For Argentinian filmmakers Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, Buenos Aires is an explosive and inspiring mix. A characterful city that draws on its own past and the legacy of European immigration. A city full of contrasts, powerful, powerful. “It exposes you to constant contradiction. It’s not a quiet and peaceful place, a town in Switzerland with a lake and a mountain, it’s the opposite. It has unusual power,” says Gastón Duprat. “You can feel very comfortable and very uncomfortable at the same time, and that gives you a lot of adrenaline. It is the opposite of the stagnant lake that Gastón said: everything is always moving and surpassing itself. “There is no crisis that can hit this city with a hammer,” adds Mariano Cohn.
Its streets, its characters and its peculiarities are portrayed in the series by the director duo responsible for films such as “Official Competition” and “The Illustrious Citizen”. The series “The Manager” and “Nada,” both on Disney+, have strong roots in Buenos Aires. In the first part, Guillermo Francella plays the doorman of a building in an upper-class neighborhood who fights with all his might against anyone who tries to take power away from him in his territory. In the second part, actor and politician Luis Brandoni plays a dandy who makes a living as a food critic and whose existence is turned upside down by the death of his personal assistant.
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Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat spoke to EL PAÍS via video call from Buenos Aires last Wednesday, the first from the Saavedra neighborhood and the second from Núñez. “Although we film a lot outside and think of stories to shoot elsewhere, we like to create, work and tell the stories from here, from Buenos Aires, from Argentina. And we thought that there was an open debt of ours towards Buenos Aires that we had never portrayed 100% and that I hadn’t seen in films or series,” Cohn begins the lecture. Hence Nada, a fictional tribute to the gastronomy of the Argentine capital and some of its most emblematic characters.
Directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn during the premiere of the series “Nada” at the San Sebastián Festival. Juan Herrero (EFE)
This dandy from Buenos Aires, “a species in danger of extinction,” as Cohn says, is Manuel Tamayo Prats, a man of odd looks and solid habits who moves in elite circles but is short of money. His quiet life is turned upside down when his assistant dies and he must learn to defend himself in life and adapt to a new assistant, a young and inexperienced Paraguayan.
Cohn explains how Nada came about: “We are very friends with Beto Brandoni [Luis Brandoni] and at one of our dinners with him, he showed us a photo of himself sitting with Robert de Niro in the ’80s, right at the same table where we were having dinner in his house. So we thought how good it is to make a series where we can connect them together and there is a mirror game with this friendship relationship that lasts over time. In addition, Brandoni has a certain component of Manuel’s character. Both Gastón and I spent a lot of time with him and he is very easy to talk to, has a lot of experience and he also had a kind of full-time housekeeper in his house who was present at dinner and made him follow certain culinary procedures. Since we had all the connections there, we decided to put them on paper and present them.” After that dinner, they took notes and founded Nada.
Luis Brandoni and Robert de Niro in the fifth chapter of “Nada”.
They still can’t explain very well how Robert De Niro got his series. The New York actor didn’t take part in any series (except for a few cameo appearances) because he turned down offers. “The suggestion of a series that he wasn’t even the main character, that it was in Spanish and filmed in Argentina… seemed to have everything going against it,” says Gastón Duprat. “However, we managed to convince him that Luis Brandoni would do it and read the chapters to him. He saw our films and really liked them and the aligned planets, to everyone’s surprise. We met over Zoom, then we went on a lot of trips, had a lot of conversations, we talked a lot about the script, he was very committed to the script. Then we brought in Brandoni so they could have their first meetings as actors and it was a pleasure to listen to them and see how they, two actors of this category, spoke in a mixture of English, Spanish and Italian, in an unusual way The way they do it is “Real Life of Communicate” and that is reflected in the series, as the director and screenwriter explains.
De Niro traveled to Buenos Aires to record his participation in the series for 10 days, where he plays a very famous writer who is friends with the protagonist, who acts as narrator and explains the character and gastronomy of the place to non-Porteños and takes center stage in the final episode. Such was his commitment that he had reserved in his schedule a trip to the San Sebastián Festival, where the presentation of the series was taking place, but the actors’ strike prevented him from attending.
Luis Brandoni’s character walks through the streets of Buenos Aires in the series “Nada”.Consuelo Oppizzi
“It was all a kind of connection that wasn’t so accidental because we were all interested in food, both De Niro and Brandoni and us, and it was easy to build this culinary critic, which, like every critic, is also a dying one Race is “critics with such strong personalities that when they have to give a negative review, they do so and are more happy about a negative review than a positive one,” says Cohn.
The filmmaking duo speaks with pride about their latest series, which they say is a “boutique, artisanal, sophisticated series that wasn’t designed in Excel,” says Duprat. Although the platform does not provide data, “Nada” was an international success, as was “The Manager,” whose second season is scheduled to premiere this fall. Two series with a very strong Argentine flavor that have found a large audience both at home and abroad. “Many years ago it was said that history had to be neutral so that it could be understood in many countries and seen by a Chinese and a Mexican. However, we saw that there were things that refuted that idea because, what do I know, El chavo del 8, the extraordinary Mexican series, very Mexican, and yet it was seen all over the world. We never pay attention to that and tell the stories from the perspective we have,” remembers Duprat. “There is no need to impose our gaze because it is the place where we live, where we eat, where we create. Years ago, word spread here that Woody Allen was coming to make one of his films about cities in Buenos Aires. He never came, but who better than us to portray Buenos Aires, someone from outside wouldn’t have to come to portray us,” Cohn adds.
This portrait of Buenos Aires also includes the gastronomy in Nada. “There is no book that compiles the cuisine of Buenos Aires, which is very rich and has many influences from Spanish, Italian, regional cuisine from neighboring countries and Creole cuisine. “All this creates a super-free and unbiased deformed Frankenstein that has a lot in common with Spanish and Italian, but with very daring variations,” describes Cohn.
Majo Cabrera and Luis Brandoni, in the series “Nada”.
The creations of Cohn and Duprat radiate a very special irony that turns the drama or thriller into a comedy in the eyes of the viewer and serves to destroy society. “Our stories are dramas, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t situations where you can laugh, just like in reality.” “You live reality in a realistic drama, but you can come across incredibly ridiculous or unpleasant situations” , defends Duprat.
Nothing takes just two and a half hours total. Five half-hour chapters. Although they always thought of it as a series, when they showed it in San Sebastián they realized that it would have worked and worked as a film. In fact, they say they often refer to it as a movie. “But it makes sense that it is a series because there are very important omissions between chapters,” emphasizes Gastón Duprat. Mariano Cohn appreciates the short format of his series, a few chapters of a few minutes, which allows them to condense the story and “put all the meat on the grill, there are very powerful half hours left and you can do a little more.” make.” more craftsmanship, more artistic.”
“We dedicate the same work, the same detail, to a series, a television show, a documentary… we see each genre as a work in itself,” explains Cohn. And he continues: “We did a television show in Argentina in 1998 called Open Television, which, before YouTube, before Big Brother, was a delivery of cameras to households.” You asked on the phone for a camera, a small motorcycle went with a cameraman, he took a camera out of the pizza box, filmed you and the next day you were on TV. That’s how we started on television. Our approach to cinema and series is a mixture of these. We don’t have an academic or university method, it’s more of a sui generis thing, a mix of television, photography, cinema, documentaries, television…”
Guillermo Francella, in a picture from the seventh episode of “The Manager”.
With The Manager’s return just around the corner, the interview couldn’t end without asking about season two. The directors expect that Eliseo will have a new owner who will challenge his control of the building. “He is a character, the manager, whose physique we really like. There is an extraordinary actor, Guillermo Francella, who makes the difficult thing very natural, because it is very complex for an actor to go from a warm, almost humorous and funny mood to something serious, intense and very vicious in the same scene. Guillermo can do it,” says Gastón Duprat. “In the first season you might not have been so conscious and we filmed it more subconsciously, without knowing 100% exactly what the character was like, you discover that while filming.” In the second season it’s much more consolidated. For us as directors, watching Francella play is like watching Messi play,” adds Mariano Cohn.
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