Breakfast avec Des(pecho)truccion

Interview with Maria Ruiz, for Des(pecho)truccion 

In your short, the separation is focused on objects related to Gabriel and both characters are almost absent from the screen. Do you think that we can get a full portrait of Gabriel through his objects ?

I dont think you can get a full portrait of him in anyway because all the information you have about him is given by this girl; even worse: all the information comes from her voice over, in the middle of a speech that is obviously hyperbolic and sort of absurd as well. The only clear portrait you can get, I think, is hers: she is a neurotic, dramatically hysteric and she is very hurt.

Your style of filming emphasizes the artifice of the mise en scène (apparition of hands to show the credits, etc.) and a home-made style. Why are you avoiding realism ?

I think realism could have made my story a very dramatic one. That was not what I was looking for: my idea is a self-parody, make fun about things that I feel, in general, and about something I felt in a very specific moment years ago.

I was trying to send the portrait of a spoiled girl making a huge thing about something that is not that big: a break up is something as human and normal as hanging out with friends. We hear about people breaking up maybe every week or something like that. It was for me like a little girl very mad because her toy was broken. So, in that way I decided to chose a hand-made and sometimes child like style/aesthetic to emphasize that idea.

Did you think about animation and home-made style when you wrote the scenario or after ?

The home-made style was clear for me from the beginning, even when the script was not finished. The stop motion technique was too but only for a few parts of the film as the tower of books in “The literature” chapter, the first take of “His house” chapter, and the napkins tower in the “Epilogue”. Then it became extensive to other situations with the problem of the computer screenings: “how can we make a hand-made screen where things move by them self in the desktop?”. My first-weird-complicated solution was “lets make a magnet mechanism to move the little objects in the desktop from the back of the screen”. The DP and the Art director asked me ” is not easier with stop motion?”. They were very right :).

What is the signification of the last picture at the end ? Is she finally still in love for Gabriel ?

Sadly that last take did not happened as I pictured it in my head when I wrote the script: my fault, of course. The idea was that from all that revenge-destruction process she still saves something from him, a referent from the story they lived together. She should have taken the picture and keep it with her, not just showing it as it happens.

I think that any experience we have in live is rich full and has a learning sediment in our personality. So, it is the same idea-feeling I try to express in a poem of mine called something like “To get inside the wound”. There are two sentences which translation could be like: “There is always something or someone that remains. There are always the footprints”. So; you can destroy everything but what happened just happened, you cant erase it because you got at least a scar that will remind it to you.

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To see Des(pecho)truccion, go to International Competition screenings : I10