The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Romería.

It’s such a beautiful film with no false notes. I wasn’t surprised to hear it was influenced by personal experience. What was it like to write this and then find someone to portray the protagonist?
Carla Simón: For me, the writing part was quite organic because I had done two previous films that already were inspired by my own story and my family. This was a bit like another chapter. It was interesting because the film was born out of my frustration of not being able to remember my parents because they died when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to make a film about memory, and it allowed me to explore my own family memory, but also how memory works. At the end, it turned into something very freeing. After making the film, I realized that I was grateful to have cinema to create the images that I was lacking. It was a happy process, the writing.

And then to find Marina was quite difficult because we were looking for someone who had to play both roles in the film. We saw a lot of girls, maybe 3,000. It was crazy. Some of the girls were very good for Marina, some of them were very good for the mom, but it was complicated to find someone who could play both. We ended up doing street casting and that team found Llúcia [Garcia]. She was coming from a Boy Scouts meeting with her backpack. They invited her to come to the casting and she said yes, but she came with some friends because she didn’t know if it was a kind of joke or if we were going to kidnap her or something! When I saw her, I felt that she was very close to the kind of teenager I was. I felt very related to her somehow. It was an intuition. I felt that she was very close to Marina in her curiosity towards the world, but also in her innocence. At the same time, she was about to turn 18, so she also wanted to be mature. And I asked her a question. I asked her, “What are you afraid of?” And she said that she was afraid of looking silly, which gave me the clue that she knew she had two faces. We tried both roles with improvisations during the audition, and I realized that she could also be the mom.

With the boy [Mitch Martín], it was the other way around because Mitch is a musician, he’s a rock star. I knew he could do the dad, but I didn’t know if he actually do the cousin, so I asked him one day to come in with a t-shirt, something plainer than how he usually dresses. That worked and we put them together. I didn’t know if my parents were like them, but for sure there was something between them that was very magnetic. I really wanted to keep watching and see the love story of these two.

Her way to get free from these stories is to do it through imagination

And how did you prepare your young actors to play out this story?
CS: Llúcia had never acted before. I needed to make sure that she could really understand what she was doing and connect with it. The first thing that I did was give her my mom’s letters. Shehad written these letters to her friends and family, and I turned them into the diary for the film. This was a way for her to connect to my own story. And then we improvised moments that could have happened before the story that’s told in the film. I really believe in emotional memory. You can sit with an actor and tell him or her about the background, but you can also make them live it through improvisations, no? And that’s what we did. Some days in the rehearsals they would meet and they were a couple, and we were in the ’80s. We improvised, for example, the moment that he introduced her to his family… the moment that they got hooked on drugs… the moment they didn’t have enough money to pay for more drugs. And so on until their death. This was useful to build a love story. It was useful so that when we shot these scenes for the film, they would have someone to think about in this loss.

And then we also improvised some moments that happened in the 2000s. where we worked a lot on the family dynamics. They learned how to behave with one another. And they started to love each other as well. I feel that if you spend enough time together, you get to an intimacy that for me is very useful when it comes to shooting. Because if you get there and you’re told, “Okay, this is your father and this is your brother,” but you haven’t played these roles, it’s hard to feel it.  When we’re shooting, we follow the script, because I like to follow the script. But I give them some room for improvisation. And if we’ve done this previous work, then it’s usually right when they improvise. I cannot ask an actor to invent dialogue. But if they know their characters already, everything belongs to the universe that we created together.

What is it like as a director when you’re working a story that’s so personal?
CS: When I’m directing, I’m very focused on getting what we need at the end of the day. That makes is much less emotional. Obviously, I connect on what we need for the story, but I don’t have the time to think so much about how I connect with all of it. That may happen more in the rehearsal process, as I mentioned. There are some moments that may hit me, but in general, I’m very focused on guiding the actors, and then in the shooting, I’m focused on getting the footage we need. Then, in the beginning of the process in the editing room, I’m kind of sweating to make sure that it’s going to work as a film. But at some point, I start feeling that the emotions that I am having are very similar to the ones that we are showing, and this is when I feel like, okay, we do have a film. But I do have to maintain a certain objectivity while directing, in order to capture what we need.

I’d love to hear more about how you choregraphed the departure from the present day and the reality of this story. There are so many evocative moments in that last act, especially that image of the people at the party with the sheets over them. How did you find your way to construct this part of the story?
CS: I think that when I realized that I wanted to make a film about memory, it was the moment that I found the structure of the film. It made a lot of sense to have a character who tries to reconstruct a narrative about her parents through other people’s stories. Because these memories are very stained by the taboo and the stigma of heroin and AIDS, as she tries to put the pieces together, it doesn’t work. That’s also how memory works. When we remember, we don’t remember the actual event, we remember the last time we accessed that memory. If you have big emotions attached to this memory, they keep transforming in your own mind up until the point that you really believe that this thing happened like that, and maybe it has nothing to do with the real moment.

It was interesting to build this quest in a way that the pieces just don’t match. And she arrives to the conclusion that there are many gaps that she will not be able to fill, and that she has her own imagination to fill them. Her way to get free from these stories is to do it through imagination. And for me as a filmmaker is to do it through cinema, you know? It made sense to have this structure where when you feel that the film is about to finish, another film starts, and this is the story that she imagines. I study a lot about how imagination works, and it’s very interesting because it works in a very similar way to dreams. Imagining is dreaming when you’re awake. We imagine and dream with elements or moments that we have lived recently. For me, this was a nice thing to create because I always feel like a mirror. If I try to think of my parents, I cannot imagine them moving. I don’t have enough photos or videos to do that. So, it made sense that she transforms to her mom and the cousin transforms to her dad. Then this happens in all the places that she’s been visiting on the trip. She films some images that are exactly the same as in the imagination part, but with the characters inside or some objects that travel from reality to imagination. Having this mirror to build was very beautiful. While I was imagining that party, I said, “Why not go use music,” because the music in the ’80s was very important in Spain. What we used was from a band from Vigo, the city where my father was from and the city where we shot. I was trying to look for an image that would explain that this is not only the story of these two characters, but of a whole generation.