “I chose a group that they didn't know each other, and then we trained them...some of them never had seen a film. It was really to teach them how to act for the camera, what can be done. And they are an amazing group. They became, some of them, really close friends. Some of them are now trying to make it a career, learning acting; also there's one of them that she chose to try to be a director. So it was really great.”
After filming was complete, he says, they kept in touch and continued with the training so that the group will be available for future casting.
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| The Substitute poster |
We talk about the way the film crosses over between thriller and interpersonal drama, and how he set about striking a balance between those elements.
“I really like to mix,” he says. “It’s something that comes a little bit naturally for me. I'm always interested a lot in the sub-dramas, not just in the main plot. In this particular film, it was a kind of game that I did when we were writing the script.”
There’s a parallel, he points out, between what Lucio tells his class about how to construct a story, and his own writing process.
“It was really clear for me from the beginning that I wanted it to be focused in a character, then at the same time to show the contrast between two worlds...For the character, what he has to say about theory, and what happens when at the door of the room appears the police. What do you do with that? Do you get involved or not? So the film changed a little bit.”
He’s going on to shoot his next film in September, he says.
“I cannot say too much, but I can say that it will be something radically different from what I have done [before] today. It's a project that has a lot of humour. It’s a period film at the same time. It's something that I wanted to do for a lot of years and finally I can.”
