Pablo Larraín on his Pinochet film: ‘It’s a vampire movie. It’s also a farce. It deals with horrific, horrific people’

Venice International Film Festival has been fertile territory for Pablo Larraín. It is a full 13 years since the Chilean director’s stark Post Mortem premiered here. Jackie, his study of Jackie Kennedy featuring an Oscar-nominated Natalie Portman, emerged by the Lido in 2016. Two years ago, Spencer, his study of Princess Diana featuring an Oscar-nominated Kristen Stewart, also had its premiere at Venice. He doesn’t exactly bounce into the Excelsior Hotel – that’s really not his style – but he seems very much on familiar soil.

“I love that it’s cloudy,” he says, looking out towards a sombre Adriatic. “It will become hot very soon, and the weather is very scary in Europe.”

The gloom and the rain rather suit the project with which Larraín has returned to his favourite stamping ground. El Conde moves on from the director’s long circling of Augusto Pinochet, dictatorial ruler of Chile from 1973 to 1990, to a direct – if surreal – assault on that resonant figure. His films Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No engaged with characters corrupted by the regime. (An interesting obsession given that his father, Hernán Larraín, was twice president of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union.) El Conde imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire who, still upright in the present, has finally had enough of life.

“It’s a vampire movie, right?” Lorraín says. “And it’s also a farce. It has a lot of tragic elements. It’s about the bloody element of history. It deals with horrific, horrific people.”

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The black and white gives the sense of a fable and creates the right distance to the subject. But at the same time it allows you to say the most brutal things with a smile

—  Pablo Larraín

There is a possible twist about two-thirds of the way through the film, though surely not for any English speakers raised in the northwestern archipelagos of Europe. From the moment that Stella Gonet breathes the first syllable of narration, almost everyone from that part of the world will know we’re hearing the voice of Margaret Thatcher.

The impersonation is spot on. And that UK prime minister had a famously close and controversial relationship with Pinochet. Never able to get over his support during the Falklands War, she visited him in Surrey when he was under house arrest in 1999. Does Larraín expect non-anglophone audiences to immediately recognise the initially unnamed narrator?

“No, I don’t think so,” he says. We have the wonderful Stella to get that specific way of speaking. But it is the point of view that really matters. Now archives have been published you can see the way people like Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger referred to our country. They see these little countries and just invade them or drop a bomb or make the economy scream. All just to make sure there are no socialists in power. Do whatever you need.”

Gonet, who is Scottish, also played Queen Elizabeth in Spencer. She is cornering a market in long-serving female British leaders.

“It’s not really a gender issue,” Lorraín says. “It is about politics and how the world works. And how sometimes the North can have a very absurd view that is full of despair, contempt and ignorance of our culture.”

Raised in Santiago, Larraín would have been just 14 when Pinochet was eventually eased out of power. He studied at the University for the Arts, Sciences, and Communication before going on to co-found a production company with his brother Juan de Dios Larraín. His first feature, Fuga, from 2006, made little noise, but his second, the weird, off-centre Tony Manero, landed in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and established him as one the era’s most unpredictable talents. One is slightly surprised that it has taken this long for him to actually put a version of Pinochet on screen. Jaime Vadell plays the dictator as a glowering, hooded figure adrift in what looks like an abandoned concentration camp.

“I think that the path of satire is very important,” Lorraín says. “That is a way you can reapproach someone like this. Pinochet has never been in a film before. No one has put a camera in front of him. So that’s another conversation. Is it too early? Is it too late? We have all kinds of opinions in that regard in our country. I think if you’re going to do it, you need the truth of satire. Because if you don’t you can create empathy. That’s very dangerous.”

This is an interesting argument. Many is the film-maker who has suffered a version of Stockholm syndrome when examining a political monster and ended up making implicit excuses. But nobody is likely to have even mixed feelings about the blood-drinking fiend in El Conde. He is cynical, ruthless and depraved.

“Someone who saw it very clearly was Stanley Kubrick when he did Dr Strangelove,” Lorraín says. “And that was only made 20 years after the war. So I think it’s a combination of tones and layers. The black and white gives the sense of a fable and creates the right distance to the subject. But at the same time it allows you to say the most brutal things with a smile. That’s very interesting, because it creates a nervous type of smile. The smile without teeth. Which is good, I think.”

So does he feel as if he has been leading up to this film throughout his career? As we have already noted, it is as if he has been on a holding pattern over Pinochet for the past 15 years or so. Maybe Guillermo Calderón, his co-writer, gave him a nudge.

“I honestly didn’t see it coming,” Larraín says. “It started with these pictures of Pinochet in a cape. And then in the pandemic I was on the phone with Guillermo, and we were just discussing the story. We had time, like most people, just to be on the phone for hours. And then we called Jaime, the actor. We discussed it a lot too with him. And then Netflix showed interest in producing it. We thought, let’s do it. But it was a process. Yes, probably a lifetime process.”

This bleak, monochrome comedy will, indeed, be appearing first on the world’s most popular streaming service. What an odd world we now live in. Does that help get the message out about the depressing cycles of history the film addresses?

“Well, I won’t answer for Netflix,” Larraín says with a smile. “I’m not the voice of the studio. What I can tell you is that I think that these sorts of movies could eventually spread a nice message, a good chain of thought. Let’s see. Every time I have an idea of how a movie will turn out I am wrong. I never know. I think the reaction is going to be like this or that – and then it’s completely different.”

He smiles at the thought of it. “As David Lynch says, don’t make me explain the movie. Because the movie is there. Ha ha!”

Wronged women

Most of Larraín’s films have (outside Chile, anyway) generated those conversations largely in the art house. But both Jackie and Spencer have had a wide reach. The first of those Venice debuts, following Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s death, was more or less universally praised and picked up three Oscar nominations. The spooky, slyly funny Spencer proved a harder sell – people who hated it really hated it. It looks as if Larraín is moving towards the completion of a trilogy concerning wronged late-20th-century women. Angelina Jolie is set to star as the opera singer Maria Callas in his starkly titled Maria. But when? Reports differ as to what stage the production has reached.

“I never talk about movies that are not finished,” Larraín says. “It’s very bad luck.”

But we are right that it’s carrying on that tradition. He has an interest in famous women of that generation.

“They were all alive in 1973,” Larraín says, puzzlingly. “And in 1976 when I was born.”

For now he has to go up the red carpet for the puzzling, beautiful, nasty El Conde. It must be an exciting experience. But also frightening.

“It’s my sixth time here,” Larraín says. “I am ageing. I’m 47, and sometimes that can help you to face things with a better attitude. Whatever happens, it’ll be fine. I really love the film. I’m sure it’s not perfect. But I’m very happy to let it go.”

And where better than Venice to stage the release?

“I really love this place,” he agrees. “This place feels like home.”

El Conde is available to stream on Netflix from Friday, September 15th