Celebrity Biographies
Rodrigo Cortes
He is part of a new generation of filmmakers distinguished by such a visual force that executives from the American majors have been passionate about it. Rodrigo Cortés must be compared to Fresnadillo or Jaume Collet Serra ( La casa de cera ). This is an authentic “self made man”, he has created himself.
Born in 1973, in Pazos Hermos (Orense), Rodrigo Cortés’s family settled in Salamanca since he was very young. Self-taught director, when he was 16 years old he shot his first short film in super-8, entitled The inconsiderate and frightful case of the Salamanca murderer . At 19 he filmed 35mm Yul , a short that received some 20 awards. Shortly after, he shot 15 days , an imaginative and fresh short film in mockumentary form. Its protagonist is a guy who survives by consuming items that he can later return to the stores. It had an enormous impact, and received a total of 57 international awards.
Thanks to this short, Rodrigo Cortés was hired to shoot commercials and video clips. It didn’t take long for him to pull off his first feature film, Contestant , starring Leonardo Sbaraglia . A very interesting film about the black spots of capitalism and the economic system, its visual invoice was impressive. However, the film went unfairly unnoticed at the box office, and despite his talent, Cortés has been in a dry dock for some time.
Nobody is a prophet in their own land. One fine day the news appears in the newspapers that a Spaniard has triumphed at Sundance with a film titled Buried (Buried) , and in his own country not even the most knowledgeable have a clue who Rodrigo Cortés is. Premiered out of competition in the competition, the US press reports that queues are formed for six hours under the snow to see it, and the Los Angeles Times talks about Lionsgate buying the rights for an astronomical amount: 10 million dollars.
Buried (Buried) is a Hitchcock-style thriller whose action takes place entirely inside a coffin. “A Versus producer told me to take a look at a script by Chris Sparling that had been around different production companies for years and years,” Rodrigo Cortés himself told me in an interview. “He told me that reading it was exciting, but that it was impossible to shoot, so everyone was amazed but nobody dared to film it. When I finished it, I called him to tell him that we had to make the movie as it were.”