[IMG:L]Bordering between fantasy and reality, The Orphanage unfolds as a supernatural drama as much about loss and love as the possibility of spirits living among us. The film, by screenwriter Sergio Sanchez and director Juan Antonio Bayona, tells the story of a woman, Laura, who returns to her childhood home, The Good Shepherd Orphanage, in hopes of opening the old manor house for sick and disabled children. Laura moves into the house with her husband Carlos and son Simon, only to find a sinister presence among them. When Simon disappears, Laura struggles to accept he’s gone.
Sanchez and Bayona tell us about the Spanish film that started as a short story nearly 10 years ago.
Hollywood.com: Did your inspiration come from a specific story?
Sergio Sanchez: Not really. Growing up I loved reading Gothic horror stories. I was a huge fan of Edgar Alan Poe, [Howard Phillips] Lovecraft, and Henry James of course. I think that the seed of this picture is really this group. I wanted to write something like that, something open to interpretation. You can see this movie as a ghost story, but also you can see it as something that has nothing to do with supernatural. When I first started showing the script around it got picked up by the Sundance script laboratory, and all these production companies did their coverage. Basically they were saying this was a movie that could not be made. They said it was an impossible mixture of horror and melodrama and those two are like oil and water.
HW: What about the fairytale references throughout the film?
SS: We wanted to stuff the film with references to fairytales, folk, and mythology so that in a way you would understand that [Laura] builds up her own fairytale. There is a little bit of Hansel and Gretel but it’s seashells instead of crumbs. There is Peter Pan; there are slight mentions to the figure of the doppelganger and the Spanish equivalent. But on the other hand, I think the film is unique. I can’t really think of another horror film that has the emotional effect. I’ve never seen a horror film before where people cry at the end.
[IMG:R]HW: Do you consider this a horror movie or a thriller?
Juan Antonio Bayona: I don’t consider it any genre. When I was working on the script, I felt free to shoot the story the way I think it should be told. We shot it like a horror movie and a mystery, but it ends like a melodrama.
SS: I think it’s a drama.
HW: Did you have to deal with a haunted set? After all, this is a ghost story…
SS: The house where we shot was really eerie because no one lived in that house for the last 30 or 40 years. The woman who lived there, her son got run over by a car in front of the house. She said that there were too many memories there and she wanted to leave. It is as if they had left the house running. There were still things there from 30 years ago. When the sound guy was trying to load, every time after you finish a scene they do a track recording the sound of the room. All the time he was like, “Quiet everyone, quiet!” It was like “What’s that?” There was always something there. Creepy things happened in the house. The restroom was on the top floor. Everyone was asking, “Would you please walk with me to the restroom?” because nobody wanted to go there alone. [Laughs] It was funny.
[IMG:L]HW: What was coming on the sound?
SS: I don’t know. Actually, most of the stuff you hear in the séance sequence was all those strange noises that they recorded for real.
JAB: I asked the guy with the sound and I said, “Put that sound there.”
HW: They are working on an American version of this movie. How involved are you guys or what do you think about it?
JAB: I was offered [the film] by Guillermo Del Toro–he’s a very generous man–and he offered me to direct the movie. For me, it was just too much Orphanage. I need to do something different now. What I know is that Guillermo wants to be involved and he wants to do something like retelling the story in a different way. He doesn’t want to do exactly the same movie in English, with an American director.
HW: Does that bother you? It’s like they’re implying you didn’t get your point across the first time around…
SS: With theater, that happens all the time. One play can be done a thousand times, and nobody complains about that. It’s not an insult, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s a compliment. I suspect the reasons for doing it have to do more with money than anything else. It’s great and I actually hope they remake the movie very differently. It’s wonderful to get somebody else to take a shot at it.
[IMG:R]HW: Every couple of years, U.S. studio executives get jaded and look overseas and find something they can reinvent for the American market. For a while it was Asian horror and now it seems to be Spain. Why do you think these Spanish films have universal appeal?
SS: We are always watching stories that happen 24,000 times. There are like 12 basic plots that we’ve been repeating since the Greeks. The only thing you can do to renew that is to offer a different point of view. I think it’s probably the setting, and having it set in an orphanage in the Franco regime. That gives it a specific personality. At the same time, the movie speaks about fears that are universal to all human beings. That is why the film works in Spain, the United States, China, or wherever.
JAB: The thing I was really attracted to when I read it for the first time was all ideas of childhood. Childhood was a thing that everybody could talk about with knowledge. That is what I recognized when I read the story of The Orphanage, that woman is going back to that house because she can leave her own childhood there. She has to face the work of an adult, she has to face a marriage. You go and venture in business, marriage, life, and family. She is so afraid to face that, so she’s going back to the past. That is something that everybody can understand and it felt like something personal.
HW: How did you both react when you found out this would be Spain’s official entry for the Academy Awards?
SS: We could not believe it and we were so thrilled.
JAB: We were so surprised and we were so happy with the big push that the Spanish Academy gave us. We were really happy, not just because of the movie, but I was very happy for my crew. I think I was also happy because I understood that the Spanish Academy really appreciated all the work that we did on the script. We were trying to get a resonance in the story. We went really deep in the research of the movie. We were talking with a lot of people who have had children disappear and with sensations of grieving groups. We felt that the Spanish Academy understood the movie the way we understood it.
