Screenwriter Diego San José, author of acclaimed comedies such as Vote Juan o Celestesomething unusual was proposed: hiding a series within another series. “For this to work we needed the generosity of the network and the production company, to hide it in the promotion and the trailer, and not reveal exactly what we wanted to tell until the third episode,” he acknowledges. The project in question is Jakartawhich this Tuesday was presented at the Serielizados, the Barcelona series festival where it competes in the Official National Section, and which Movistar Plus+ premieres on Thursday.
He wants the viewer to know the characters as they know any person in their daily lives: “Life is that. Understanding the people around us, understanding what their pains and wounds are, takes time.”
“Life is that. Understanding the people around us, understanding what their pains and wounds are, takes time”
This implies that, no matter how much we interview San José, the important themes that appear in Jakarta They must remain hidden. Yes, you can explain what your starting point is. On paper, it focuses on José Ramón (Javier Cámara), a former Olympic badminton player with a gray life. He is divorced, has no devotion to his job as a physical education teacher and spends his free time at bingo.
Of course, he has an obsession: turning Mar (Carla Quílez), a teenager whom he has just met, into the great badminton sensation to upset the federation, with whom he fell out. With Elena Trapé in the direction, he does not look for the joke as in the past, since he would consider it frivolous here: “I don’t think about the genre of what I write. The closer you are to the characters, the less genre there is.”
And Celeste It was “like Zodiac with personal income tax”, as he himself revealed, in Jakarta the reference was The color of money by Martin Scorsese: “I imagined what a film like that would be like in Spain. It couldn’t focus on billiards, since that’s cool; it couldn’t be Dallas or Austin, but cities like Ponferrada or Torrelavega; and it couldn’t be Paul Newman but Javier Cámara.”
The other production that inspired him was the series I could destroy you by Michaela Coel, which addressed sexual violence in short episodes. “Pain, when it has to be condensed, forces me to write better. A 30-minute episode forces me to make good ellipses and go to the DNA of the characters,” he considers.
“Pain, when it has to be condensed, forces me to write better. A 30-minute episode forces me to make good ellipses and go to the DNA of the characters”
With this Jakartawhose title refers to the capital of Indonesia where badminton is a respected and popular sport, also wants to go against the current trends in fiction: “In recent years, series and movies are about a certain theme. What I was looking for was for the characters to be more than the theme in question.”
Now the question is whether the viewer will enter into his brave exercise in which, consciously, some cards are hidden until reaching the third episode. This is not just a series about gray people.
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