INTERIOR is a film born of a feeling I once had while staying in a hotel in Bogotá. One night, as I was about to doze off, I heard three young people –two men and a woman– talking about their plans to go live in Ecuador given the difficult economic situation and lack of jobs in Colombia. They complained of poor working conditions and a lack of opportunities for advancement in their careers, which hindered their goals of financial stability. They had no steady jobs or fixed income, which made them uneasy. The instability they faced had submerged them in a feeling of suffocation and crisis. Two of them had decided to leave the country and were trying to convince the third person to go with them, but he didn’t want to leave his mother.

A few hours earlier, I had crossed their path in the hotel lobby and hadn’t even looked up. But listening to them, I felt a kind of empathy. The short conversation I’d overheard, this glimpse of their emotions and the situation they were going through, connected me to them despite not even knowing their names or ages, or their full stories. It was as if their conversation had drawn them closer to me, by showing me their humanity.

At the time, I thought about what Jean Paul Sartre wrote on the gaze and its power to make us see others as humans and not objects. According to Sartre, to stop and look at a person is to allow him or her to become human before our eyes, become an equal, bringing them closer by creating the other person in one’s own world. Eavesdropping on the conversation of these three young people had revealed to me their humanity, because their stories revealed situations like those in my own life.

From that moment on I became very curious about how, based on just a hint of what is happening inside another person, a connection is created that needs no further details, just the recognition of the other as an equal.

Later, I returned to Cali to continue working on my film, ATENTAMENTE, which led me back to the feeling and space of a hotel. ATENTAMENTE is the story of an elderly couple who meet in a nursing home and, due to a lack of privacy –he shares a room with other men and she shares hers with other women–, they start saving money to pay for a night alone in a hotel room.

While shooting the final scene of this film  –which takes place in a hotel room–, I discovered the very hotel where INTERIOR was to take place. The hotel caught my attention because of its especially confined, interior spaces. It was practically void of any connection to the outside world: the room had two very small windows at the top two walls, which were almost impossible to look out of and allowed only a few rays of light to enter. This room gave me a strange feeling; it was so close that being there for a while made me feel like I was in prison. The relationship between interior, intimacy, and prison fueled my interest for the space, which also projected a sense of weight, harshness, and life. It was as if it were charged with the weight of the lives that had inhabited it. Inside the space it was possible to glean certain clues about those lives: signs left on the walls, the time and use apparent in the objects that composed it, handprints and footprints on the walls and on the floor. It was a hotel room intended to be basic and neutral, but that exuded a sense of life and weight.

In that room I once again experienced the feeling I’d had months earlier in the hotel in Bogotá, and the feeling began to spread. I performed the same exercise I’d done there, paying close attention to the sounds coming from the outside, the hallway, and the other rooms. I remember the cries of a drunk trying to sing along to the songs of love-gone-wrong playing on the radio. I began to feel empathy for him –he sounded so sad–, and I imagined, he was suffering some unrequited love. It made me want to sing along with him and, once again, a stranger was drawn closer to me as I imagined the emotions he was experiencing. Emotions I, too, had experienced. Could a movie be made out of the little clues we’re given of the lives of different characters? Could a feeling-emotion be created from these clues? These were the first questions regarding what would then become a film.

I began visiting the hotel in Cali to collect the clues to different lives. At first my job was to rent a room and pay attention to everything I could possibly hear in the hallway and the other rooms. I was amazed by how the smallest bit of conversation or a simple sound could fire my imagination. A single clue was enough for me to imagine the situation that person was living. I was surprised by this act of completing stories, imagining, trying to find out what was happening. Watching someone for a moment not only drew him or her closer; it also aroused my curiosity, my need to understand what was happening.

Later, I began to carefully observe the people who walked past me in the hallway or in the small foyer in the hotel’s entrance. Sometimes I’d chat with a guest or spend the afternoon talking to the family who looked after the hotel and shared with me their stories of the place. I also began to enter the rooms after they were vacated by a guest. I was interested in the way they left these spaces and in the traces of their stay that were left behind, before the maid made everything neutral again. Based on these observations I confirmed or rejected the ideas I had about the people staying at the hotel. Reality is always more complex, filled with situations one could never imagine sitting at a desk.

Most of the guests were from a low-to-middle socioeconomic background. They had no economic stability and were forced to move around constantly, looking for a way to eek out a living. Their faces, their movements, and even the way they walked reflected the harshness of life. They were burdened, irredeemably, with the weight of capitalism, with no health insurance or pension, and no education. They lived out their days in an effort to secure the basics needed for survival. And these people I met at the hotel were, and are, like the vast majority of Colombians who have to find a way to sustain, coming and going, willing to work in “whatever you got”.

Strangely, this vast majority is the most invisible; it doesn’t possesses the money or fame that would make it attractive to the media, but doesn’t live in extreme poverty either, and therefore doesn’t qualify for the “poverty porn” manufactured by these same media.

This large majority is the labor force that sustains the country, but often it has not had the opportunity to be educated. It is present in our imagination as a mass, but has no face. Might a film revealing tiny clues to the lives and feelings-emotions of these people be able to create a collective portrait of this part of our society? This was my second question regarding what was to become a film.

At first I thought I’d make a documentary chronicling the people who stay at this hotel, but I quickly realized this wouldn’t be possible. Guests at these hotels are constantly on the move, immersed in their daily needs, and generally going through difficult times. When they return to their rooms at the end of the day all they want is a moment of peace and to rest. And filmmaking is quite the opposite. The vast majority of these guests would never agree to participate in the filmmaking process. Furthermore, they move around –here today, gone tomorrow–, and it takes time to make a movie: trying things out, making mistakes, searching. They had no time for these methods. Add to all this the trepidation experienced when confronted by a stranger, in front of a camera, and the time needed to get overcome this apprehension, which –once again– is exactly what they have so little of.

I began focusing instead on collecting clues, observing the dynamics, understanding how time is experienced in that place. Concentrating on the sense of harshness, getting to know the people who stayed at the hotel, their stories, and the situations they were going through. Based on this material, I started to create characters, scenes, thinking about images that could contain those feelings, that time, those clues. Sometimes I imagined scenes that took place before or after the scene I had in mind for the movie. At other times I focused on the actions I wanted to shoot, without imagining or needing to know anything more about the character.

Once I felt I’d created a character charged with an emotion I’d felt in that hotel, I began searching for someone who was experiencing a similar emotion, someone going through a similar situation in the present, but with the time needed to develop that emotion in a film. It was essential to me that those who participated in the film as characters had a direct relationship with the emotion they would portray upon entering that hotel room. But I wanted the relationship with that emotion to be in the present, not a memory. At the same time, I sought people whose bodies, movements, and surroundings bore these traces of life.

When we found a person who fulfilled these conditions, I began working with him or her, getting to know them, their situation and the emotion they were experiencing, to pinpoint the similarities and differences with our story and with the emotion that I had experienced at the hotel. Based on these encounters, I made adjustments to the character and created the scene we would shoot, filling it with everything I’d discovered about this person. And so my work became a constant making and remaking. Often, the scenes constructed from what I’d experienced in the hotel were rewritten based on the person chosen to play the character, and then changed again during shooting, based on the relationship they had with the place, with the objects in it, on their unexpected reactions, and on images I hadn’t seen and discovered along the way. Many times, the footage we shot forced us back to the hotel because we hadn’t managed to capture the emotion we were looking for. A constant making and remaking that eventually led to a soulful image. This remaking occurred again during editing of the film, where other needs arose and forced us to re-shoot certain scenes and characters.

For example, the cleaning woman’s character was created over time during shooting. The images themselves cried out for her character, and later demanded her presence and that of her husband (off-camera, as we watched some hotel guest). And it was the images that guided her transformation.

Likewise, the character who finds the doll left behind by a child had to be re-shot several times, transforming the character based on what the images called for in a process that was completed only after the final sound was edited and we could feel the emotion we’d been looking for.

During this film I was constantly challenged by a need to construct different characters, different emotions, which had to be transmitted in short scenes, in moments that sometimes left us with more questions than answers. Each character had to have a soul, without giving away too much information about them, because I didn’t want them to lose their aura of mystery. I wanted the viewer to use his or her imagination, to guess, to decide how the story would end, how the characters would overcome their situations. Or even decide not to complete it and just remain with the emotion. I liked the idea of the viewer’s conjectures actually revealing more about themselves than the characters. I was very interested in leaving that space in the film.

This decision forced me to look closely at a need, which I now relate to the inherited narrative we carry with us, to know everything about the characters, to have absolute clarity about everything, to evade the mystery of what we don’t know, to remain omnipresent in our stories, and to feel that we possess total understanding of each character by the end of the film. I was forced into discussions regarding this narrative several times during the process of making the film. Sometimes, those who viewed a cut of the film questioned me about whom exactly these characters were and why they were there: What was the man hiding under the mattress? Where were they taking the woman we’d seen gripped by fear throughout an entire scene? Why was the man on the bicycle there? The narrative created in them a need to know everything about the characters and what had happened to them.

Faced with these questions, I had to ask myself whether or not it was important to reveal more information about a character. I wanted to hold on to the mystery, everything we don’t know about them, because it allowed me to play with the viewer’s imagination, and because each character inspired a different need; sometimes we wanted to know more, and sometimes less.

I feel like with this film I had to listen to each character, and the film itself, more than ever, in order to know what information was necessary. Beyond my own interests, there were voices speaking from inside the film. Sometimes I felt like just another spectator and my guesses about the characters revealed more about me than about them. I couldn’t be entirely sure what the man was hiding under his mattress or why the man on the bicycle had come to the hotel.

Another concern that emerged while making the film had to do with the characters’ transformations. I wondered whether they should undergo transformation during the scene, entering the room in one state and leaving it in another. I discovered a different response to this question in each character, in their personalities and in the situations they were presently experiencing in their lives. Sometimes the characters were fraught with emotions that had brought them to a standstill. They were totally caught up in it, and in those cases I wasn’t interested in a transformation; I just wanted them to stay there, in that state. Other times, the characters returned more than once to the hotel room, which allowed me to show the transformation they’d undergone while away from it. In these cases, their transformation didn’t occur before our eyes; we only saw them return and noticed the change, observed how their lives had continued during the time they were outside the film, and how their lives had left marks on them.

A transformation of something or someone is part of an ongoing process and occurs in stages. These stages, and their duration, are different in every process, depending on the person’s character and his or her way of dealing with is happening.

In the case of the cleaning woman, for example, who appears most often in the film, I was able to show the development of what was happening to her, and from this, build her transformation in the film. She is a passive character, willing to put up with a situation she doesn’t like, and her transformation, therefore, had to be slow. Only through a process of accumulation would she find the strength needed to opt for a change. As the scenes with her husband progress, we see her slowly acquire the strength that will allow her to make a choice: to leave or stay at the hotel. But aware of her situation and accepting the situation based on this awareness. Sometimes we are privy to these scenes, and other times they take place off-camera, while we watch another character. Her final decision speaks to us of her internal transformation, the fruit of this accumulation.

In other cases, such as young man who strikes the walls and messes up the room, I was more interested in the emotion the characters were experiencing than in their transformation. We watch as this young man experiences moments of violence and stillness, two states of the same emotion. I felt that, based on the young man’s personality, there wouldn’t be enough time to allow us to capture his transformation and therefore focused on creating the emotion that remains throughout the scene.

Then there was the character that appears with his girlfriend and dances at the end of the scene. This is the main character from my previous film, ATENTATMENTE. Later, he appears again, alone, and meets with his daughter. In this new appearance, the character is experiencing a totally different emotion from the first time we saw him (as the person who has seen my previous film knows). His scene in this film takes another direction. In this, we need two films (ATENTAMENTE and INTERIOR) to witness his transformation. A transformation that has taken time and that, by watching both films, we are able to sense. A transformation that has taken place in a life that has continued after each film. I am extremely interested in and would like to continue working with this idea of life that goes on in and out of movies, that continues beyond them. The idea took on even more weight in this film with all the thought given to each character’s transformation. This transformation depended, in fact, on each character, their personalities, their lives beyond the film, and it was at times visible and at others invisible. I think this challenge nearly got the better of me, but forced me to seek the answers in each character.

My goal was for each character to find his or her place in the film and that, depending on this place, we would or wouldn’t witness their transformation, receive a certain amount of information about them, and experience different degrees of intimacy with them. Not everyone had to be transformed; not everyone would develop in the same way during the course of the film; we didn’t have the same amount of information about everyone. I was interested in creating emotional, physical and formal differences between all of them. Although all the scenes would be framed in a similar fashion and would take place in the same space, this difference in form would be based on each character’s development, and by the number of times they were to appear in the film. I had no way of knowing this until the scene had been shot and I watched it on my computer screen. Based on these images I was able to discern what was missing and what was too much, whether a character would return to the hotel, if we needed more information about him or her, or if he or she was suspended in their emotion and should be left there. We shot the same scene several times with certain characters because each time we sat down to watch it we felt something was still missing. The work required perseverance and patience, making and remaking.

It was also important to discover how a character’s interior could be constructed through his or her physicality. Emotions, invisible in themselves, are expressed through the marks left on people’s bodies. These marks take the form of facial expressions or blemishes on the skin, but also a certain way of walking, sitting, talking, picking up an object, responding to a look, etc. Physical traits directly related to what we are experiencing internally.

Creating this emotional force from the physical was something I was curious about when I began making this film. I had been doing improvisational exercises with a couple of actors, hoping to discover the relationship between physicality and expressions of the interior. I’d also studied their body language, which sometimes reveals even what people want to hide. I later worked on this with each of the characters in this film. They already had a sensation and I watched them and watched the images we recorded of previous improvisations, looking for physical traces of this sensation in each of them: the almost unperceivable gestures born of emotion. The gestures I discovered in each of them were very important to me when it came time to construct their characters and their relationships to the space or to each other.

Later, I re-made and re-worked it all, paying close attention to these physical details. On many occasions, when asked to repeat one of these small physical actions, they became self-conscious, unnatural, and I was forced to look for a way to make them physically remember the gesture without being complete aware of it, helping them establish a corporal dialogue with their interior, and with the other characters in the scene. Even so, during shooting, in every take of every action, I was very attentive to these little clues, which might appear any moment, and was constantly prepared to change everything if during shooting something more interesting I hadn’t seen before should appear. My attention was always focused on detail, especially because the actions and dialogues of many of the characters were minimal, and these physical and bodily forms and ways to doing things became essential to me. This is something that still raises questions for me, and something I’d like to continue to develop.

I did a very interesting exercise with some of the characters, asking them to think about something other than emotion, while performing the actions we had blocked out with them, which ranged from reciting the lyrics of a song to inventing a story. By thinking about something else, they were unable to control their reactions to certain objects that reminded them of the emotion or situation they were experiencing. This exercise helped me to uncover certain small reactions in several of them. I was aided by the fact that the situation and emotions I was working on were born of or reconstructed from a situation and an emotion that they were facing in the present, and were there unconsciously. This was the case, for example, of the woman who is obsessed with the cleanliness of her room.

In the scene with the two Afro-Colombian women working on their hairstyles, we asked them to perform an everyday activity while talking about issues related to the village where they come from, or their life in the city. Their minds were therefore focused on the action while they conversed, which made it harder for them to control their gestures and reactions. While their conversation is about issues affecting their past and future, their actions are in the present. The feeling generated by the contrast between what they say and what they do is especially interesting in this particular case.

We created a different exercise with each character, depending on what we were looking for. In the last scene of the film, where we observe a man deep in thought and then watch him dance to the song that tells his own story, the exercise was entirely different. The man was completely immersed in past events that had marked him and were responsible for his present loneliness. Everything the man is thinking in silence and stillness is revealed later in the lyrics of the song we listen to as he dances. In this case, there is a direct connection between the man’s thoughts and where the action is leading us.

But there was something else I needed to be aware of. This film was a whole and had to function as such. In its entirety it had to construct something that would justify the importance of all these characters coming together. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth it. This was one of my biggest challenges. We had to repeat many previously recorded scenes to make them consistent with this.

The idea of a film’s totality is very important to me. Rather than creating a wonderful scene, I try to make a movie that is wonderful in its entirety, in which each scene participates and is necessary, where all the formal considerations work to achieve a complete element. This challenge is always very difficult and requires a lot of work, and it isn’t always possible to achieve what you’re looking for.

With this totality I hoped to create a portrait of a section of society constantly confronted with the harshness of capitalism and whose lives are marked by this harshness. This was a very ambitious goal and I wasn’t at all sure I could successfully create that feeling through the accumulation that occurs in the viewer as the film progresses. The sense of the whole, of society, of different people who become a group, connected by the place from which they face life, living through different situations but starting from the same place.

I was in constant fear of not succeeding, of each scene becoming a postcard. The idea of the postcard frightened me especially, because of its image as something frivolous and showy, created for commercial purposes. The idea of the postcard based on formal and aesthetic considerations, not on what it might mean to a person. This fear of the postcard was linked to the extremely limited time I had to construct each character. It was therefore essential to create the emotion (the soul) of each scene, create emotional density in each character, but create also the idea of totality, a feeling that would bring together all these characters and build something itself. This was the film’s most difficult challenge.

During the process I understood that it was important for these scenes to be physically related in some way. There was of course the relationship between people staying in the same hotel room, but I felt something was missing. It was then that the idea came to us of leaving items behind to connect certain scenes: the drawing on the wall made by a child, the toy left behind by the child, the lack of water, the off-camera voice of the cleaning woman’s husband in different scenes, creating a time and an everyday quality for this shared space. This creation of physical and aural connections between scenes and characters helped us generate a sense of unification between characters through accumulation. Even though they never met directly, they shared something.

Formal Proposal

The formal approach of INTERIOR is very important; it is responsible for creating the overall feel of the film, the feeling the film must generate as a whole. The formal proposal arose from the moment we defined the room where we would shoot. It was a very small room, divided into two spaces: a bathroom and a bedroom. A room in a hostel used by different people, belonging to everyone and to no one, designed to be neutral in order to adapt to each guest who uses it. A room whose set design consists of basic objects: a bed, a small table, a fan, and a TV.

This attempt at neutrality, dictated by the room itself, became the basis of the film’s formal proposal: still frames from about six different positions, with a few variations in size depending on the action and character. The camera, defined by this neutrality, strives to become a nearly invisible object. Thus, both the space and the camera are engaged in the same game, focusing on the characters and their emotions, providing the film’s rhythm and emotional strength.

It was clear to us from the beginning that whatever entered the room would be in the film, and whatever left the room would leave the film. We were extremely interested in creating the enclosed feeling experienced in that room, a sense of the interior so strong that at times it is stifling. The first night we slept in the room, as part of our research, it felt like being in a prison, suffocating and creating a need for the outside, or a need to resort to one’s interior to withstand the time spent there. We were fascinated by this interior so strong, so overwhelming at times, that it forces you to travel to other interiors, and it led to our decision to remain inside the hotel room throughout the film.

Also, we saw these characters at the time as beings in motion, for which the room was a transitional place where they stopped to recover the strength needed to move on. This constant movement of the characters prevented us from seeing them and made us question the way we planned to shoot them. Our answer to this question led us back to the moment when they entered the room, at that point where they stopped to face, from a position of stillness, the situations and emotions they were experiencing. But we also wanted to hang on to the feeling of movement, the constant flow of these characters, and our formal proposal in this sense was very helpful. Having a space that remained throughout the film, in and out of which the different characters moved, made it possible to create, through a sense of accumulation generated in the spectator, that feeling of flow.

The same room became the starting point for the film’s photography and art. We used artificial light most of the time, since the room had only two very small windows at the top of two of its walls. The similar lighting in each of the scenes helped to accentuate the idea of the interior, since it was difficult to know if it was night or day, and created a sense of timelessness.

The photographic proposal respected the placement of the light bulbs in the room, but created some shadows that would bring volume to the space. We also created a contrast between the bathroom, where we used cold lighting, and the bedroom, where we used warm lighting, thereby differentiating the atmospheres in this small space and allowing for the creation of different sensations.

We built a system on the ceiling that allowed us to move the light depending on the character and his or her actions, but always respecting the direction of the light and preserving the neutrality and realism we were looking for. Lights and other equipment were minimal, because the limited space forced us to work with only the absolutely necessary.

The film’s art direction respected the scenery of the room, but the props and costumes incorporated colors that harmonized with the colors of the room. Props at times helped us connect one scene to another and were related to the characters’ activities and lives, becoming clues to the characters’ unknown stories. It was essential to us that the characters use each of the objects in the room, including props and scenery. There was no decorating for the sake of decorating. Each object had to have a purpose and a direct relationship with the situation and the actions that developed on the screen. The textures of objects were also very important in connection with the feeling that we were seeking to convey in each scene.

The costumes worn by each character were based on the clothes they used in their daily lives. In the same way that corporeality spoke to us of who they were, the way they dressed helped define them and so we decided to respect it. We did, however, ensure that the colors and fabrics were in harmony with the art direction.

The sound was designed to work in two directions: it was used to enhance the sense of interior, giving special importance to the sound of the characters’ actions and feelings, but at the same time we were interested in using sound to create the exterior, the part not seen in the film, and therefore recorded the atmosphere of the street and the area where the hotel is located. The everyday sounds of the other guests and the family that cleans and operates the hotel (which became a very important character, visually and aurally), as well as the TV programs and music on the radio, provided contextual clues to the city and country where the film takes place.

Sound in INTERIOR became fundamental, because it helped reinforce the emotions and accompanied the actions and characters and allowed us to create the outside world that isn’t seen. We had to work to find a balance between what was happening inside and outside the room, so that they could communicate and, at times, affect each other.

Fiction or Documentary?

Once again, we are faced with this question and once again I turn to the words of Vicent Vang Gogh in his book «Lettre à son frère Théo»:

(…) My great desire is to learn to make such inaccuracies, such variations, reworkings, alterations of the reality, that it might become, very well– lies if you will–, but truer than the literal truth (…)»

I think this phrase has become so important to me because it reflects what I hope to do with movies. Only time will tell.

Still, if classification is necessary, I am inclined to say that this film is closer to fiction, given the way in which it was conceived and constructed. It is true that the film’s formal proposal and direction create a very realistic feel, and it is also true that the space we portrayed was true to the conditions of the hotel where we worked –and to the type of guests that stay there–, and that we looked for characters who were currently experiencing the situations and feelings we wanted to portray in the film, but our method included staging and directing, which allowed us to create more theatrical moments and, I believe, makes this more of a fictional film. The viewer will classify the film as he or she sees fit, but all will agree it is a film.

Year of publication: 2017

ISBN: 978-958-48-1513-2

Textos y fotografías: Camila Rodríguez Triana

Editor y corrector de estilo: María Juliana Soto

Traducción al inglés: Sally Station.

Diseño y diagramación: Johnattan Ríos