Spanish talent is very present at the 2024 Oscars. Three of the statuettes that will be awarded during the 96th edition ceremony could fly to our country since The snow society accumulates two nominations while Robot Dreams aspires to become the best animated film. This feature film, which won two Goya awards, has exceeded all expectations according to its director, Pablo Berger, whose exciting life could be brought to the big screen. We will tell you about it below.
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Pablo’s destiny was always marked by the seventh art. As a child he grew up very close to the big screen, specifically wall to wall. And the building next to his family home, in the center of Bilbao, was a cinema. But then he did not even know of the existence of the major film awards nor did he know anything about the industry that is his profession today. At that stage I was more in contact with music. The reason? His cousins are the Uranga brothers, members of Mocedades, group that represented Spain in Eurovision in 1973 (it was held in Luxembourg) with It’s you.
His most personal side and the advice on which his career is based
The passage of time turned him into a great film buff, a hobby that increased during his time as a computer engineering student since at university he made short films in super 8 and was a regular at the film club. When he finished his degree, his desire was to be a film director and it was his cousin Amaya Uranga who gave him the key to achieve it. The singer introduced him to the filmmaker and screenwriter José Luis García Sánchez, whom he went to meet in Madrid. After that meeting, he followed his advice to write and direct short films without imagining that those first steps would take him to the Oscars four decades later.
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His first work was Mama, a short film based on a comic by Phillippe Vuillemin and in which his good friend Álex de la Iglesia served as director. The result was well received and it was clear to him that his future was on that path. Willing to learn everything about the trade, In 1990 he moved to New York to do a master’s degree in film direction that lasted four years.. Upon completion he became a professor of Film Direction at the New York Film Academy. In that period he directed Truth and Beauty, for which he was nominated for an Emmy.
In the Big Apple, in the middle of the aforementioned decade, he met the photographer Yuko Harami, who has been his inseparable life partner ever since. At his side he had his daughter Akaiowho is 20 years old, studies Fine Arts and has entered the big screen lending his voice to a Dalmatian from Robot Dreams. In addition, he has set up his college’s film club, a gesture that reminded Pablo of his own youth..
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Return to Spain, her first feature film and Maribel Verdú as muse
The United States was the family’s home for a decade, but they moved to Spain so Berger could shape the script he had written. Torremolinos, 73, his debut film. Starring Javier Cámara, Candela Peña, Juan Diego, Fernando Tejero, Mads Mikkelsen and Malena Alterio, it received four Goya nominations and its success crossed borders. It triumphed in Denmark and even had its adaptation in China. We had to wait almost a decade for his talent to sign another title, snow whitewith Maribel Verdú leading the cast.
They met at El Retiro to present the project to her and she accepted because, as she later confessed, Guillermo del Toro had advised her to take risks. Four years later filming began and today the interpreter is one of her great friends and one of the first people she saw Robot Dreams.
snow white won ten Goya awards and in 2017, five years later, Berger’s third bet arrived: Abracadabra. He came up with the film after seeing his cousin hypnotized at a wedding and which once again starred his muse, Maribel Verdú, Ángela Molina and Macarena García. The latter, sister of Javier Ambrossi, won the Goya for best new actress for this title with which he began his meteoric career.
Two years of methodical work and his path to the Oscar
Six years later Pablo Berger, who is a Knight of Arts and Letters of France, premiered Robot dreamshis first animated film. It took 24 months to record it and during that time he was working from nine in the morning to eight in the afternoon on Mondays and Fridays. In conversation with AISGE, he compares the process to a bullet train that cannot stop and assures that the result is the film “that I could have dreamed of the most as a screenwriter.” That dream can now mark a before and after if on March 10 he goes on stage at the Dolby to collect his Oscar.