David Trueba

Born on September 10, 1969, David Rodríguez Trueba from Madrid was the youngest of a family with eight children, including Fernando Trueba , who became an important filmmaker. His mother resisted that David stop being ‘the little one’ full time, so she did not take him to school until he was seven years old. His father was a peddler of typewriters, and David got used to typing on the Lettera 35 model he used to carry.

Determined to become a journalist, he studied Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, and before finishing he had already been hired as a scriptwriter for Amo tu cama rica , directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro , with Ariadna Gil as the protagonist. The script portrayed the lack of commitment in youth relationships, through a character who spends his life chasing a girl who has continuous affairs with everyone who comes within range. The film turned out to be somewhat prophetic, as David fell in love to the core with Ariadne, whom he married, but after many years she left him to go with the famous actor Viggo Mortensen.. Although he tries to take setbacks philosophically. “Life is a badly staged movie,” he said.

After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he went to the United States to study screenplay at the American Film Institute. There he prepared the script forThe worst years of our lives , which would later also be made into a film by Martínez Lázaro, who had been very happy after their previous collaboration.

Although these two scripts were very marked by the cinema of Woody Allen –unattractive boy in love with beauty–, David Trueba completely changed the model with his first feature film,The good life , debtor above all ofThe Four Hundred Blows by François Truffaut , although at times it is also reminiscent of Louis Malle ‘s cinema and the book “The Catcher in the Rye” by JD Salinger . Fernando Ramallo played Tristán, an orphan who must choose between going to live with his aunt or entering a shelter. He obtained four Goya nominations, in the categories of new director, original screenplay, revelation actress ( Lucía Jiménez ), and secondary ( Luis Cuenca ), which was the only one that he finally won.

It took Trueba a few years to get financing for his next film. “When making movies you feel like a snake charmer, more than anything because you find many snakes along the way,” he declared, referring to the Spanish film scene. He ended up filming in the year 2000Masterpiece , which unfortunately does not live up to its title, and whose plot –an amateur film director kidnaps a successful actress to lead his film– was very similar to that of Cecil B. Demented , which John Waters shot practically at thetime.

Although until then he had only shot comedies, David Trueba set out to turn towards drama, and bring to the screenSoldados de Salamina , a very interesting book by Javier Cercas that is not very cinematographic, about the Falangist leader Rafael Sánchez Mazas, who survived a firing squad by the Republicans. The move worked out for him, since it gave birth to his best feature film, despite the fact that the change of protagonist –Cercas himself in the book– for a journalist, seems to have been shoehorned in to give work to his own wife, Ariadna Gil , for that of reaching the end of the month. When the continuous incursions of Spanish cinema on the subject of the Civil War are distinguished by extolling the Republican side, and caricaturing the national side to the point of ridicule, Trueba was right to give the film a left-wing approach, but respectful of the nationals. Unfortunately, the example did not spread.

He has also filmed the irregular but enjoyableBienvenido a casa , with interesting reflections on fatherhood that sound autobiographical, and co-directed with Luis Alegre Fernando’s chair , a documentary that collects the brilliant phrases of Fernando Fernán Gómez . In addition, he has worked as a screenwriter in various films by other filmmakers, such as his brother Fernando, since he co-wroteTwo Much andThe apple of your eyes .

Trueba –who has also worked on television, as co-director of “El peor programa de la semana”–, has been a journalist for various media, works as a columnist for “El País”, and has gradually carved out a career as a novelist every ever more interesting. If “Open All Night” and “Four Amigos” were as hilarious as they were inconsequential, he took a turn towards tragicomedy with “Knowing how to lose”, which won the National Critics Award, in 2008. And that takes longer than it should in launching a new book because “Living takes a lot of time to write.”

Between 2004 and 2007 David Trueba became Vice President of the Spanish Film Academy. Although he has studied journalism, he is somewhat wary of journalists because he has suffered firsthand from their bad arts. “In an interview I spent half an hour explaining why Spielberg seemed like a gifted filmmaker to me, but that he believed that his treatment of some of his themes was not always up to par. I came across the following headline: ‘Spielberg has done great damage to cinema’. One never learns that in these interviews anything you say can be reduced to a headline by which you become part of the large group of idiots that populates humanity.