9th Annual Jameson Belfast Film Festival

Javier and Marina Gatell at the Jameson Belfast Film Festival where "Little Ashes" was being promoted.

‘Ashes' to ashes: Talking with Javier Beltran by Richard Knight, Jr.

	‘Ashes' to ashes: Talking with Javier Beltran by Richard Knight, Jr. 2009-05-06
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In the indie film Little Ashes, an intense romantic period drama, actor Javier Beltran makes his feature debut as revered gay Spanish poet, playwright and slain political activist Federico Garcia Lorca. Beltran's startling debut, however, has been slightly overshadowed by his suddenly world-famous co-star Robert Pattinson, the teenage heartthrob familiar to millions as vampire Edward Cullen in Twilight. Pattinson plays surrealist painter Salvador Dali, who meets Lorca at art school at the beginning of his career during the 1920s. The two become close friends and lovers before a host of complications intervenes, including Dali's intense preoccupation with fame and outrageous behavior. This time out it's Beltran, with his dreamy good looks, who gets to play the moody, sensual hero filled with passionate, unspoken desires. It's a performance that finds critics comparing Beltran to another Javier—Bardem. Beltran is busy working on an array of projects—a wildly popular Spanish soap opera called Zoo and the Spanish premiere of the play The History Boys, but during a break in rehearsals from his home in Barcelona he managed to give Windy City Times his only Chicago-area interview. Beltran speaks beautiful English in Little Ashes but is more comfortable in his first language so the interview was conducted with the help of a translator. Windy City Times: You were cast out of college in Little Ashes—were your college years in any way comparable to those experienced by Lorca, Dali and their artistic group? Javier Beltran: More or less, yes. I'm 25 and Lorca was 27 so it was about the same, yes. [ Laughs ] WCT: Lorca is highly revered, obviously, for his writing but do you think are people aware of his gay sexuality? JB: Yes; the whole world knew. I don't think it was any secret. Everyone in Spain knew that he was gay. It was another thing about whether people talked about it or not. His secret was out there but what people cared more was his poetry [ and still do ] —not necessarily if he was gay or if he wasn't. WCT: Do you think if the climate for gays in the 20s and 30s when Lorca and Dali were intimate friends had been more accepting, they would have been able to maintain their relationship? JB: That is very hard to say—I wouldn't like to guess. WCT: How does it feel to be the envy of millions of teenage girls and gay boys, sharing love scenes with Robert Pattinson? JB: I don't know. [ laughs ] I'm just very happy to have worked with Robert—to have shared this project with him—and I'm very happy for him for his success. WCT: Can you talk about filming the love scenes with him? Both of you have said they were painful physically to film—really? JB: The scenes were very intense. It was very difficult to express since they were very intense emotions in these scenes with what was happening with the two individuals. But I was very comfortable doing the scenes because the crew and Robert were very supportive. I was happy how they came out in the movie. WCT: In your research did you find a poem of Lorca's that helped you find the key to his character or his relationship with Dali? JB: Many, many—all of them, actually. A Poet In New York is my favorite Lorca book. I loved the whole book. It's very difficult for me to choose only one. WCT: You're being compared to Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem partly because this is your breakout role and, like them, you're portraying a gay character. How does that feel? JB: Me being compared to Antonio Banderas is a pleasure. I love his career; he's a marvelous actor, he's stupendous [ and ] he's a perfect example for young actors to follow, as is Javier Bardem. I get excited over this idea [ laughs ] I have to admit. I'm proud to be compared to these two. They're great actors both in Spain and abroad; they have great careers. WCT: Any chance we'll see you in an Almodovar film? JB: Hopefully! [ Laughs ] I'd love it, absolutely. Not at this moment, though. WCT: Now that you've played Lorca, any chance you'll appear in one of his plays? JB: No, I'm not doing any Lorca plays. I would like to, though. WCT: How do you feel about your success with this movie? JB: I'm not aware of fame or anything like that. I'm just a 25-year-old run-of-the-mill actor, no more, no less. It makes me very happy knowing that people are watching the movie—the more, the better. I haven't changed anything in my life. I will keep working and that's all. WCT: Does all this fuss over same-sex marriage in America seem rather odd to someone from Spain, where it's legal? JB: I don't live in the United States, but I would hope there wouldn't be any controversy and everyone should just live and let live.

Another Interview About "Little Ashes"

Can you tell us about your character you play and the role he has in the movie?

I play Federico García Lorca, one of the most important Spanish poets. He was a playwright and a musician too. Icon of the Generation of 27. The period of my character in the movie covers from the age 25 to 1936 when they killed him when he was 38. The movie is about the friendship and the love Lorca and Dalí lived. This is the central theme of the movie, the relation between both artists; how they meet each other, what is going on between them, and the reason of their break. But in this story, we have to bear in mind the significance of their close friends during this period like Luís Buñuel, Magdalena, Pepín Bello, and others.

When and where was the movie shot? And can you tell us what what scenes and locations?

The shooting of Little Ashes started exactly a year ago. They were a very intense, hard working days, during the day and the night. We shot near Barcelona where we shot the scenes in the residence hall of Madrid, in the Barcelona city in places like Poble Espanyol, Born, casa Burés… In Cadaqués, near Sitges, in Granada and surely in some other places I actually don’t remember. I have to comment the extraordinary work the Atrezzo team made with the settings in these locations.

Which period does the movie cover and which years? The movie is centered in the period where Lorca, Dalí and Buñuel were in la Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid but as we know the movie also deals with Lorca’s death, and Gala appears in the movie too. So the film isn’t only centered in their time studying in Madrid?

As I said to you, the period is centered from 1925 to 1936. I can confirm you the poet’s death appears in the movie. We could not avoid telling this episode. It wouldn’t have any sense if we didn’t. Personally, I’ll say to you that for me, it was the most intense scene of the shooting. One of the most emotional scenes and I’d say more impressive. And yes, Gala appears too, undoubtedly, in one of the most important scene of the movie but as you say, the movie is basically centered in the period they were students.

What is your impression after you’ve worked on this movie? Have you seen the definitive editition? What is your feeling about it? How do you think the audience will react? Will the people like this movie? Do you think it can be a firm candidate to win some awards in some film festivals?

The impressions after I worked on this movie only can be really good. For me, to work with actors and actresses like Matthew, Robert, Marina, Bruno and others it has been a unique experience. And I’m very grateful for the chance to play Lorca. He’s an unique and exceptional character.

The movie is already dubbed in spanish and in catalan so yeah I have seen the definitive editition but they still have to make some changes. If you don’t mind, I prefer not to comment on my feelings about it, but obviously are good feelings. I can’t guess if the audience will like it or not, I can’t guess about the audience reactions. Of course I hope the audience likes the movie and the people enjoy it. At least I hope they give it a chance. About if Little Ashes is a good candidate to win some award… I don’t think about it, it’s something that I don't see so far.... but I hope so.

What about the accents of the characters? This is a very commented question. Can you confirm to us if the movie was shot entirely in English? We suppose the questions are about if you spoke in English but with a spanish accent. I know the question is a bit weird because Lorca had an accent from Granada, Buñuel from Aragón and Dalí had a catalan accent when he talked in spanish. If the movie was shot in English, did they take the accents of the characters into account?

The movie is shot in English. But I have to say in some scenes, just a few scenes, they were shot in Spanish, the poems for example.

About the accents of the characters, you’re right, each character because of their origin, had different accents talking in Spanish. But since we shot the movie in English we dispensed with the accents. But on the other hand, in my case, when I dubbed it, I didn't create any andalusian accent either but for the simple fact of Lorca dispensed with his accent when he wanted. So I decided not to create any andalusian accent because, for me, it would have been very forced and, I don’t know if that would have been a wise decision.

Over and above the subject matter of the movie awakes. It’s said a lot about two scenes. Partly because of the rating of the movie “R” because of these scenes. One of them is the scene that shows Lorca making love with Margarita in front of Dalí. And the other one is the kiss between Lorca and Dalí. Trust me, this info caused expectancy when it came out. What can you tell us about these scenes? How do you consider them before and at the moment of shooting them, or rather, how did you - you, Robert Pattinson and Marina Gatell - consider them. How did you prepare for them? Were they difficult to shoot?

Do you really want me to tell you about these scenes? I won’t do it then… hahaha… if these scenes have really caused so expectation I prefer keep on maintaining this excitement until you see the film.

I can just tell you that these scenes were shot with a lot of tact. And I personally think Paul, the director, made an excepcional work. It was a pleasure to shoot all the scenes with Robert and Marina not just these ones. We all see very clear what we had to do. I don’t deny you these scenes were complicated, and not because they were sex scenes but they were a very intense and emotional moments for the characters and, as an actor, you’ve to communicate these feelings, beyond if you’re shooting a sex scene or not.

Can you tell us about how the work environment was in and around of the set? Did you enjoy a good work environment? Was it a easy shoot? Did you (the shooting team) share some other moments on the set?

I'm going to be brief. It was a very intense shoot. Easy and difficult but in short, a pleasure. An unforgettable experience. I’ll keep the moments out of the shooting for me but yes, there were a lot of moments that by luck or misfortune, they weren’t shot.

An obliged question if I don’t ask you people won’t forgive me. How was it to work with Robert Pattinson? How is he working on and off the set?

Robert is an exceptional guy, on and off the set. Generous and very nice. A professional from head to toe. I can’t tell you anything else. It was a pleasure to work with him and meet him in person. I’ve just have good words for him, the same with the rest of the cast and the shooting team.

I hope I’ve answered all your questions. This is not a bother, on the contrary I’m very grateful for you interest and your work. I hope Little Ashes matchs up to your enthusiasm, I hope you like it and you enjoy it. Thank you very much.

credit goes to: http://littleashesmovie.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-with-javier-beltran.html THANK YOU!

Credit: Kristaynuh

OUT Magazine Photoshoot and interview

LLove In The Time Of Lorca

Who better to play Spain's great martyred gay poet than Spain's hottest young actor? Meet Javier Beltrán.

By Michael Martin

A chronicler of unspeakable desire who has attracted a legion of pop culture acolytes, like too many gay artists from his era Federico García Lorca was martyred, murdered at the age of 38 in 1936. As the subject of the new filmLittle Ashes, the Spanish poet and playwright is due for a resurrection and reappraisal. The film is also a high-profile coming-out of sorts for Javier Beltrán, the 27-year-old Spanish actor who plays him. “For a Spanish actor it’s a really big and important role,” says Beltrán. “Lorca is the most important poet in our history.”

Sweepingly romantic and darkly melancholic, Lorca’s poetry was filled with vivid images of nature and frequent references to death. His plays tackled thwarted passions and unrequited longing, with a gay subtext barely beneath the surface: Mariposa concerned the ill-fated love between a cockroach and a butterfly; Blood Wedding dealt with a mother in love with her daughter’s fiancé and ended in murder; The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife was a comedy about extramarital flirtation and fantasy (very risqué for 1926). “He’s certainly one of the greatest 20th-century poets and playwrights,” says Little Ashes director Paul Morrison. “In Spain, after Cervantes he’s number 1. His plays still seem modern, absolutely alive. They’re like Shakespeare in that they’re very open to interpretation.”

Little Ashes is decidedly focused on Lorca’s sexually and romantically pivotal years at university following his middle-class agrarian childhood on the pampas of Spain. He attended the famed Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he met fellow students Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Lorca and Dalí developed a close friendship, which blossomed into an intense flirtation, then a frustrated affair. “They saw themselves as [mythical heroes] Castor and Pollux,” says Little Ashes screenwriter Philippa Goslett, “twin souls with an innate and complete understanding of each other -- intellectually, artistically, and emotionally.”

“If you read Lorca’s poems, you can see he loves Dalí, and a lot of Dalí’s paintings have Lorca in them,” explains Beltrán. “Lorca was in love with Dalí -- but I don’t know if Dalí really loved Lorca.”

To get into character Beltrán studied Lorca’s poetry and how it connected to his life story. “He was very passionate,” he says. “To be a homosexual in his time in Spain was to be sick. He didn’t speak about homosexuality, but death and sexuality are always present in his poems. I tried to show that in my work on the film.”

Little Ashes also stars Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame as Dalí. “I didn’t really know him from the Harry Potter movies,” says Morrison. “And then he came and did this reading, and he was so lovely and vulnerable and smart in the way Dalí was. If he played Dalí like the caricature we’re familiar with, nobody would care that Lorca was falling in love with him. You’d want to say to him, ‘Get the hell out of this relationship -- this guy is trouble.’ But Robert manages to make this guy really interesting from the start.”

In the film Dalí and Lorca engage in a tortuous push and pull, but they first come together physically in a scene where they swim naked and kiss under the moonlight. “I loved Lorca’s closeness to the earth and sky and moon and his love of the texture of the countryside,” says Morrison. “I tried to get some of that textural feel, to make a sensual film in the wider sense as well as in the specific sense.” But as Lorca grows more attached, Dalí backs away, and their ill-fated affair eventually ends in a violent, voyeuristic threesome. “We didn’t have any problems with the sexuality,” says Beltrán. “On the set the sex was less important than the emotions. The sex scenes are beautiful -- very tragic and very painful.”

The film plays a provocative game of “What if?” in exploring Lorca and Dalí’s relationship, the subject of historical controversy. Lorca never spoke of the affair; Dalí referred to it only briefly near the end of his life, in an interview where he talked about how he had attempted to have sex with Lorca but was unable to complete the act because it hurt. “Nobody knows exactly what happened [between them],” says Morrison. “But what’s not in dispute is that they were very close. Lorca keeps popping up in Dalí’s pictures over this period, and Dalí keeps popping up in Lorca’s poetry. Artistically they inspired one another even though they were very different, and their intimacy went beyond a friendship. They at least attempted to have sex a couple of times. As Dalí recounts it, he was both attracted to and repelled by Lorca’s sexuality. But what was important to me was that the actors inhabited the characters truthfully, that they did something that felt real to them.”

So was Dalí closeted? “I think it would be a mistake to try to pin a gay or straight label to Dalí,” says Goslett. “I think the situation for Dalí was complex. He had a profound fear of sexual intimacy, seemingly based in childhood trauma. It seems clear to me that Dalí desired to be physically close to Lorca, but because of his psychological hang-ups he was unable to follow through with it. The combination of such a profound emotional intimacy and his inability to reciprocate it on a physical level proved too much for Dalí.”

The artist left Lorca for a woman; Lorca was devastated. Yet when the two went their separate ways, they found great fame: Lorca published popular books of poetry and studied in New York at Columbia University before returning to Madrid to direct theater. He had a number of affairs (one with another man who left him for a woman) but never really recovered from his love for Dalí.

“The relationship had a deep and long-lasting impact on both men,” says Goslett. “It represents a moment in their lives where they could have taken very different paths. For Lorca it marks a great turning point in his work. After falling in love and having his heart broken by Dalí, he truly connected with his emotional side. His writing was never the same again. Although Lorca was more overtly traumatized by the way their friendship broke down, I think the loss was greater for Dalí. After his departure from the university in Madrid he began to construct the buffoonish, life-as-art persona that brought him such fame in the years to come. It was a mask. And as Lorca often pointed out in his work, the price you pay for wearing a mask is that it becomes increasingly difficult to take it off.”

Lorca once described his artistic mission this way: “I sought to express the struggle of reality with fantasy that exists within every human being.” Seen by the ascendant dictator Francisco Franco as an enemy, Lorca was executed in 1938, forced to dig his own grave. One of the soldiers bragged that he shot “two bullets into his ass for being a queer.” But his influence lived on: Little Ashes is only the latest cultural artifact to draw inspiration from Lorca’s work and life. Previous adapters and fans include playwright David Henry Hwang, who composed an opera about Lorca; Charles Bukowski, who referenced Lorca’s life in his poetry; and the Clash and the Pogues, who name-dropped Lorca in their songs. Leonard Cohen, who set one of Lorca’s poems to music, cited Lorca as his “greatest influence” and named his daughter after him.

Like Little Ashes, Lorca’s life story ends with a perpetual coda: speculation on what could have been. “The tragedy is that he didn’t get the chance to write the canon of work he had in him,” says Morrison. “He could have written 20 more plays. I’m sure of it.”

For Javier Beltrán, however, this is only the beginning. The Madrid native’s debut in Spanish film came in 2008, when after appearing in student theater productions of Shakespeare and Harold Pinter, he was cast in Daniel Torres Santeugini’s dramatic short El Paso. This year marks Beltrán’s triple big break: his lead in Ashes, a starring role in the Spanish television series Zoo,and a turn in the Spanish version of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, appearing as Stuart Dakin. “I love movies, and I want to get back in front of a camera,” he says. “My goal as an actor is to work until I get tired.”

He adds that he cultivated this passion playing Lorca in Little Ashes: “To me, Lorca was a transgressive man, a distinctive man, a genius,” says Beltrán. “He was ahead of his time but humble. He never forgot where he came from and what he wanted for his people. The fact that he was killed is something the Spanish will never understand. He’s an important figure because of the emotion in his words but also because he was a genuine man who loved life. I only hope I can live up to him.”

Photo Update!

in the spanish version of "The History Boys" which played at the Theatre Goya this past October


LITTLE ASHES!

Hello and Welcome!

Hello! This is a blog dedicated to Javier Beltran, his work, and his fans. He is probably best known for his performance as Federico García Lorca in the film "Little Ashes" also staring Twilight's Robert Pattinson.