rewrite this title Sebastián Lelio Talks Musical Film ‘The Wave’ About Chile’s 2019 Feminist May Protests: “It Was An Iconic Moment”

Sebastián Lelio’s has touched down in Cannes this year with musical film The Wave (La Ola), inspired by the wave of feminist civil disobedience that swept Chile in the spring of 2018.

The mass protests and university rallies, sparked by a collective desire to bring attention to widespread harassment and abuse against women in Chile, came to be known as the “Feminist May”.

Daniela López stars in the film – which debuted in Cannes Premiere – as a music student who joins the cause, haunted by an incident with her voice teacher’s assistant. She is joined in the cast by a raft of young Chilean acting talents including Paulina Cortés, Lola Bravo and Avril Aurora.

The musical film marks Lelio’s first film in his native Chile since his 2017 Oscar winner A Fantastic Woman, with feature credits in between including Gloria Bell and The Wonder.

Deadline sat down with Lelio in Cannes.

DEADLINE: You’ve done a lot of female stories, but what was it about these protests that caught your attention?

SEBASTIÁN LELIO: I happened to be in Chile during the Feminist May. I was very impressed by the marches that took place, the demonstrations. The female students would march with masks, some with their breasts exposed. It was a very iconic moment. I remember seeing a photo on a newspaper with all of them on the street and it very impressive, very powerful. After A Fantastic Woman, I was starting to think about what I could do again in Chile. The idea of using this movement as a background to explore these themes, using the language of a musical film started to take shape. I thought it was a great opportunity to use the musical to talk about things that for which words are insufficient, to mix politics and spectacle

DEADLINE: The release of The Wave film follows in the wake of Jacques Audiard’s musical film Emilia Pérez last year. A number of established directors are tapping into the musical genre but kind of subverting it at the same time. What do you think is behind this?

LELIO: We are in a moment in the history of humanity, but also cinema, where things cannot be that innocent anymore. So, if you’re going to work within a genre, it’s almost your duty, not to necessarily subvert it, but to expand it, to make self-aware narratives. So, when you’re working with the musical genre tradition, you need to think about the genre and why you’re using it. You need to push boundaries, so it’s not an exercise of nostalgia, which is what has been happening for the last 25 years, with some exceptions, but rather an act of now.

DEADLINE: The film still features a number of elaborate singing and dancing numbers. It’s different from Emilia Pérez where the musical numbers are intermeshed with narrative.

LELIO: It does step into musical territory, unapologetically. The thing is the tone. It is something more than just finding a way to express things through dance and movement, movement and singing. This is more of depiction of political cacophony.

DEADLINE: This film is coming out at a time when it feels like governments worldwide are clamping down on student led activism and protests. Do you think this gives the film extra resonance?

LELIO:  We’re going through a backlash globally. It feels like a betrayal and revenge against all sorts of advances is being orchestrated in a very conscious way. I think the pendulum still has a few meters to go in that direction before things hopefully start to get more balanced again. Globally, it’s a moment where you know the demands of society, women’s demands, used to sound like commonsense three years ago, and now they sound like crazy things. That’s what they are doing. It’s just part of the never-ending cycle of the dance between the attempt to change things and the way in which power deals with that.

DEADLINE: Did these young Chilean feminists succeed in making a change in real-life? Has it stuck?

LELIO: Yes and no, or I would say maybe ‘no’ and ‘yes’. The way in which these things tend to develop is that a certain amount of energy is accumulated, the conditions for negotiation manifest and then politics and power make the move. Usually the movement, I’m talking history here, not this particular movement, is appropriated by politics, and then there is a sort of arrangement. Things have the facade of change but do not necessarily really change. It’s a slow process.

DEADLINE: How did you find your lead actress Daniela López?

LELIO: We did a very big casting process. Some of the biggest numbers feature 400 people in total. The average age of the woman in the story is around 22, or something like that. They were all very young. It’s basically the introduction of a whole generation of artists and performers. For the protagonist Julia, we saw hundreds and hundreds of faces. Daniela’s just out of drama school. It’s her first role.

DEADLINE: Looking back at your filmography, you like to tell female-focused stories. Why is that you think?

LELIO:  I found the first exercise I did in film school on a tape a few a while back. I was around 20, and it’s about four women. I understood it has always been there as a genuine interest. It was never programmatic. And then, the world changed, and this dimension became more prominent.

DEADLINE: You co-wrote the screenplay with three female writers  Manuela Infante, Josefina Fernández and Paloma Salas. How did this come together?

LELIO. My first intuition was that we needed to find a correspondence between the subject we were talking about and the way in which we were going to generate the pieces of the film. It had to be coherent. I called three female writers so I could write it being a minority, I called people I really admire, some I knew more, some less, but they belong to different aspects of the feminist spectrum.

It took five years to finish the script. The first year was like them talking. I would contribute a lot, but clearly, I wasn’t the one that was going to have many, many, many, things to say… the film expresses ideas and points of view that I agree with, but it’s also a sort of like political and spectacular device that gives space to many points of views. It’s more of an analytical portrayal of a moment than my own little thesis.

DEADLINE: How did your long-time collaborator composer Matthew Herbert fit into the process?

LELIO: This is fifth film we do together, and Matthew had the same question on how to create coherence. He said, ‘It can’t be just my score or my composition for the numbers’. He suggested we set up some sort of music camp and we invited 17 women songwriters. That’s where the music came from, and where Matthew took many, many things from, from that experience with two big camps. So there is a collaborative, co-creatiive approach, with the spirit of sharing power.

DEADLINE: What did choreographer Ryan Heffington bring to the project?

LELIO: For me, he one of the choreographers working today.  I said to him, ‘We don’t have a musical tradition. These actresses are very young. They don’t have experience. We’ve never done musical films in Latin America, in Chile, so you would have to work with that. We won’t have, like, professional dancers.’ He said professional dancers would ruin this film. He has this approach that everyone can dance. He found ways to make those people, those bodies, change with what they had. It’s not really belonging to the highly professionalized style of a more traditional film. There is something a little more raw about the aesthetics of the dance.  It’s the same with the music, most of it is coming from street chants.

DEADLINE: The film is produced under the banner of Juan and Pablo Larraín’s Fabula, with Fremantle and now defunct Participant on board as co-financiers. How was it working with the Larraíns on this film?

LELIO: It’s a dance, we’ve danced before. They are very supportive, but at the same time understand you need some space to create something that has certain uniqueness.. This is our fourth film together, but first film I’ve shot in Chile since A Fantastic Woman. Working with them in Chile feels like home.