Celebrity Biographies
Daniel Monzon
First he wrote about cinema, then he wrote cinema, and finally he directed cinema. Daniel Monzón is passionate about genre cinema, and his cinephilia has been able to channel it little by little into his work, until his mature work, Cell 211 .
Daniel Monzón was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1968. Since he was little, he had been passionate about cinema, because as a child he developed some rudimentary drawings with tracing paper that he projected to friends who wanted to see them. His first jobs in the world were journalistic. Monzón was a critic for the veteran film magazine Fotogramas, worked on radio in programs by Andrés Aberasturi and Julia Otero, and finally became deputy director of the Spanish Television program “Días de Cine”. On screen Monzón communicated his passion for movies, there was something of the natural self-confidence of an actor.
It is often said that in every film critic there is a frustrated filmmaker who would have wanted to make films, but due to a lack of courage or comfort, has been left judging (and condemning) the work of others. Whether or not this appreciation is unfair, the fact is that Daniel Monzón affirmed that “cinema is learned by watching cinema”, and when he had seen enough he made the leap to film development. In the first place, he would do it as co-writer with Santiago Tabernero of a film by Gerardo Herrero from 1994, the concocted thriller shot in English Detour to Paradise . It was logical after this that Monzón would seek control, that is, that he perform management tasks. And that would make his debut in these fights with El corazón del guerrero (1998), a kind ofConan, the Spanish-style barbarian in a role-playing plan, ambitious in his commercial approach, and who moved away from the well-trodden terrain of comedies and political films to use. However, the film was not much, because the combination adventure-crappy humor (there was the ‘buddy’ Santiago Segura ) did not match.
The director is convinced that films must be made with their audience potential in mind, offering entertainment and not looking at one’s own navel. True to this maximum delivery in 2002, a film of the always grateful robbery subgenre, The Greatest Robbery Ever Told . The idea that they want to remove nothing less than Picasso’s Guernica from the Reina Sofía Museum is funny, but once again we had a film that was somewhat unbalanced in its hooligan intentions, wanting and not being able to, although its lack of pretensions was appreciated, the I wish the viewer had a good time and that’s it.
Surely Monzón realized that humor was an element that he had to control much better in his stories. He also needed a scriptwriting partner to help him do this, and he found one in Jorge Guerricaechevarría , a regular collaborator of Álex de la Iglesia , with whom he co-wrote La caja Kovak , which he shot in English with Timothy Hutton as the lead. The idea of a novelist entangled in a situation reminiscent of one of his works gives a certain play. Although the film is not round, it showed that the director had matured.
The land was fertile for the best film by Monzón, the one that has given him the most joy. Cell 211 is based on a novel by FP Gandul , and again the script was signed by the director and Guerricaechevarría. The idea of a new prison officer, who pretends to be an inmate on his first day when a riot breaks out, gives a lot of play, it has its originality. The film fits perfectly into the prison subgenre, it holds surprises, and has a formidable cast, the brilliant Luis Tosar and the discovery Alberto Ammann. The director dared to deal with ETA terrorism, even if it was collateral, and there was a certain moral perspective. Alluding to Tosar’s character, he explained that “we could say that Mala Madre is like Long John Silver in ‘Treasure Island. He’s the bad guy, but the one you fall in love with in the end. You are discovering that she has a code of honor and a nobility much greater than that of the security guards.” The film would sweep the Goyas, with 8 “bigheads” including those for best film, direction and adapted screenplay. When collecting his prizes, the director would not fail to remember his wife, Ana, and his three-year-old daughter, Sofía. From this moment begins the stage of a consolidated Monzón as a filmmaker, whose career gives rise to many hopes, and to which tempting offers from Hollywood arrive, of course, which he wants to analyze with a cool head.