Precisely, “The country of the last things” is a little about that, about the rescue of some things and people in a kind of Noah’s Ark, and that is why Chomski, always consulting Paul Auster, decided to put together an international production between Argentina and the Pinewood studios in the Dominican Republic. “They are a kind of branch of the same English studios where all the James Bond movies were filmed, but they work in Santo Domingo with a gigantic tank for underwater filming, with cameramen divers and all that aquatic paraphernalia. But aside from the tank, Pinewood is interested in doing a few independent movies, and that’s where we come in. I would have liked to use the tank to make the dream scenes underwater, but the underwater camera and divers were too expensive for our budget. We were barely reaching the 150 special effects the script needed. And here there was something in which the quarantine benefited us, and that is that we spent more time choosing and improving the effects in post production, which took a long time, and that is why we had more time to work with those effects and also with the design of sound, which is important to me. And work with Auster and his suggestions. He would send him the raw cuts from the shoot and he would send them back to me with a bunch of annotations, and then I would send them back to him with those corrections, and he would send back other new suggestions. Time is very expensive in the cinema, but thanks to this pandemic misfortune we were able to have all the time in the world to perfect the film.
Something that Chomski can talk about at length is the experience of working with Paul Auster: “To begin with, he is not just a great movie buff who knows any reference to any movie you tell him, but he himself is a director who has filmed four movies, including ‘Smoke’. I met him through a contact when he came to the Book Fair after 2001, and there we saw that the characters from ‘The country of the last things’ wandered around that Buenos Aires with hordes of cartoneros. In order for me to put together the production, he sold me an option on the rights to the novel for one dollar, and he continued to renew them for one dollar each time they expired. And he was the one who supported my idea of taking inspiration from Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’, without letting the film be anchored in a certain country or accent.”
“And this is a funny detail,” adds Chomski, “because when I saw that we were going to film in the Dominican Republic, I suddenly realized that it is a country without professional actors, and that even if I used non-professional actors, everyone was going to have Dominican accent and they were going to anchor the situation. So we understood that it was important to have accents from all over the world, whether from Latin American, Portuguese or French countries, and that we were not going to subtitle them, that way we give an idea of Noah’s Ark where there is each one of the last ones who are symbolically rescued”.
While waiting for the release of this film that took him so long to produce, Chomski is already dreaming of other impossible projects: “Something I would love to do is a biographical series on Licio Gelly and the Propaganda 2 lodge, which would be an international project for all its ramifications. , including having led Perón to Freemasonry”.
Source: Ambito
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