Behind the make-up of 'The Snow Society': “Bayona discarded plans of brains taken from severed heads because he felt they were unbearable” | Goya Awards | Cinema | EUROtoday

David Martí didn’t need to work in The Snow Society. “I didn't want to do another melodrama with Jota [el director J. A. Bayona]. We had already done together The impossible y A monster comes to see me, a film that I took especially badly because my mother died of cancer and for me it touched on a touchy subject. I wanted a comedy, an adventure, something like that. So when she confirmed to Montse and me that in the end she was going to face The Snow Society, which I had been thinking about for years, I looked at him and said: 'But what are you telling me!', recalls the makeup technician in a video call from his DDT studio in Barcelona, ​​accompanied by his partner, Montse Ribé. In the end, the studio agreed. Thank goodness they did. Their names are the ones that appear prominently in the double nomination (at the Goya Awards and at the Oscars) that they both share with the team of makeup artist Ana López-Puigcerver.

We are in the same city and just a few metro stops away, but Martí and Ribé are grateful that the interview is telematic. They claim to be “overwhelmed” by the media curiosity that their Oscar nomination has as soon as once more aroused. Something that they already skilled in 2007, after they took him away for his work in make-up and hairdressing underneath the orders of Guillermo del Toro in The Pan's Labyrinth. “We are a bit like we don't know where we are,” emphasizes Ribé. After that magical evening by which Steven Spielberg requested them to borrow his Oscar and so they ended up at a Prince get together, this artistic couple will return to Los Angeles originally of March after their studio took cost of the technical make-up half in a movie that has grow to be a conversational and viewing phenomenon on Netflix (greater than 50 million views within the first 10 days of being uploaded to the platform).

This technical group needed to examine – by medical experiences, accounts of these concerned and materials from the time – what occurred throughout and after the 1972 accident by which 16 males survived for 72 days due to practising cannibalism after the affect. of his flight, 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, in opposition to the Andes mountain vary. Their work consisted of replicating how and the place the our bodies have been hit, what they appeared like after the accident and through the survival course of, or what the corpses appeared like as the times handed. From DDT, hyper-realistic replicas of inert our bodies, torsos of dwelling characters, severed heads, broken enamel, false cheekbones to mark cadaverous faces, glue ears – those worn by Tomás Wolf as Gustavo Zerbino – and even rickety legs animated with hair embedded by hand hair by hair by his group. Yes, they’re those who star in a vital shot nearly on the finish of the footage and that just about nobody imagines are completely synthetic. “One of the most satisfying sensations of this job was when I heard the murmur raised in the cinema by the moment in which the survivors undress to take a shower and our leg appears in the foreground in the Chilean hospital after the rescue,” he highlights. Ribe. And anybody who has seen the movie, whether or not at residence or on the massive display screen, understands the rationale for that group sigh of astonishment.

Without fauns or magical creatures, however with lots of hyperrealism, his goal was that the viewer was not conscious of his work. That normalized each the bodily deterioration of the survivors and the looks of the corpses that timidly seem within the shot. Martí assures that this might even have been “a movie gore” about anthropophagy. One that solely Bayona noticed and the remainder of us won’t ever see. “Jota always likes to record all the possibilities, to have the footage ready for the final cut. So we did a lot of things for him. From eating bone marrow to cutting off heads to remove brains, everything. We told him: 'But is this necessary?' “He wanted it all,” says Martí. These specific pictures have been seen within the first cuts, however they don’t seem within the closing version. “When I asked him why he had taken down our work, he himself told us that he took it down because he found it unbearable to watch. 'If people saw it, he would walk out of the cinema,' he told us.” Ribé clarifies that these pictures, exactly, have been dissonant with the intention of the movie. “Jota wanted it to be very realistic, for him to tell everything, but always respecting the privacy of the survivors. We had already felt that this could not be included,” he acknowledges.

From DDT they already knew the strategies of the Barcelona director, however the one who debuted with JA Bayona was the make-up artist Ana López-Puigcerver, whose group was centered extra on the non-technical half. The Madrid native got here to the movie in spring 2021 by one of many producers, Sandra Hermida, with whom she had already labored. “She known as me and informed me that she had a really good mission that I used to be going to like. “She wasn't wrong,” she says on the opposite finish of the telephone, from the hallways of a central Madrid resort, whereas she works on the fourth week of filming Daniel Guzmán's newest movie. It doesn't cease. His is a life marked by cinema. Her husband is a director of images, her son is a digital camera operator and her sister, Belén, is a part of her group, centered on hairdressing work.

“In The Snow Society It is very difficult to know where one makeup begins and where another ends,” she clarifies regarding what separates her from DDT. Her function was to provide logical and chronological continuity to the physical and capillary degradation of the survivors —she created the raccoon effect in the eyes of Fernando Parrado after the coma: “The medical reports assured us that it must be a totally symmetrical effect, as see in the movie” — or find out what type of beard grows at 4,000 meters above sea level (“there are people who don't believe they barely grew, but in Uruguay there are many hairless men”) to contact the survivors and their families. relatives to replicate their hairstyles. She even interviewed Laura Surraco, Roberto Canessa's partner, to find out how the eyeliner and know how to apply it in the mass scene.

“The actors lost a lot of weight, and we had the support of DDT with their prostheses, but the most complicated thing was to normalize this passage of time and the consequences on the bodies of the living, to understand the temporal ellipses,” clarifies this new Instagram star. . The interest that the film has aroused has caused its filming videos, such as that of the physical degradation of Enzo Vogrincic (Numa Turcatti in the film), to go viral in a matter of hours.

López-Puigcerver did not expect the Oscar nomination. Since DDT, they didn't see it clearly either. Martí and Ribes believe that Maestro, despite the heated debate it raised online and complaints about Bradley Cooper's exaggerated nose prosthesis, could win the award in its category. López-Puigcerver, who will debut on the red carpet at the Dolby in Los Angeles, has already received messages from American stylists offering to dress her. “I don't know if they will give it to us or not, but I am clear that I took my style from Madrid. And to choose it I will have the best help: all my friends from the costume teams,” she says. Another proof of the other community that no one sees, but has also been woven, thanks to The Snow Society.

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