Daniel Sánchez Arévalo (Madrid, 52 years old) had a pending account with the female universe. The audiovisual world that the filmmaker has drawn in his films, from Azuloscurocasinegro to Sieventeen, past Cousinsand The Big Spanish Family, is mostly male. That debt will be paid with The Last Row, a tale of friendship and an upbeat, transformative journey to overcoming self-imposed barriers, premiering September 23 on Netflix.
Five women, five friends in their thirties are the protagonists of a story that Sánchez Arévalo had been thinking about for about 10 years, but which he left untapped, he says from the Netflix offices in Madrid. The idea was simmered until three elements came together: first, the need to enter the female universe; second, his partner Sara, who responded enthusiastically when he told her this idea; and third, Verónica Fernández, Director of Fiction at Netflix Spain. “He called me and said they would like to produce a series for me. We met for lunch and I told him about those in the back row and he told me that he wanted to do it right at the start,” the director explains to EL PAÍS.
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In six chapters, the series tells the journey of five childhood friends, a custom that has a different twist this time: one of them has cancer. The conditions they have set for this summer vacation are that the five of them shave their hair, that they do not talk about cancer at any time and that everyone writes on a piece of paper what they would like to do if they knew that they had little time left to live and everything they must do as a collective challenge.
Godeliv Van den Brandt, Mariona Terés, Itsaso Arana, Mónica Miranda and María Rodríguez, in the second episode of “The Last Row,” JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
Sánchez Arévalo, who writes and directs the six episodes, was clear that his protagonists should be between 35 and 40 years old. “I wanted women in adulthood and at the point where your life is said to be pretty much on track and any transformation is more complicated. As you get older, the changes become more complicated, but at the same time more interesting.” I also knew that he preferred his actresses not to be known to the general public. María Rodríguez, Itsaso Arana, Mariona Terés, Godeliv Van den Brandt and Mónica Miranda are the protagonists, accompanied by supporting characters with better known names such as Javier Rey, Macarena García, Carmen Machi, Michelle Jenner or Antonio de la Torre, whose participation sometimes becomes mere cameos reduced. “In my obsession with putting together a group of thirty-somethings who you think are school friends, working with actresses who aren’t as well known to the general public makes it easier to get into the story. Although I also looked for the best actresses for the characters I wrote. I always do that, regardless of whether they have a more or less long career,” says the director.
The physical journey of the protagonists will also put them in front of an emotional, transformational journey. “I like to put the characters in a time when the wheel of life has stopped and forces you to look at yourself and ask yourself if you are where you want to be and who you want to be with.” , explains the screenwriter. “I have this picture of the hamster in the wheel. Many times in life we sit in this wheel and we don’t stop thinking. You push forward and there are things that start to get dirty, you swallow them and don’t clean them and they accumulate.”
Mariona Terés, Godeliv Van den Brandt, María Rodríguez, Mónica Miranda and Itsaso Arana, in the fourth episode of The Last Row, JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
For this trip, the group chooses Cadiz. The decision is not accidental and responds to several reasons. The series is set in June but filming had to take place outside of the high season between September and November and a location had to be found that recreated the summer feeling at that time. “I visited several areas in the south and Cadiz was love at first sight,” says Sánchez Arévalo. “There’s something about the spirit of these beaches, that freedom that creates a bubble between them that fits very well.” She also asked groups of friends where they were going on vacation, and Cadiz was one of the winning destinations. The team traveled there for three months to shoot at different points between Tarifa and Conil de la Frontera.
But first, the filmmaker had to face his greatest challenge: reflecting on the female world. “With a tennis expression, I felt my arm tight at first, I found it difficult to let go and hit, enjoy. I was a little scared because I really wanted to do it well so women could empathize so it didn’t come across as a man writing about women. To do this, he consciously tried to immerse himself in the female universe. Taking advantage of the fact that incarceration caught him writing the series, he approached his partner with a thousand questions so he could tell him all the details about what he’s talking about or what he’s doing with his friends. In addition, he had the help of an expert gender psychologist who reviewed scripts, characters and situations. And he asked both the actresses and the mostly female technical team to let him know if anything squeaked in the lyrics.
Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, in a corridor of the Netflix offices in Madrid. Claudio Alvarez
This process of working together with the actresses resulted in what Sánchez Arévalo singles out as his favorite scene of the series, a sequence from the third chapter in which the protagonists talk about their bowel movements. “I can say it’s my favorite sequence because I didn’t write it myself. I wanted to talk about it because it seems very taboo in the female universe, guys don’t have that much modesty. But it’s a topic that’s there and they recognized me that they’re all talking about it. For two days we started improvising while I was taking notes, and all the phrases that appear in that sequence were said by them, they wrote them.”
Just as the viewer doesn’t know until the very end which of the friends has cancer, neither did the actresses, who had to wait until the shooting of the final sequence, which had already been shot in Madrid, to reveal their identities. “I wanted to achieve the feeling that everyone experiences it in a very personal way. When you speak to associations that fight cancer and patients and patients’ families, it’s something that you experience very personally, and I wanted to reflect that pineapple that’s generated, that everyone suffers from it and embraces it and it’s all very close is on the surface.”
The protagonists of The last Row, in the fourth chapter of the series.JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
Although Daniel Sánchez Arévalo started in the world of screenwriting in the series with Antonio Mercero in Farmacia de Guardia to continue it in titles like Hermanas or Hospital Central, this is his first series as a creator based on his own idea. “There was one project where they asked me if I wanted to do it and I said yes, but I wanted to shoot it by hand in 16:9 and rehearse with the actors. You told me no to all three things. I felt the director was still nothing more than a filmmaker, so I wasn’t interested. After I made Azuloscurocasinegro, I went back to writing screenplays for series due to financial reasons.”
With The Last Row he was able to verify the differences between directing a series and a film. “The most complicated thing is the timing, 16 weeks of shooting, it’s like shooting more than two films. And the writing and the post-production… Also, I got caught as a father, I was shooting with my daughter who had just turned one year old. I remember one day when I had less than a week to shoot and I was at home on the playground, my daughter was sleeping, I was sitting and crying, a somewhat pathetic picture. Sara asks me what’s going on and I tell her I don’t think I’ll make it to the end. I released the tension. I made it, but the toll you have is not so much physical as mental, a lot of pressure.” Do you want to repeat this experience at the top of another series? “No, no, what’s the matter. I’ve got film mono, doing something more controlled, seven weeks of shooting… I’ve got it very clear. Although it was a wonderful, immersive, incredible experience,” he concludes.
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As a superstition, it is common in South Sudan to hang dead snakes on trees to prevent them from coming back to life.Pierre-Yves Bernard (Pierre-Yves Bernard/MSF)
Godeliv Van den Brandt, Mariona Terés, Itsaso Arana, Mónica Miranda and María Rodríguez, in the second episode of “The Last Row,” JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
Mariona Terés, Godeliv Van den Brandt, María Rodríguez, Mónica Miranda and Itsaso Arana, in the fourth episode of The Last Row, JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, in a corridor of the Netflix offices in Madrid. Claudio Alvarez
The protagonists of The last Row, in the fourth chapter of the series.JULIO VERGNE/NETFLIX
