At 80, José Luis Garci keeps watching movies, but he doesn’t feel like doing more. He lives happily without a mobile, without driving and without coming upstairs now that a young film audience is rediscovering him. “I don’t believe in posterity,” the next Forqué Awards Gold Medal tells EFE.
The Entity for the Management of Copyright (EGEDA), with its president, Enrique Cerezo, at the head, has called on Garci and the media this Thursday to prepare what will be one of the main dishes of the Forqué Awards gala, on December 14 in Madrid.
The Gold Medal is a recognition of the trajectory, in this case that of a screenwriter, filmmaker, writer and publicizer who feels cinema as a love story. He fell in love in January 1951 when at the age of 7 he saw a few minutes of What the Wind took away, and he continues to fall in love in October 2024 after seeing Joker: Folieu . Deux.
Tarantino and his admiration for The Crack
Garci’s films, his rhythm and his pause, live here and now. He acknowledges that young people are rediscovering him.
The crack trilogy is an example. Garci says in the interview with EFE that the idyll began by saying Quentin Tarantino that he had seen the first part and chosen plans for his own works. And it’s true, he told me when I talked to him, reveal.
Garci smiles right after because he imagines himself commenting on the anecdote with his great friend Horacio Valcárcel, screenwriter of this and so many other films of his. They’d laugh, he says. “We would never have thought of it,” he adds.
He misses Valcárcel frequently. And Alfredo Landa, Encarna Paso or Antonio Ferrandis, the leading couple of “Back to Begin,” the film that gave Spain its first “scar in 1983.”
Garci says he will also miss them when he is handed the Gold Medal. Because his films did not make them; he made them and them.
Don’t be a whole idiot.
The director of the pending assignment is removed. I don’t believe in posterity. Of course I like young people going to watch my movies. I guess over time you’re getting more attractive. This happens to me at 40 and I believe it. Not now. If he believed all this to me, he’d be an integral idiot.
Time has changed, cinema has changed, he has changed. But he keeps up. He speaks wonders of the series The Penguin and very well of The Infilter, by Arantxa Echevarría, premiered a couple of weeks ago.
He keeps going to the movies, he points out, even if he’s not the same as when he was a kid. He narrated an anecdote a few days ago: he went to a room in Madrid to see the second part of El Joker and there were barely any people, barely any workers looking into his entrance. Nothing to do with the crowds of the 1950s, with that noise, that society.
The cinema and the future
Garci doesn’t see making movies. You can’t see looking for money. I don’t want to waste my time; I’m for a world without meetings and I’m no longer anxious about making a movie because I have nothing left to do, he sums up. What do you call him? He thinks so. In fact, he’s been called, but to make a TV show.
He doesn’t seduce the possibility, unless they let him do a silent movie show. Then yes, he says, and in this way young people would discover where the things they like so much come from now.
Cinema has a future, she proclaims; it must have it. Cinema has always been ahead of life, let’s hope this time goes too.
This article was translated after originally appearing in La Prensa