It feels disorienting to be sitting in an elegant, breezy Venetian hotel room to interview a man who made a blood-soaked tragicomic fable about Augusto Pinochet, but such incongruity is the currency of international film festivals. The night before, on the opening night of the Venice Film Festival, Pablo LarraÃn’s El Conde premiered to a crowd of well-dressed filmgoers and dignitaries. The film was produced by Netflix and premiered globally on the platform September 15. Which means that sitting in everybody’s Netflix accounts all over the world right now is an agitprop cinematic grenade that presents the onetime dictator of Chile as a 300-year-old vampire continuing to feed on the blood of his fellow citizens.
El Conde is many things, some of which tend not to coexist in movies. (You can read my full review here.) It’s a broad satire shot in shimmering, moody black-and-white. It’s an unrepentantly gore-filled horror flick that nevertheless finds time to provide detailed, fact-based accounting of the Pinochet family’s crimes. In short, it’s the kind of work that immediately makes you want to talk to the person who made it. That is exactly what I did after seeing LarraÃn’s brilliant, complicated film, which also won a Best Screenplay award at the end of the festival.
Where did the inspiration for El Conde come from?
In reality, movies are made by satellites that are floating around your head with different ideas that then eventually come together. And some of those satellites are old. I saw, many years ago, pictures of Pinochet dressed as a captain general, with this very long cape, and he looked very much like a vampire, like a count. Then over the years you start to understand that that man never really faced justice, and my country is so broken by that. The lack of justice creates impunity, and that impunity becomes the biggest symbol for eternity; that then makes you think of vampires. I always had an idea of making a black-and-white movie, but I wanted to make it organically black-and-white. Then Jaime Vadell, an actor who I love, and I’ve worked with in the past — during the pandemic, I don’t know about you, but I had a lot of time — we were on the phone with Guillermo Calderón, the writer, often talking hours about it. So we started to put together this fable and finding the right approach.
Your films have always had political layers, but this might be your most overtly political film. Do you think of it that way?
No, not really. I think that every movie is political. Some movies are more openly and directly political, but once you are describing a reality, any form of society that is exposed there would likely be a perception of politics. This one, it’s probably about how the structures of power are connected. There’s some strong link between the end of World War II, the Cold War, and then the rebirth of socialism in different countries. A part of that is Vietnam. And then Nixon and Kissinger organizing the coup d’état with the Chilean far right. It’s been 50 years since the coup d’état. Pinochet gets in power and becomes a symbol, protected by U.S. intelligence. I wonder if in the United States people really understand how the U.S. had such an influence in bringing Pinochet to power. Do you understand how the CIA through Kissinger, under Nixon, ordered to destabilize our country? There’s more documents coming out every week. They met with rich businessmen and media owners. They co-financed it, and they helped put him there. When you see the reports of the dialogues among Nixon and his aides, it’s a little bit what the narrator does in this movie. It’s sort of a patronizing perception of reality and geography. “Just go down there and drop some suitcase of money, send them some weapons, some bombs, don’t let this socialist infestation continue. We don’t like them. They aren’t very smart. Just do this.â€
So, they put this violent but not very bright soldier in charge. Eventually he gets too bloody and too dark and they try to cover it up and say, “No, no, no, no. Yeah, we are with him, but we don’t support this.†But when he’s doing it, they’re quiet because he’s doing the dirty job for them. It isn’t just a Chilean reality. You see it everywhere in the world, because fascism starts with a smile, then moves with fear, and then ends with violence. You don’t have to be shouting in German and wearing a swastika in your arm to be that person. Sometimes it’s more hidden and has to find new words.
You made these two films in the U.S. and the U.K., Jackie and Spencer, that take place in and around the halls of power, but the politics in those films is very sublimated. The further you get from the centers of global power, however, the expression of politics is no longer absorbed into ritual and behavior and morality. As it spreads out to places like Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, it becomes raw violence.
Can I answer with an example that speaks to this exact thing? I was invited to do a big movie in the U.S., and my idea was to bring the war on drugs into the streets of Los Angeles. The executives panicked. They said, “No, no, no, no, no. That happens in Mexico. It stays there, the cartels stay there. When they’re rich, they come here. We are not going to have an ocean of blood on the streets of L.A. We’re not going to have these guys just pulling out shotguns and cutting off heads and all this slaughter. We want to see that on television, not in our neighborhoods.â€
On a more practical level, how did you balance the genre elements in El Conde with the comic and political elements?Â
The genre and the farce approach, the satire, are probably the only ways to face someone like Pinochet. He has never been shot on film before in any movie or a TV show. So, how do you make a movie about it? One way to do it is to use satire as a code. That is the only way to avoid the more conventional mechanism, empathy, where the audience starts to feel and to share certain emotions and desires with the protagonist. You can’t have that.
Dr. Strangelove opened that path only 20 years after the Second World War. Black-and-white really helps; it’s not only beautiful and poetic and artistic, but also creates a parallel reality. It’s a fable that you could observe from afar, and that allows you to be dark, be funny, talk about this difficult and painful subject in a way where if you are able to smile a little bit, maybe there’s a strange and awkward form of healing.
Did you look at other films for inspiration?
Well, I went through Dreyer’s Vampyr and Murnau’s Nosferatu, and I love the Herzog one too. Then of course Dr. Strangelove. I think there’s a sense of humor that is hidden in both Barry Lyndon and Dr. Strangelove. But sometimes the most incredible inspiration comes from movies that aren’t the great ones, that could be considered “bad movies,†because sometimes the great ones are just too perfect to be imitated. In some movies the main idea could fail, but you find two or three things that are very interesting, that can be incorporated in a new form that can spark your imagination.
Do you want to give me a couple of examples of such films?
No, why would I? [Laughs.] If you want to hear some references, you can find them. There’s a line in the script that I personally wrote about how we see a figure that is a combination of Batman, Nosferatu, and Superman when he’s flying. So there’s an element of pop culture, too.
The character of Carmen, the nun, is fascinating because we don’t know exactly what her story is at first. The narration says one thing, she says something else, and then her behavior suggests something entirely different. And as the film goes on, she becomes more and more complex. Tell me about creating her.
Well, we wanted to incorporate the romantic element and we wanted to talk about a power structure. The vampire is a romantic character who is there to fall in love and suck the blood to make that woman his woman, and by doing so, make her eternal, too. Remember this very mysterious origin idea of a vampire who lives in his castle and receives this real-estate agent, and then falls in love with the wife of the real-estate agent.
So, the Pinochet family would make the silly mistake of hiring an accountant who was really a nun, who was going there to perform an exorcism in order to try to save the vampire’s life. Then he can die in peace. That plan doesn’t work, because she’s seduced with power, seduced by the fact that she could eventually be a vampire and fly. She realizes that she can flirt with eternity. That idea is old as bread, but it’s so moving and motivating. And then after she’s bitten, she still tries to follow her mission, because she’s absurdly obsessed with accomplishing the task she was given.
I love the scenes where Carmen is interrogating the family members. She’s got this big smile on her face, but she’s asking these horrific questions. They’re idiots, and she’s getting all this stuff out of them. She maybe gets seduced in the film, but she’s also seducing them.
Of course. She has the intelligence and the beauty, and that is used to get the information, but once she finishes the report, she’s ready to burn all that to accomplish her own desires. I think it’s a key element of the farce. And this is where it could be more dangerous, is that once you’re able to laugh at something, maybe you’re able to deal with it better. I don’t know if this movie does that. Julio Cortázar, the Argentinian writer, wrote something that stayed with me: “There’s only one way to kill a monster, and that is to accept them.†That doesn’t mean that they’re not monsters anymore. That doesn’t mean that they’re forgiven. That doesn’t mean that you have to accept them through the tools of compassion. It only means that if you want to kill it, you have to accept it.
One gets the sense in these scenes with Pinochet’s family that all this accounting of their corruption and embezzlement is real information about their crimes. How closely are you sticking to the facts there?Â
In order to avoid any legal complications, all the information that is said is real. About properties, amounts, dates, how they move the money. Basically, that they operated like a money-laundering cartel. Taking out money from the reserve accounts of the Army over the years is real, and it’s part of the report that condemned them from the highest Supreme Court in Chile. It’s an official truth.
I grew up hearing stories about Pinochet and Chile, but what is Pinochet’s legacy in Chile now? Is it one that people still debate?
Yeah. That’s why it’s so relevant. I don’t know if you saw last year, Santiago Mitre’s movie, Argentina 1985. That movie is about justice and how they were able to put those guys into jail very quickly. It’s the same in Uruguay. They created a pact where they would say, “Never again.†But our guy died in 2006, free and a millionaire, and that broke our society forever. Unbelievably enough, there’s some people who still protect his figure and legacy. They say that he didn’t steal that much, and that he killed and tortured and exiled the people who needed to go because we needed to get rid of socialism. This is completely immoral and absurd. But there’s another leg of his legacy. This is said clearly by the narrator in the film: Beyond the killing and the human-rights violations, the real legacy of Pinochet is that he turned us into heroes of greed. Greed is probably one of the most complicated and unspoken and invisible sequels that we have. Not only in the rich people that just want to have more money, but in all of us. We all want to just have more and more and more and more. And the lack of compassion that we have among each other. This is because Pinochet brought this wild capitalism, with no rules. Today Chile is one of those that has the greatest distance between rich and poor. Seventy percent of people in my country make less than $800 a month. And the top one percent holds half the wealth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.