Interview: Buried Director Rodrigo Cortes
The Spanish director filmed Ryan Reynolds in a box for 94 minutes and created one of the films of the year.
If you take a spectacularly high concept like Buried and decide to film it, you're either going to make viewers endure boredom or nail-biting terror. Luckily, Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes pulls off something pretty special with only his second feature film.
Working from Chris Sparling's original script, he takes the beyond-horrific idea from the ending of The Vanishing and successfully drags it out for an hour and a half. The fear of being buried alive is a universal one, and we follow the fate of a US contractor in Iraq who wakes up in a pitch black coffin 6ft underground, with only a mobile phone and a lighter.
With only one actor onscreen for the duration of the film, Cortes had to choose wisely. Fortunately, he was able to secure his one and only choice, Ryan Reynolds. I got Cortes on the phone from America to talk about Buried, and he explained why he was head over heels for the star: "Ryan is simply the best. I saw him about three years ago in a film called The Nines, which about 16 people in the world have seen, because it had awful distribution. I discovered an actor able to be convey emotion with very small things, in a very truthful way. So he never acts, he sees - you cannot catch him lying. He has a perfect sense of timing, perfect."
Cortes then explained why this was essential for the role of Paul: "If you intend to make a film like this, with such few elements, you better have a high control of nuance. It has to do with pace and rhythm." Luckily, Reynolds had already read Sparling's script and was impressed by Cortes' ideas for the film. So how quickly did he sign on? "It was very fast and easy. There was a communication beyond words from the very first moment, a strange connection. We both knew it was going to be a two-person dance, and in ten minutes we figured out that we could be very good dance partners. 40 minutes later we were shaking hands."
Turns out his leading man was determined to make the horror as real as possible, and that meant no rehearsal. Cortes explained how that made him uncomfortable, but Reynolds convinced him it was the right thing to do: "He said he wasn't being lazy at all, it was a very serious thing. It was like, I don't want to be prepared. I want to discover things at the same time my character does. I don't want to get used to the box. I don't want to know what to do, I want to find it out. It really worked, and it was totally right."
Not that there was much time for rehearsal: "We had to shoot very fast, extremely fast, because we didn't do this film in eight or five weeks, we did it in 17 days, 12 hours a day. That means instead of eight shots a day we had to shoot 30-35 shots a day. One day we did 52. That means it was a factory. From the second day we didn't even rehearse technical takes - simply shot them, and we adjusted from there."
Cortes explained that Sparling's script could've been filmed without the challenge of keeping it all within the box, but it was his number one rule not to: "If you're trying to do something like this, inside a box for an hour and a half, you'd better have the perfect script. And he did a brilliant, amazing job. We only did a polish, but 90% of what you see was there on the first script I read."
He did take the liberty of adding some dark humour, something he admits Sparling wasn't that happy about at first: " He said, I'm not sure this is going to work, because if people laugh they will be out of the story. I thought those laughs could focus real emotions - from his anger and his frustration. People will feel more commited with him. You cannot keep the rope tight the whole time, because you'll lose the effect of the emotion. This has to be more like a rollercoaster."
Understandably, it was a tough shoot for the crew: "Many members of the crew needed to leave the set often, in order to remember that they were alive, to take some fresh air." Naturally, Reynolds bore the biggest brunt. "We sent Ryan back to LA with his back bleeding, with his skin totally destroyed because of the friction of the rough wood," the director revealed. This endurance helped shape the character, as Cortes points out that Reynolds "went through a catalogue of human emotions many people don't go through in their entire life - primal fear, panic, joy, surrender, hope, anger, acceptance, frustration."
With Buried a critical success, what's next for the visionary director? Something equally ambitious in the form of Red Lights: "a paranormal thriller with a very scientific approach that explores how our brain is not a tool you can trust to perceive reality, because it basically lies." Sounds fantastic. Until then, catch Buried in cinemas from today.
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