Director and screenwriter Alberto Rodriguez always looks for inspiration in the world around him, from real life to art. The muse for his gripping detective thriller Marshland came in the form of photographer Atin Aya, who also grew up in Rodriguez’s hometown of Seville.
“He had devoted himself to capturing the last vestiges of a style of life that existed in the marshlands of the Guadalquivir river for centuries,” the director explains. “Many of the photos were portraits of the locals and showed a mixture of resignation, mistrust and hardness, which were part of those faces frozen in the past. With mechanisation of labour, they most likely weren’t going to have much of a future. The exhibition was a reflection of the end of an era. It was my first contact with La Isla – the sunsets and landscapes were amazing.”
The setting gave rise to a plan to create a modern noir film, based around an investigation into the murders of young women in a hopeless town. Rodriguez was also attracted to life in the immediate post-Franco era, where both personal and political lives were in turmoil. This atmosphere of suspense and turmoil is perfectly evoked by the geography of the marshlands.
“They were a huge inspiration,” nods Rodriguez. “It’s a magical and mysterious place, where wealth and power live side-by-side with pain and misery, which results from the social and political past. With all that information we began to write the story. We set the film in 1980, a year of great political tension in Spain, which lurks in the background. The marshlands are tough, magnetic and cruel and this is heightened by the underlying political conflict.
”Marshland’s lead characters, two mismatched policemen, come to represent both the hopeful future and dark past of Spain’s political landscape.
“Pedro (Raul Arevalo) is astute, idealistic and opinionated,” explains Rodriguez. “He rebels against authority and injustice – he’s an ideologue. You could describe him as a ‘closet Che Guevara’ who, deep inside and regardless of his best intentions, will have no qualms in transforming himself in order to quench his vanity. He has that impulse which at every moment urges him on towards the ultimate objective: to become a hero with political aspirations.
”In contrast, Javier Gutierrez’s award-winning role as the cynical but charming Juan hints at an older, more brutish philosophy. “Juan worked in the Social and Political Brigade and is an expert in torture. Trained as a spy, he applies the methods he acquired many years ago. He is cunning and secretive – he represents the darkness of Spain’s past.
”Marshland is Rodriguez’s most obvious genre film, and he cites Houston, Ford and Billy Wilder as inspirations. “I also very much like the Coen Brothers, Fincher and Bong Joon-ho, the director of Memories Of Murder,” he adds. “I think that they have, in some way, revitalised genre.” Marshlandhas been described as “deep-south Spanish noir”, and has drawn comparisons to Se7en and The Secret In Their Eyes – but the director says he was inspired by older works like Chinatown. As for True Detective, to which Marshland has also been compared, Rodriguez hadn’t even heard of the hit show when he was working on his film.
“While we were editing the movie, Raul Arevalo – the actor playing Pedro – sent me a phone message,” he recalls. “It had the trailer for the series, and Raul said, ‘Alberto, someone has copied your idea and decided to make a TV series!’ But this Easter I had some time and watched True Detective. I really enjoyed it.”